Category: Riffs

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Note-taking is a sacred duty. The first secretaries recorded the mandates of heaven, as divined from entrails or the cracks on tortoise shells.

Stay in character. Wear surgical gloves and carry a mute parrot under your hat.

Apprentice yourself to an earthworm, whose assiduous note-taking turns dirt into soil.

Don’t write what you hear—what good is that?—but how you hear it.

Never lift a pen from the page, even to dot an i, lest it become lost in lust for the flange of an ear.

Use unlined stationary and let your letters imbricate to better shed the sweat of your brow.

Staple your tongue to the moonlight until you learn how to shine with borrowed radiance.

The goal is become invisible, like a street photographer in the mountains.

Type rhythmically, in 4/4 time. Improvise a work song to make it go faster.

Have your way with semiquaver and crotchet, but beware the Franciscan Minims of the Perpetual Help of Mary.

Domesticate the hortatory: speak off a freshly laundered cuff, blank of ink.

Get speech recognition software and use it to transcribe whatever you babble in your sleep or in moments of ecstasy.

Invent the world’s most offhand shorthand, in which each letter is signified by a random mark.

There are certain sentences that can only be heard by note-takers. They lurk like puns, disguised as slips of the tongue, stammerings and clearings of the throat.

Notice everything.

Marry the slate to the chalk with a long claw’s screech.

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Start with the cut that severs all connection with the earth.

Start slowly so the body can re-learn how to be whole after each amputation.

Start by living elsewhere, in another part of town. You’re better off not knowing.

Once you start giving things up, it becomes difficult to recapture the joy you felt in the presence of an adored partner or possession.

What happens to the worshipper who makes a gift of her worship and learns to do without?

What happens to service when the floor falls away and every salaam is infinite?

Let the child and the ram both go and place the knife on top of the stacked wood.

Too long have you thrilled to its militant conversation with the whetstone.

Let it go out like a phoenix, come back as a black wing.

Stay in the wilderness until someone calls you by a name you’ve never heard.

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Carve a bowl-shaped hollow at head height in a softwood tree and stand with your head in the hollow, embracing the trunk.

Stare into the darkness until it returns your gaze.

Accept no substitutes, neither love nor a mirror.

Remember: you’re not your reflection, much less the water in which it appears, but the dropped stone that shatters its composure.

Practice being smooth.

Learn laughter from schizophrenics, ecstacy from pornstars and outrage from politicians campaigning for office.

Shave your head so your face will have nowhere to hide.

When applying make-up, don’t forget to leave breathing holes!

Scowl at the moon. Don’t be its sycophant.

Your goal isn’t to make children laugh, but to make them love the façade.

When you feel yourself smiling for no reason, say: this is what happiness feels like.

Keep crayons and a paper bag handy for emergencies.

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Abdicate. Grow backwards.

Let the flowers retract into their buds, the buds into the stalk and the stalk into the hemispheres of the seed.

Let the circle be unbroken: form a feedback loop until the brain roars with howlround in its cage.

Focus. Prune every Y until there’s nothing but a pollarded knot of pure intention.

Trade nuance for the on or off of a machine.

Don’t give anything away.

Without a hoard, there can be no power. Let your waters build and build behind this new dam.

Zero in like the ouroboros.

Curl. Coil. Clutch. Constrict. Consume.

*

Note: this is not a revision but an extended commentary on my poem, “Fist.”

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Become an idol sheathed in gold leaf.

Let no one touch you but the wind, and then only through proxies.

Have your hands replaced with hooks and your feet with augers.

Avoid lakes and oceans, thunderstorms and kisses. Dry out.

Live on earth: an unconsummated star smoldering under a thin crust of ash.

Spend your holidays on a barely cooled tongue of lava, or the slag pile from an old coal mine.

Become coal yourself if necessary, but avoid the extremes of heat and pressure that would turn you translucent.

Diamonds are a poor fuel, and their cold fires last nowhere near forever.

We need to burn carbon if we are to fulfill our destiny.

Embark on a long-distance relationship, ideally with the assistance of an anatomically correct knitted heart.

Listen through keyholes.

Feed small rumors with bacon grease and fan them with the shoulder blades of race horses.

What is digestion but a controlled burn?

Join the crowd for a public execution or the overthrow of a government.

Dance the way flames dance, leaping in and out of existence.

Oxidize and exfoliate like a slow book made of rust.

Glow if you can’t flicker, flicker if you can’t blaze.

Set fire to the crops so the harvest will never come, cold and dark—that death that grows inside you like a field of snow.

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Write his or her name in the snow, get a comfortable chair and watch how it melts: the letters expanding, becoming illegible and finally disappearing into the earth.

Spend time—the only form of currency the dead still honor.

Find the perfect slab of polished granite and release it into its native habitat.

Every year on the anniversary of your loss, take out a small ad in your local paper. Let it remain blank—an oasis of propriety among the ads for legal services and riding mowers.

Become migratory.

Visit caves that have lost all their bats to white-nose syndrome. Stand at the entrance and listen.

Visit mountaintop-removal sites in the Appalachians that have been terraformed to look like Wyoming.

Wear a cowboy hat and squint.

Become addicted to a tear-flavored brand of chewing tobacco.

Bleed yourself regularly with leeches to remove the black bile.

Follow a river from its mouth to its source: a spring small enough to empty with one long sip.

Plant a stump.