near our house

bus stop

behind church

OUR DOG FRIENDS

Shadows nose the driveway
in our friend’s headlights.
Thumper and Bambi,
big and small.

Blown in with the bora,
they traveled by starlight
over bone blue road,
free and startling.

He jumped the stone wall, pausing
atop to burst his black fringe mane.
Bambi made do, scuttled under the iron gate.

She’s a little beige clown.
She nuzzles her mouth into my hand fold.
The stains around her eyes are a black hole.
White light jiggles in her irises.
Hope burns in holy hollow lungs.
Heart patters companion.

They wag past the straddle of
grape vine work lines,
the last pomegranates of November.
They’re dark darts on cobbled town floor,
Istria whole province dominion
to panting friends of man.

My imagination’s kite flies with them,
Over the red earth, a minnowing shadow
large and far or small and close
under king constellation, canine nebula
hung in historical stars for the free friends
of humans.

- Kathy Ireland Smith

 

 

i entered navy boot camp in 1963 a 6 foot 3 inch 165 pound 17 year old kid… left 3 months later weighing 185.  by 1991 i was drinking 5 gallons of cheap white wine a week, and had ballooned to 260 pounds.  i looked like a greedy chipmunk who carried all his acorns in his cheeks, my eyes hidden in fat folds of facial flesh. i stopped drinking april 21 1991, and dropped back down to 185 over the next few years.  when kathy moved in and started feeding me actual food in 2005, i went down to 170 – which is a wee bit light.  once we left the states and i started serious candy and cookies, i went to 190.  today i’m 185 – back where i was 44 years ago. of course my 1963 flesh was much more attractively dispersed.  next few months of healthy eating should see me at 175.  dark clouds carry light linings.  it’s all how you look at things. i’m grateful because this gives me a chance to live up to my better self, and i still get two cups of coffee a day.  plus i found out spain’s new marijuana laws are as liberal as holland’s, so there’s hope for life after life after all.

my weight loss is nothing compared to my mother’s – or kathy’s.  mother dwarf went from 320 to 210 in two years of dieting, then dropped to 165 in 9 months of hell bouncing between emergency rooms and rehabilitation homes before she died. kathy cut her weight in half from sheer will, running, and dieting. i’m in awe of both of them. kathy’s writing a book about her weight loss – working title is Fat Girl.

we’re headed to a french village not far from beziers.  got this note from cleveland poet dan smith: “hi – i looked up Beziers & find that you will be watched by the river Orb & it is in Languedoc which i believe was home to the Black Madonna & the Knights Templar & things along the lines of the Da Vinci Code. it was home to the Cathars who were virtually exterminated along with many true Catholics.  ” kill them all , let God sort them out .”  also known for great wine since Roman times.  best regards, dan smith”

   The Tesseract

   Larger within than without
   We test our act
   As tesseracts
   Tightrope walk
   The lesser tracks
   Proselytize
   And pressure facts
   Lick our lies
   As preachers shout
   And panthers stalk
   The lesser that
   In sum of arts
   Explode in parts
   Much greater than the count

a tesseract is a vessel larger on the inside than it is on the outside, so that makes us all tesseracts.

now something much smaller within than without – folk keep trying to tell me how great paul mccartney is.  gag me with a spittoon.  the two most obnoxious soporific elevator muzak songs ever written are mccartney’s “yesterday” and “michelle.” i like what john lennon said to mccartney on lennon’s first solo album (lyrics appear to be in shakespearian iambic pentameter – who’da thunk it?):

“Those freaks was right when they said you was dead, the one mistake you made was in your head… You live with straights who tell you you was king, jump when your momma tell you anything… A pretty face may last a year or two but pretty soon they’ll see what you can do… The sound you make is muzak to my ears… How do you sleep? How do you sleep at night?” – excerpted lyrics by john lennon

for mind and talent, the 3 singer/songwriters i admire most are bob dylan, john lennon, leonard cohen. for pure singing talent alone, elvis presley. for jazz genius, miles davis and charles mingus. country music would be willie nelson and hank williams. the two bands i enjoy most are the rolling stones and meat beat manifesto. if this were one of those phony games where i could name one name only, it’d be bob dylan. my favorite person and woman is my wife kathy. and for best combination of artist / poet / writer / publisher / life, i pick me.

ate a can of sardines this morning  – forgot about the salt in the brine and got the metallic taste in my mouth with the high blood pressure singing in my head.  had our hosts over for lunch today.  ate forbidden foods with a third cup of coffee and some of the excellent chocolates they brought – and again the metallic tongue taste and high blood pressure head song.  guess this straight and narrow path i’m to walk really means straight and narrow.  i’ve never been straight, or narrow. i am my own lab rat. oog goog a choob.

