John Olson
Body Language

I write like a criminal doing push ups in a cell. My right ear argues constantly against the evidence of my left eye. My right eye languishes under a bushy eyebrow creating a jewel of light for the X-ray of a bean. My left ear has a job in Kentucky and my taste buds lean toward scallops. My emotions are absorbed in yardstick hair. I applaud the law of physics. I walk around dreaming of quatrains that describe themselves as toast. Do you remember Prospero? How about Caliban? Remember him? All he wanted was freedom. What can you do with your hands? I fought the law and the law won. There are sockets in Antarctica that beg for this kind of attention. What’s so special about philodendrons? The hardware of heaven is an imbroglio of blue and red. If zip codes were parsley I would wear velour in the fog. But here we are lost and alone, masturbating ghosts bursting into fire. Give me a spoon. Give me a needle. And I will give you time crawling toward a library crackling with black. I will give you the tall glue of reply. The light of the mind shames the darkness of the bank. It is silly under such circumstances to expect yeast, or unanimity. If you’d like, I can imitate the passage of Thursday. I can cram it full of scintillating questions. I can show you skeletons dancing on a map. Essence thirsts for explosion. Imagery is fur, cadence is bone. Each time I push my emotions into words light squeezes through a hole of blackberries and wrestles the sky onto a loom of seaweed where it becomes a coin of thought. Eternity tastes of quince and drapery clicks across a window. Is it true that a pendulum will swing in the same plane as the planet rotates beneath it? The azure of afternoon pours through the window and quick as a barracuda the horizon is hijacked by tendrils of mist. These words these fingers these strains cannot prevent the afternoon erasing itself from the wall. I can never understand the United States. This passion for jokes. For revival. For crickets and trigonometry. Once the voice mixes with a body of words I have a parakeet on my finger. See it? It is gripped in a gargantuan gloom. Eyes as dark as wine. As you may have already guessed, I don’t wear cologne. I prefer the natural odor of garlic. It makes me feel French. It holds my ego together while I explore the planet. The planet, that is, as it appears to me in photographs and flint. I consider such things luxuries, like knowing where to scratch, or pulses of light creating a dialogue with time.