where everyone is made of butter

touch (if you will) my stomach
- prince, when doves cry

I WOKE UP with a spider near my head. the spider was in a web spun where the ceiling meets the wall. i was close to the spider anyway because my bed is so high. my bed is so high because i made it so. i made it so high because of a bed i once saw when i was nineteen and impressionable. it was about two metres high and made from stolen scaffolding.

the spider is so high because the flying insects sleep on the ceiling and this spider catches flying insects. i know the spider catches flying insects because the other day i could hear a fly buzzbuzzing lo! without cease or respite and i looked for it and i found it far above my head. it was snarled in a web and the spider was watching it. the spider was patient and the fly wasn't. the fly was struggling and wearing itself out and the spider knew it and waited.

i know the flying insects sleep on the ceiling because my bed is high. when i'm in it my face is only a few feet from the ceiling. i built the bed over my doorway. i wanted a kind of entrance hall to my bedroom. i made it high enough to walk under but low enough that a friend can sit on me when i lie in it. (sometimes when two friends feel strongly for one another they want to get very very close and sometimes they sit on each other. we call these kinds of friends special friends.) maybe you didn't want to know that detail about my bed construction. too bad! now you do.

when i watched the spider the other day it was far above my head because i was sitting on the floor and it was up where the ceiling meets the wall. when i woke up today the spider had moved to the other side of the room and so it was right near my head.

it's a daddy long-legs. it looks happy and well-fed. it has a large thorax for a daddy long-legs.

there's a story going around about daddy long-legses. the story is that a) they are more poisonous than other spiders but that 2) we don't hafta worry cos their fangs are too wee to penetrate our skin. both a and 2 are untrue.

anyway: i was wondering if i looked like food to the daddy long-legs or it i was too big to think of as edible. like if you landed on a butter planet and it was so big it didn't occur to you it might be food.

re which: someone told me once about a planet where everyone was made of butter.

'you think that's pretty funny,' he said. 'but they think it's funny that you're made of meat.'

love to all
xxx

parabolas

this morning i got up. i felt pretty good. maybe i am finally getting enough vitamin b.

i walked down the hall. i looked back at the puppy. he was still curled up on his lil blanket near the front door.

'interesting,' i thought. 'i have more energy than the puppy.'

i looked at the puppy some more. one of his eyes was open. he looked back at me with said eye.

'very interesting indeed,' i thought. 'could it be,' i thought, 'that we are symbiotically linked like homonculi? that maybe we form some kind of closed system where the amount of energy stays constant but passes between us through some mechanism which is not immediately obvious to the naked eye and the details of which would certainly hafta be worked out in somewhat more detail? but that anyway in layperson's terms one of us has the energy at any given time t while the other reposes or struggles to walk without tripping over? and that right now the lil puppy is as montgomery burns would say the cool yin to my raging yang?'

i looked at the puppy again. one of his eyes was still open. there was, gentle reader, a subtle gleam in said eye.

'is it just my imagination,' i thought, 'which is, admittedly, quite active,' i continued thinking, 'or does that lil puppy look just the tiniest bit guilty?'

i stepped over a gentle shiny parabola of puppy piss on the hallway floor. i guess the puppy had pissed against one of the walls sometime earlier and the earth's intelligence had moved it downhill and it had dried, nearly, in a gentle shiny parabola.

i continued down the hallway absorbed, gentle reader, in these reflections. actually to be quite honest i'd moved on from my psycho-physical musings and was absorbed in picking words out to describe what i saw. i'd settled on 'parabola' and was just forming the word 'gentle' with my interior voice and then i said a very very rude word indeed and looked at my heel with the melancholy eye of a poet.

the puppy groweth in cunning, i can say that much. he had artfully left the parabola right outside my door where i'd see it and be distracted and not notice the limpid pool he'd left just next to the bathroom. he'd found one of the natural basins formed by the geological activity in our linoleum and filled it with piss. my heel was sitting in it.

my sock was wet. i took it off. later i would add it to the pile of piss-wet socks in my laundry basket but for now i was interested to see that the pool of puppy piss was a much fainter yellow than usual: the pale yellow of the sun through train windows: the pale yellow of unsalted butter.

'interesting,' i thought. 'maybe the mechanism of it all has something to do with vitamin b.'

on which note:
love to all
xxxx

i was later i look! pepper-trees!

o my heart which i have from my mother!
o my heart which i have from my being!
do not rise against me as a witness!
do not turn against me in the tribunal!
do not tip the scales against me in front of the keeper of the scales!
- the book of going forth by day

1. i was
I WAS TIRED this morning. maybe i'm not getting enough vitamin b. maybe the puppy is getting it all. i think the puppy is getting enough vitamin b because when i walked into the kitchen this morning he was looking at me and i looked at him and then i saw behind him a small pool of puppy piss, cartoon-sun yellow. it was a hallucinatory yellow in fact and the world's intelligence was moving it downhill. it was becoming a slow stream because our floors are not flat.

i cleaned up the piss. i do this a lot at the moment. i'm also home a lot just now working on music and so is the puppy. home, i mean. the puppy is not working on any music. stop trying to confuse me with your suggestions and, frankly, innuendos. thanks.

when i walk he spins like a satellite around the planet of whichever leg just hit the ground. he twines around my legs like bolas . i hafta be alert lest i fall.


2. later i
LATER I WAS on the train. a woman and a little boy came and sat across from me. the boy's hair was the colour of burning butter. by this i mean that some of it was a pale yellow and some of it was darker.

the boy was excited to sit by the window and gaze out at the world: the world always new and surprising. i'd guess he was four. to be that young is to know you don't have the measure of the world: you want to keep looking at it out the window because it's full of surprises: look! a truck! look! a helicopter! look! a horse!

we didn't actually see a helicopter or a horse. i am just giving an example.

none of the rest of us have the measure of the world either but we forget, maybe, and instead of looking out the window we think about other things but the world is always new. it's always being put together just in time for us to look at it. the woman wasn't looking out the window. she was yawning and rubbing her eyes.

some people can get fucked. no, wait.. that came out wrong.. i meant to say some people think it's funny the way kids have more energy than the adults who look after them.

'isn't it amazing,' they say, 'how much energy kids have! and look how boring their parents are!'

but see, the parents would have more energy if someone else was cooking them food and paying their rent and cleaning up after them and so on. kids are like rock stars. other people attend to their needs and they get to throw tantrums and jump on the furniture and look out the window at the world always new: look! the sun pale behind clouds! the sun paler than my butter hair!

i don't mean to imply that the little boy across from me was some kind of prima donna. i was just making a more general point. he seemed in fact like a total sweetie and he was happy to snuggle up to the woman when he got tired so i guess they knew each other from before the train.

there were things lying around on the banks by the train tracks. everything had an air of magical decay.


3. look! pepper-trees!
WE PASSED BY pepper-trees. look! pepper-trees! something pale and generous was flowering the pines, too.

xxxx