lots and lots of neat

The friendsters have spoken! No more Kent spam!

And I offer this tender invitation: http://lotsandlotsofneat.typepad.com/lots_and_lots_of_neat/

P: YO!
C: Yo?
P: Where are we?
C: We are in crimson.
P: …
C: I have laid aside laughter.
P: …
C: This is fury and impotence. The guard rail should have held the van full of children, but it didn’t.
P: What is should. The sentence should carry marigolds, but there are only crowns and thorns.
C: And knives and biting fires.
P: Delicous. I say we go for the corrugated metal sentence.
C: And we can make him a king.
P: And we can say that we’re into the hip hop. That’s why we did it.
C: You can say that home slice. But I got my own stab at "justice" and "should" and "fury."
P: Oh, your puns ARE painful!

Here is a strange one with his ear to the ground. And this man says, "I am a poet." His hope is to make you, dear reader, take up the awkward position. Knees are rough creatures. And ground is never consistent, but this man says, "Really, I am not a platypus. There is nothing to fear." Berries are either sweet or poisonous in this nether world. And the poet is fearless. His pose, and his gesture inviting you into the joy dancing under and inside the earth, this is romantificating.

Please, my dear reader, don’t mistake this scene for anything romantic or dealing with romance. Television shows responsible for the really cool soundtracks these days have made the poet into a clown, who survives at the coffeehouse, who lassoes ten microwaves to corrale their little chorus of buzzers. He is the collectible doll that sells and sells and SELLS!! He is the "troubled soul" "intense" & "earnest."

Yes, of course, there is an importance to being earnest. I myself am an imposter in every sense of the word. Give me the chance and I’ll gleefully confuse romantificate and romance for your entertainment. I’ll set the bling on the bling, the match to the paper, the "troubled soul" to the windex any day of the week. That guy with his ear to the ground is my assistant, and he has a report due to me this coming Wednesday. The title is "Truth is beauty and beauty truth" and I’ve subtitled it, "Vive spectacular obsequiousness."

My dear reader, my maligned instructor, there are ten words for sorrow I’ve buried in today’s entry. Put your ear to the screen and you’ll hear them.

Editor, Playboy: I am a reader. I am a viewer. I am a fan–a collapsible fan. I live on feathers. Heed me. "Intellectual extravagance." You understand? Again. "Intellectual extravagance." Fantasies aren’t all marmalade pies. Sweet indiscretions. Colliding particles in inert space. Fantasies, glossy fantasies, need extravagance. "Intellectual extravagance." Clearer now?

My fantasies. A partial glimpse and rich earth. Two cyclones dancing. Torrid, not tepid. Marilynne Robinson in every respect of the word. Imagine Virginia Woolf with thick gray hair. Imagine her speaking just to you. Marmalade pies and rich earth. The fantastic in collusion with the specific.

I have an appetite, and I hunger. I am not a feather. I need you to understand.

Signed, Underscore.

So me an my genes got together last night and had a vote about who is most qualified to be a Playboy Playmate. And not necessarily in the player sense of the word, playa, but in the sense of sexy in synthetics and hard core intellectual catastrophes. Marilynne Robinson was first on the list. I mean have you heard her voice, and seen her speak? And the fantasies of having her in my bedroom, or the hayloft, where I think a lot of Playboy spreads are shot (the hayloft, the public park, the bubble bath, the ultra modern living room), I think Marilynne Robinson would be a joy in every single one of those places. Seriously, her voice is like a deep well, and I drink and drink to the veriest pleasures. Perhaps best of all, she might be willing to pose in a church. "Marilynne is that you in the pew with ME?"

And as delicious as seeing Marilynne posing in the pages of Playboy, would be writing the letter proposing the model to Playboy. I’ll admit, she isn’t really what they typically feature. I don’t know if she likes stuffed animals, and I kind of hope she finds smoking is a redeeming addiciton. And I don’t know how to get across to them the sound of her voice. Yeah, I could send along an excerpt of her new book, and the editors at Playboy are actually known to feature some exceptional fiction. But for them to see that we who thrive off the visual as much as the intellectual need pictures of her in fantasy-inducing places, it might take some verbal razzamatazz, some linguistic pachinko. Maybe Alex Truman could lend a hand.

I was actually very serious when I talked about sending press releases about an identity of me (or someone opposed to me) that doesn’t really exist. It started in 1999 when I absurdly reserved the name alex truman at every free email program I could imagine. What was I going to do with this guy: Alex Truman? Why was it so important that Alex exist? I really have no idea. But I pursued it, and held my little alextruman email addresses up to friends as trophies of my ingenuity. Or imbecility.

But there could be something very constructive to encouraging these false identities. Mainly because you’d suddenly have to think about all those things that make an identity. Things that I know I take for granted. Yeah, I live in an apartment, yeah, I have a post office box, yeah, I could ride my bike down the street and see a movie or buy sodas for all the kids hanging outside. Or I could go go-cart riding at Kingshighway and Delmar!

