Me: “Where do you find your ideas?”
Artist: (Dips a brush in Yves Klein Blue, never looks up from the canvas, rests back
on a deep sigh before offering an answer)
“From my dreams. Pieces of the world covered over with fantasy.”
Me: “Where do you get your ideas?”
Poet: (Swishes ice in a glass, a writer’s windchime, keeps eyes closed, naps on a
long pause before whispering an answer)
“From my muse, whenever she visits. And if she’s on vacation, I send a
haiku.”
Me: “Where do you get your ideas?”
Neighborhood Icon: (Rummages in a dumpster while wearing three coats, looks
at me directly in the eyes, points to own head infested with
hair; the answer is immediate)
“A FISH”
I awake from the night, sheets drenched in dreams, small puddles of hallucination that evaporate with morning. I scream out the window to a world bleached in sunshine: “Where are my ideas? When will they come?” My eyes yank back the hints of lunacy. I slam down the window, shut out the wail of sirens. The local police are vigilant with fracas.
My morning coffee is followed by heady sensation. For there, in my brain, swims a bright orange FISH. Either eye is a compass, opposing directions. Its gills expel ink, Noodlers Heart of Darkness, black as the flow off a Pelikan Pen. The dorsal FIN is translucent, a New York Times acrostic fades in its crease. The pelvic FIN a ladder, leading to nowhere, a symbol of balance where there is obviously none. And the pelvic FINS are puppet hands, useless as legs. But the orange, ah, the orange, illuminates perfection. The color of Buddha right after a bath. I watch the hypnotic glide as it swims in gray coral. A FISH in the brain is such intense GRATIFISHCATION.
But the bliss of the FISH erodes into folly by a heightened desire to tame it as pet.
And so that night, I set out a bowl: FILL it with vodka (Polish not Russian), add more gravel than pearls, insert a castle of sand to make it a home. Then meticulously, with unexpected caution, I consign it a place right under the bed. A trap for the FISH that swms in my brain.
Early the next morning, just after the sunrise, I reach under the bed, pull out the bowl. I will greet my FISH with enthusiasm and song. I will feed it dried apricots, teach it to dance. Imagine my bewilderment, take note of my shock, when instead of a FISH, my spectacular brain PISCI, I discover the aspect of an overweight old man. A wrinkled, sagging, bald little man. The size and color of a kumquat’s kidney.
He lays there quite buoyantly on a float of plaid bubbles. Gird, quite fortunately, in an almost ample speedo, located beneath his copious paunch. I flick the float, dispatching the bather into a stimulating spiral, a dubious motion that awakens his senses.
“Stop that,” he hisses, ” and bring me some words. I’m famished as hell and need multi-syllabic nouns.” My brain FISH is an irritated stout man beginning to rankle.
Arming myself with a utility knife and water-stained copy of dense MOBY DICK, I excise archaic language fraught with caloric consonants. And my corpulent kumquat consumes every word, smacking swollen lips, supplicating more. The enormous tome of loquacious Herm Melville soon dwindles down to mere bones of itself. Then comes the rupture, the release of vocabulary, the leviathon of spew drenched in choice Zubrowka spirits. My roly-poly man, the color of kumquat, no longer exists in the bowl under bed.
“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
“A FISH pitched up by the angry sea, I gasped on land, and
I became me.” – Kurt Vonnegut (CAT’S CRADLE)
Between Now & Zen 