so that the hum resonates, a choral trick.
The dead man’s music-to-the-max, he has the diaphragm to sustain high notes, he has the embouchure to flutter and slur, he has the circular breathing to eliminate rests.
Hipsters, bohemians all gather fully themselves in mid-century past to hear the dead man blow.
There’s jazz there, and the dead man spots the spilled coffee of poets rambunctious for Ionics, potters who pull from the inside out, painters of inverse volumes, sculptors freeing prisoners from stone, it’s a time when plenty get it.
Getting it’s the secret, ask the dead man, technique is epiphanic.
Upping the ante’s the secret, ask the dead man, vision costs.
Swinging after midnight, grooving at 2, being hot or cool, knowing the body, indulging in a feisty surrender—ask the dead man, his secrets are out in the open.
The dead man disdains metabolic hooey.
The dead man is always in motion, like a pebble dropped into a lake, like a finger stuck into an eye, like a permanent wish.
The dead man sings and plays as well in sleep as awake, he positively trumpets down the walls of times past.
The dead man dreams of the intimate, animated toys of childhood, through which pass the pensive clouds of adolescence resembling things removed to a safe distance, and the icons of free logic: sad-eyed violins, ships navigating the equator inside bottles, messages written in lemon juice, screaming candles and such.
Whoever comes before the dead man for judgment, he shall be judged.
The dead man fingers the suspect, he has nothing to hide.
To the dead man, logic is the light inside the crystal, refracted, unavailable otherwise.
The dead man takes a hammer to a piece of coal to let out a diamond.
He squeezes an ornament at Christmas to reveal the blood that was inside.
He creases the water at flood stage, he shoulders the blame, he interrupts, he insists, he bends light.
2. More About the Dead Man and Dreams
To the dead man, North Dakota is in the closet.
The dead man makes no distinction between a map and a place.
The dead man is glued to existence, he is wishful and watchful but he doesn’t need to know.
Things appear altered in his dreams: milk in black light, footwear rearranged by cubists, friends who talk out of both sides of their mouths like Egyptian figures seen from two sides.
If he could only have been white hair forever!
If he could have suffered indeterminately, seaweed tossed to and fro in sight of shore.
If he could have been a bottom-feeder without having had to die!
Achhh, the dead man has dreams within dreams, he has the claws to grip an altar, he rolls up the dirt, he plies the waves, he rides the wind, he crosses time lines without touching his watch, everything happens at the same time.
From the dead man’s point of view, perspective is a function of time, not space, so to him a dream is a whistle to shatter the known frequencies.
The dead man drinks from a fractured goblet.
The Book of the Dead Man (#18)
1. The Dead Man’s Advice
“Well, I wouldn’t be so hurry if I was you.”
The dead man starts with a wake, halbeit (sic) in salmon time.
“You don’t know tunnel’s end, but hell.”
The dead man catches hisself pigeon-talking, neck over the moment unstill.
Like a pigeon, the dead man’s iridescence aflutter.
Dead man carried aloft messages War-to-End-All-Wars, now extinct.
“What’s rush, what’s linger, neither of none’s the one, where it ends.”
“Who,” the dead man, “wants to know?”
The dead man rubs the leatherette of his Dante, considering Hell.
He riffles the sheets of his Shakespeare, the revenge parts.
“You let catharsis out, you’ve got nothing.”
“Your dreams mature, there’s no childhood, best be dumb.”
The dead man’s got hokey and corny and the dwarfs of ideas that gambol in dreamland, that carnival tent, that circus of perpetual motion.
“I decent ideas crash and burn, sometime, Sometime.”
The dead man sees the leaves sweat before they lose their umbilicals.
2. More Dead Man’s Advice
Between a rock and a hard place, between sleeping and waking, between Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, among cattle and chattel—
Oh, the dead man goes straight.
Happenstance the location, circumlocution the path, the dead man towers.
“Unrapidly, you mean to get there, do you not?”
Oh the dead man, consent for resolutions, student of the betterment, refinisher, repairer, partaker of samples with the whole in mind—
Oh, how straight the dead man gone.
“You got blame to give out none, rightchyar?”
“Who,” dead man, “there goes?” what with bearing wonderment.
“Kierkegaard, let’s try,” who proclaims laughter to be prayer, “what with his name lilting, that’s something right off.”
Having the requisites, lacing the particulars, bearing the burdens, tempestuous among frights and nights—
Oh, how slappy the dead man chokes time, Heimlich to make it talk.
The Book of the Dead Man (#19)
1. About the Dead Man and Winter
When the dead man’s skin turns black and blue, he thinks it is winter.
In winter, the dead man gathers and insists, slipping his collective unconscious forward like a blue glacier.
When flowers turn under, he sees the stars blooming above, florid in their icy reaches.
When leaves desert the trees, he reads the calligraphy
