Thomas Lowe Taylor -- TURF

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The bird of paradise recalls you toward the three graces in your moist and sentimental hours, through the signs on the floor that tell you, yes, you have gone too far this time, and let them down again for hours, floating in time, moving too far along to become anything new enough to have them waiting in line for the rest to occur too soon to wait and too long to measure, in the occult hours bending forward in another language you forgot to learn the last time you were here, smoothing through this forest of honor and letting them rest along the highway. It is now and then that you come along across the others as another newer thing in the air, moved too soon to be signed off in light or dark, there are no others in the hours ahead, and you sail through them one by one and call forward for some carpets to be stacked.

These are newer signs which named you thus, and thus again, turning the day's hours inside out with repetition and recompense, and making your own colors something to recall; hours and days of motive which lend an air of magnitude to your own thoughts, turning the other terms into an aura of light superimposed over thought and action in the in-between hours you said were not exposed or threatened but left to their own, they would decide where to emplace themselves, the doors were ringing inside your mind like another color and said to be some things are too soon to allow and very smooth besides, allowing something more to becalm the tides without pity or remonstrance, as we have said before, and before that, there was nothing more to mention but the saliences, the salivations, and the excretions.

This was another day you said hello, and smoothed the hours recklessly within the terms of what was there before you looked: It was new and smooth, and had symbolic features to render them one on one below the hours you said were this and thus. Something sudden foiled the anchors within their definitions for what was either latent or fostered and said against them one on one the movies settled into this forest of fragments where you have color to tell them which way to go, with red and blue trees set against the yellow foliage to heave them once and for all the foraging monsters of doubt eating out and staying slim to heed them still and later, mounted and sudden as the songs are settled out into their exact repetitions for the images to empty out and stay that way, you are still heaved aside with a grandiose air of refusal.

Hovered overside, and sled them further sailing, one into the other was the reigning error in their weighs and ballasts, foreign enough, or slipped them edgewise and smart, and said they were too firm to recognize in passing, but slithered the rest resting here and there you were the one recognized in the simpler terms for doubt or utterance, and this was the thing made into a suspect, a rising thing, a falling thing; and between what was said and what was thought, nothing remains of the unbidden excess of those who favor these alternatives to some other kind of thing you might imagine in savoring the attitude that some things are better off left alone than removed from their contexts and scalped, you might say, of their integrity, and left for dead along the highway, smoothing out their own hairlines into a newness.

There were some days when you just wanted to say "This is not the sky I imagined flowing through your abyss." And the natural reflex is to bend to one side and then stretch out both forward and backward, loosing the energies of your own latency onto the plane of action, where the simpler achievements are settled hour by hour in the less appropriate terms you have for this: One and two and three. The lighter hues are sandwiched between the more erudite layers of material, like the symposium the clatter-bell and the mellifluous one, in his polished category of what-you-see-is-what-you-get. It was not a mirror at all, but intense passion directed at strangers, and hollowed out without pity or sensation, merely described by Mind in its absoluteness to become something made out of leather and old wood.

Older climates perjured the air with noise. They were moving across a flattered plain with innocence to ride them backwards into time removed at spatial disturbances recalled to their own lingering doubts regarding the purposes of life, assuming one was aware enough to set it all straight with a glance or two, psychic energies radiating outward from the nimbus of light haloed out into space from her globelike forehead a continent-sized dayglow suitcase of money hanging from the parachute, glowing coals for eyes, and the lighter terms were against the tides your own wooden casques fluttering buds of angular substances tooting along the white rose highway with his noses draining into the sink, sinking into it all together was soon enough to recall them to the utter disturbances of your own terms for this or that.

This was it, he said, and let the implications rise to the top like creamery light in your hands the answer calling in verb to verb, the lingering lights were falling black to green and then saying who you were to the others; this was another matter entirely. The masks of the soldiers were emblazoned with the portrait of their god, Self-enough, and featured many different colors and interpretations for your own distinct impressions laid out from one side to the other. You stopped. The inner doubt was tinged with a slight suggestion of excelsior, a cellophane definition of what was going on that would have left you isolated and unexpected, in the new movies roughed out and told to stay in the back room until the bug guy came with his clever nets and tape recordings of fluttering sounds, in order to dance with them now.

There were others included in the glance. What was at first only a sudden thing became more than doubt itself could afford in its declinations toward a fuller sign for the existence of itself; no, it was not something heathen that filled the rooms with a sensation of being there itself; no, it was not a singular demonstration that mental illness was but a prelude to some higher state; it was just that the grey fog that became thought itself was more initiation than doubt. And every day, there were more and more indications that what had started out perhaps as a prank was becoming an international quirk. The openings and closings of the great darkness were coming more frequently as the days passed. And who you were was not just some kind of song, it was a position and an attitude that left you naked and defenseless.