I'm a kind of cowboy. Kicked a few dumb-faced cows around. Herded them down the path bellowing, stomachs sloshing, switching their dung-crusted tails. I know how to yell those beasts into line.

Yodeled black tunnels down to the bottom where the face talks and top groans. Wandered alone in an underground city. Tried getting to the bottom of things, went mad trying.

Pried, burrowed. Dug for the solid. Laughed my head off spinning in space. Climbed smooth granite with bloody feet. None of this for the sake of making anything, but for real rock underfoot and overhead.

I'm a jazz fan and cat lover savoring the succinct unpredictable phrase, the mellow flexibility of tunal gold. A painter who takes two years to complete a canvas, visualizing one brush stroke for weeks.

An archivist plastering words all over everything, then staring dumb at the floor. For exultation, for memorialization, for recognizing the never-to-be-repeated. Greeting each bright new experience with a valedictory wave.

A Saussurean sausage-slicer: thin transparent moments. A lump who's livened by the truth. A man who scrawls "coal mine" in the margins of everything from Ovid to Horkheimer.

I write from a dark room, cow's head, naked in a patch of hunger cactus. Gallop across porous borders, hunt for oysters in an ocean of books. Impatient with nothing, I bark out of turn.

Love and all her wests. Cunning desire and slaphappy chance. The swirl of mathematics. Reductionist fanaticism. Telegraphy. Iconoclasm, fragmentation, crystallization.

I am a worm. Confounded by enigmas, unable to think myself out of a wet paper bag. Helpless before turbine-powered razor blades shredding my brain to a pulp. Scritch and scratch. Let thoughts come out and see the light of day.

A dissident in the basement cranking out manifestoes. Brass-collared puritan. Radish-eater. Envoy in the tent with a private message. Nomad with an eye on the spear of an Egyptian sentry.

I am the child in burlap. Saying, Lord, it has gone on for too many generations. Bring it down.