Ars Poetica 3

There is something about singing alone,loudly and wildly, in a car, with the windows rolled up on a deserted road while driving too fast--it exorcises a being.

It only takes one random, perfect note--the one that is the catalyst for a physical and metaphysical flushing. Some preternatural organ below the heart contracts, pumps for a brief time.

It is the note that musicians know, and dare to sound publicly in a deliberate seduction.

An object of experience flushes a being, too. The same way fear, creeping or pouncing, floods us with a single, overwhelming experience that makes us sweat, overreach for metaphors to communicate, take someone by the hand and lead them to the spot where they will also be forced open with ambivalent intention.

The perfectly smooth curve of an ornamented banister that fits deliberately under one's palm; the cleanly beveled edges; its solid forced existence are the artisan's legitimation to bring to question "art" as nothing more than a definition of context, a social licence of means--not ends: the whore of the flesh, the courtesan of the imagination.

There are moments, too, like twisting knives, to pry our shells apart. These are the moments that poets know and dare to sound publicly in a deliberate seduction.