There's Something Easy About Oil

by Patrick Whitfill

How it deals in gurgles and plops.  How the entire alphabet available to onomatopoeia rests right under its black palette.  To have that connection and not abuse it, not fling to the surface and snap the rafters of our imaginations until, when we bleed, we bleed from the throat out, is the cold glory oil wrestles with, its apocryphal limbs lost inside of the carnivorous vowels of prehistory.  Midnight unsettles every hole the prairie gapes with, and if I broke through a red rock bed with the fat drill-bit of my open mouth and breathed, I'd find myself histrionic and ridiculous, every inch black-slathered and leaning forward for more.  Where's better to sleep than where the earth forgot its predated linguistics in favor of a peyote sky and the sharp, unregulated physics of beak to wing?  Where else does night bubble up without the significance of day forcing it to finish its sentences?