Dana Ward




Aeolian Phone

“It’s no small thing/to wish to abandon thought./It’s no thing, in/fact. But it’s hard to talk/about when talking is one/of your vessels for thinking” 

                                               --Anselm Berrigan

Ok

 

I button my shirt

 

I can’t believe how cold it is today the wind is so high & so out of control I thought the house might blow away I have a terror, & a terrier, AND a little dog & shoes I’ve always had them nothing could be more cliché

 

Ok the font changes when I touch the skin of this thought rippling away from its graphic in thought-conducive waves that reach their saturation point organically as if they were a cell in the warm liquid crystal display where the rainbow is always about to occur given the moisture & the sunlight of it’s make-up

 

My body fondly responds to the thought of this thought when I write something down I think eyes will be rolled & a brief erotic sigh escapes my lips a little cry to think some scorn will meet this thought I mean at least it’s not alone

 

O alone you are so much more & less now or are you the same with these infinite work-inducing toys violently blowing through everything rattles in the pre-dawn dark to open its fact to itself through its sound each thing a warning to itself that it exists & to me to be responsive, to button my shirt

 

Nothing could be more cliché than the real without a little dog imperiled by the moral police who are always about to be eclipsed & re-embodied after a purging/non-purging tornado has re-organized the symbolic order so we can return matured & changed & grateful to the order that had only been distressed but not mortally wounded it isn’t enough but the moral police in the figure of a witch I must first destroy this conflation & to do it I need more than “Wicked” I must Helen Adam myself if I’m to detourn the Singularity 

 

I am Hermione Granger but Hermione Granger who has given up all of her specialization for the rootless élan of a dillatante’s life casting failed spells that are bounced out of thought & succumb to touching indolence falling away from imperial glamour to plunge into something like agency forsaken so that in abandonment it longs for some un-coded rainbow aspiration inhaling the fearsome wind heralding each thing to its peril for which I might initiate a rescue in song but it won’t be a rescue just another meta-language surging through the floor so when I speak myself I don’t go to the meadow to sing myself Over The Rainbow although in order to appear I do I do

 

OK I know I’m not doing that really or am but only partly meaning I had an everlasting thought about thought that I maimed with my tenderness toward it & it ran away after that so it's everywhere always & nowhere & I had an unhappy thought about a train & a ridiculous thought about my phone so here we go

 

OK

 

I button my shirt & I quote things I like to myself in the war-tomb which remains the official re-broadcaster of echoes this metaphor is real for metropolitan life & absorbs it without consent but never with indifference the consoling hall of mirrors indicates there’s always a pleasuring answer to the prayer that violence & a sense that this someone somewhere getting off on all this death (& not masturbating thinking not porn sweetly dreaming) will look less like yourself if you just keep walking but a war-tomb full of echoes is like a hall of mirrors it imitates eternity for that very reason

 

An aerosol rainbow in permanent saturating transit is blowing out around & in to hammer home the thresholds as soluble colors complected by their their own incapacities incorporating that one rare cross between hippie & goth I primarily like to just pimp to myself when I’m at the crib confusing Mila Kunis & Milan Kundera & wondering why am I not in the meadow singing that song as if to beckon that tornado

 

I think that I know something real about a surface then the war shifts and changes it completely embalms the rushed sizzle its formation makes so quickly our cadavers seem to have always had those arching colors summoning what’s on the other side as the constituent fact of their presence I mean our living breathing bodies eulogize by living the cataclysmic transport it's superstar life they are a funeral for messianic time that never ends the little window has wine on its lips O the tornado is a long dead celebrity buried in a world where it sings its Warholian mortician has a  particle collidor in its fonts then people build a tornado in Cairo...

 

...in the present Harold Arlen walks into a hyperbaric chamber which is supposed to provide him an experience of absolute silence but no he could hear the thrum and the rush of his circulatory system inside him and this revelation that there’s no such thing as silence was the epiphenomenon that inspired him to write the song Over The Rainbow same thing with Yip Harburg for its lyrics

 

The song was an émigré anthem of impeccable longing queer national anthem of impeccable longing it remains these things & more now it is everything living in the world this is the epiphenomenon which inspired John Cage to compose his famous piece 4’33 in which someone sits down at the meadow of the concert piano & doesn’t play anything at all in that duration so one hears every sound like the wind roaring through this very morning my obsidian shirt button almost but not finally noiselessly thread through its clasp catching moonlight & flashing with brief irridesence

 

Love told me where to live & a visionary dollar Over the Rainbow is clear to the older provincial this metaphor is real for metropolitan life all recordings of Over the Rainbow last four minutes and thirty three seconds not really but those that have been made to do so do I do it’s like you’re in a hall of mirrors with the windows open too now where nowhere & everyplace areate their conjuncture in an arc of spectral color over a train station when I am thinking

 

OK I had a weird fucking thought about a train that continues to transport me perfectly somewhere useless perfectly inscribed by everything I thought already flowing like my train as I near my beloved on the platform/altar leaving for another thought not so dissimilar from this one to think some kind of maglev to leave behind myself on my way to a militant valueless arrangment reliving my reception of thinking that couldn’t be made any less au currant than the rainbow if it were a bell it would trigger the harp of my phone

 

When my phone rings a harp in its cellular structure is played as if someone had gone to the meadow to sing distillations of all the pure products to think someone once thought them crazy I think they're too sane the surfaces blurred beyond a twinge I thought I felt & feted rotten host celebrating endless conversion of glitter to meat I was glitter first & sought to repeat it through ecstatic commingling it was this starry anaphor sweetening the clutches in hope they’d grow tired & go for the throat of the superficial brilliance I could not avert my eyes waking up with those hands speaking through me mine I button my shirt change me wind change me rain

 

OK I had some "insane" thought about my phone with its own ballet dynamism rhinestone manufacturing vulgarity against the pure product well I was sweet to what I thought too much so & called myself at night & spoke abstractly when I spoke I made an account the screen blushed when I stroked its cheek & pencils they are pretty hard to come by in our windy kitchen the ones I find are rubbed away to soft rounded points or they break on the surface so I spoke my thought in American English a command language currency embittered in radiant letters on this limitless screen I am limitlessly kissing the motile space I wish would be my writing’s form a constellated saffron more sensitive than even the inside of my thigh or when hair brushes over my neck its unsurprising writing was looking for a blurring of surfaces somewhere over the rainbow of what can be thought & what can’t

 

When I button my shirt I feel the armor my warm life has given to me in a serious variety of forms when I speak against the war waged against everything weak I had an everlasting thought about thought so I wrote this shit right here it used to be the hottest hip hop website in the world & now it's just the fucking hottest website period deformed by the rainbow that’s surging through its surface like the wind waking each thing to its peril I had a lyrical thought about tornadoes and it was a rhapsode the structure of which had a look of salacious efficiency which gave me to a mortifying thought about my writing so I sutured the harp of my phone to my mouth to try to speak Aeolian thoughts against going on like this I button my lips until the wind collects itself into a suffocating prism refracting the light into a rainbow that swallows the world & then it pukes & then the world is there again like a rainbow & I know what’s over it not Oz but Christmas on Earth like Rimbaud wrote or not that though truly the internet talks to me softly sometimes/it says that it loves me too much/it doesn’t have anything I want to steal/well/nothing I can touch

 

I wait.

 

I button my shirt.