But how would Alex Truman do those things. And how would the Post-Dispatch respond to emails and faxes that arrived daily detailing Mr. Truman’s itinerary, that includes, well, I suppose I would have to come up with a schedule for this guy that was as absurd as it was fantastic. "Alex will be dining at Talayna’s for lunch, with certain notable spotlights, and he plans to sign autographs and give press interviews in the parking lot." How many days would it take for the Post-Dispatch to dispatch someone to these restaurants. And how much work would it take to cancel so many arrangements at the last minute, because honestly I’m not going to be mistaken for someone like Alex Truman–the man’s a social magnate (and magnet of course)

No, I’m too busy perfecting my can of coke poses for the invisible cameras in my apartment to show up at a Walgreen’s, to buy a tube of toothpaste for those disgusting Jaegermeister girls. Man, that Alex guy has some patience, doesn’t he? And some megolomaniac delusions?

I have had a loving critic ask me, "Why the Covington’s? What is so significant about dolls made of plywood and 2×4s?"

Oh, dear, dear, man. I was born, and I believe each little strand on my DNA proposed itself as a member of my audience. Any game I played, anything I accomplished was attended by great applause and acclamation. Perhaps from a parent or relative. But generally I was both the master of ceremonies and the polite crowd gathered around dinner tables to nod in approval at the evening’s award presentation.

An example. I raced matchbox cars as a boy. But not the racing where you sit on one side of the basement and push the little cars as hard as you can to the other. No my races were great symphonic movements, where a pack of 20 cars would experience the convolution and drama that must come with all long-distance races. I would move them forward six inches at a time–the result being like this story I read recently by Kathryn Mansfield. Where an entire plot and drama develops in a short snippet, only to be continued in the next snippet, and the next snippet after that.

So that the race was no longer a matter of winning, it was a matter of spectacle. The crowd cheered and always had to cheer otherwise it would be useless to have a winner. And though I had no crowd in mind, or at least nothing beyond the usual roaring and clapping in my head, I would have been better to set up some audience. I should have had little dolls that I could look to for some affirmation that this was the greatest race ever run. I could have set up rows of Fischer-Price people (they’re almost always smiling), my Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker action figures, my Battlestar Galactica rover, and these could have had voices like the drivers in the cars had voices.

And, yes, my dear Critic, I do believe a voice attributed to something becomes more playful and realistic than the anonymous one. I think you might understand.

Some people might try telling you that dignity is like the mighty oak: tall, effulgent at twilight, and tactile. And yeah, I can see it. But the real dignity of the oak comes when it’s encountered by the storm. I mean, it’s one thing to see that big guy out there in the middle of summer, just hanging out. But let’s look at him with the winds whipping, let’s look at those leaves like ribbons tied to the top of a ship’s mast. That’s dignity, mother fucker. That oak’s standing his ground, even when he doesn’t know why he has to stand his ground. He just does it.

That’s why I like the Covington’s so much. Because when they’re standing at the McDonald’s window, watching me eat my Big Mac, they don’t take flack from no one. People walk by and look at them funny, and those Covington’s just keep staring. Like four dignified old ladies, like four little oaks clustered in a field.

Oh, my Covington’s, my plywood companions. Let’s travel the world together, and you can teach me resilience. Courage may need a human heart, but I’ll pretend for my sake that you each have a soul, and I’ll watch your faces clear after the passing of each storm.

I am resolved. If I was a poet and someone asked me, "Hey Kent what form do you use for your poetry?" I would say Water. A form like water, though really a form is water: pliable, transparent, blue and green, tintinabulating. Yeah, like bells baby, like bells.

And I would say poets are swimmers, and I am a swimmer! And I like the way swimming is like climbing a mountain made of silk. I have one particular pool that’s my favorite, and I go there to swim all the time. And I bring my audience with me. They’re people I made from plywood and 2×4s, and they’re always happy to see me, and watch me swim, and stand outside the restaurant looking inside while I eat. They’re the greatest fun!

And if I wrote a poem, and had a poetry reading, I would invite them to attend, of course escorting them to their seat. And I would dive in, like the racers dive. I would swim my most graceful stroke for them, concentrating on that whip that comes the moment my hand raises out of the water. "Bravo!" I think to myself. "Bravo!" I am tumbling into silk. And for the next poem I will dive to the bottom and retrieve two live charcoals. Such daring. So tintinabulistic.

Virginia is for lovers! Yes, I said it for lovers! With exclamation and torridity. It is the love when my life fills to the point that there is no use holding back it would never complete enough the pictures I have on my walls, the big cats panting in the zoo. I am a dance. I am an explosion pushing against the sides of this glass jar, again and again arcing and dosing, but what can I do, Virginia, I’m devoured, I’m inflated, I’m cold milk in a saucer.

And I’ve lived in Virginia even! Did you know that Virginia? I’ve seen your legs on the beach, I’ve turned the slow corner to approach your plantations, I’ve stood on the ground your countrymen first touched when they came to this continent. And now I am in love with you Virginia. I am in love with what we did in Virginia. I cannot hold you enough, is life ever enough. I can crawl into this cardboard box in my living room and there I will declaim love and Virginia and the definition of torrid that has to do with the scorching heat of the sun, they are synonymous. Virginia. Thank God they synonymize so joyful and joyfully.