Birds alphabets dawns linguistics Brautigan suicide travel obscure
gods certain birds in certain pockets or hiding in the depths of a piece on spelling
using the entire the alphabet (and why not?, hardly anybody else is using it) while
waiting for a passenger pigeon to return my notion of sight, bird torn from cortex,
but all I get are evening doves, disguised as blessing. If I put a gray shed over
there and told you Brautigan wrote this, that I found it under a falls that looked
like a tall legged drink, you might believe me. If I put it aside and found it in ten
years, I might believe myself, but who the hell's going to be alive in ten years to
even ponder suicide, or deeply tucked inside Alzheimer's like a sheathe, or a pelt.
Or like the Synthesizer Beehive I created yesterday out of a real beehive with
literal bees, pick ups (lazars attached to ears) on each cubic centimeter, each a
different note and each quadrant of 64 a different tone, scales, architecture of
waves, roots and branches in and through the mix performing random and esoteric operations (Our motto: No Function is Peripheral) like the modulation calibrator
of the Dream Arpeggiator I invented with Kyle last week, the result might be something like we never expected but knew all along, the hive a home to a fully-operational metaphor for the orphaned homunculus or the mindblindness of a spell
amid wondrously intelligent attenuations of melodic lines, themselves, notes like extinction migrations woven into sonatas of oblivion. What nodes of existence
to cover, days of flight. Brautigan had it right. Watch the birds. Words create the alphabet. Climb mountain to shortstop. Blow your brains out. Keep it movin'.
—Skip Fox
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Previously published in At That (Toronto: Ahadada Press, 2005).