got so hungry for red meat i bought some girl scout cookies – but there was no girl scout meat in any of them.  it’s a scam – girl scout cookies are not made from girl scouts. what a rotten, lying world this is.

and speaking of rotten lying:
The Senate’s foreign relations committee politely rebuked Bush’s plans to send more troops to Iraq. A similar non-binding resolution from the full Democratic-controlled Congress is expected next week. But real power behind Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, immediately sneered back, “it won’t stop us.” His contemptuous retort illustrates the neo-totalitarian impulses that continue to grip the Republican party’s far right. Cheney and a cabal of pro-war neoconservatives are the prime exponents of imperial presidency. They dismiss Congress and the courts as “little jabber houses.” – January 28, 2007 by the Toronto Sun

 

 

in 2006, my http://www.agentofchaos.com/ art & poetry website had 345,360 sessions looking at 1,275,509 pages. 

2006 represents 45% of all traffic since the site was created 51 months ago, and translates into 946 sessions looking at 3495 pages every single day of the year.

total traffic since september of 2002 is 783,231 sessions viewing 2,782,306 pages.

2006 december – 106,950 pages … 31,899 visitors
2005 december -   62,788 pages … 23,084 visitors
2004 december -   60,246 pages … 16,139 visitors
2003 december -   23,658 pages …   6,007 visitors
2002 december -    6,023 pages  …   1,432 visitors

AgentOfChaos.com has 2,635 pages and 4,512 images of art, poetry, reviews.  Most of the art and poetry are mine, but there’s also a good chunk of my wife Kathy’s poetry and art – as well as a selection of the 517 people I’ve published over 20 years in my 21 issues of ArtCrimes, and an extra helping of 13 guest artists.

i won’t know what this year’s traffic will be because i had to disable the stats – 5dollarhosting.com used my web space to store my stats, and in just a few months ate up 60 megabytes of my site.  they’ve been promising for 51 months to allow users to clean out old stats, but never seem to get around to it.

After spending 3 months in Croatia, we’re heading to the village of Albeilhan in Southern France for two months.  We’ll have internet access there, so I’ll be adding some new pages to the site.

some other opinions of the site and its offerings include

Smith has consistently refused to be conditioned by the public, and it’s a good thing; we love his contagion of undiluted underground art / lit / philosophy / abuse. — Tisha Nemeth – CoolCleveland.com, September 10, 2003

Let’s face it Smith, if the song “My Way” were written about your life, it would be lyrics by William S. Burroughs & music by Laurie Anderson, as performed by The Velvet Underground. The 45-RPM vinyl would have been a blue corrosion color rather than black, with Voodoo Lounge as the cover and “Voodoo Child” as side B. And THAT my friend would be one highly collectable single. – Steve Reynolds, June 2004

The blog http://www.walkingthinice.com/ is fascinating and more real than anything you’re gonna watch on TV tonight. – CoolCleveland.com, August 22, 2006

ArtCrimes is the most significant publication of the Cleveland underground art scene in recent history. – Douglas Max Utter, Cleveland Free Times, August 9, 2006

Over the years, ArtCrimes became an underground Cleveland institution, turning Smith into the ultimate insider of outsider art. In a long line of local troubadours that stretches from d.a. levy in the 1960s through the late Daniel Thompson, Smith is a freestyling, freewheeling word- and image-smith. – Milenko Budimir, Northern Ohio Live, June 2006

In Smith’s protean art, his collages and assemblages reconfigure the mind, beachcombing daily realities. Language is scavenged, just as much as tree lawns, and sometimes Smith’s punning titles are the best part. -  Douglas Max Utter, Cleveland Free Times, March 15, 2006

Smith’s raw and often unwieldy work belies a formal sense of composition, of balance and symmetry. Even the asymmetrical pieces have a gesture, or a piece of material that acts as a balancing agent. – Amy Bracken Sparks, Angle, a Journal of Arts + Culture, June 2003

these reviews are among the 38 articles to be found on www.agentofchaos.com/reviews.html.

 

JOYWALK

Faith by failure,
knowledge by time,
love by grace.

The door is the quotation marks
etched between my starry eyes.

A brick broke my alarm clock.

Lady K

 

everything i like to eat just went out the door.  my lab results came back. doctor says my cholesterol is high.  my basic snack has been white bread toast covered in butter smothered in peanut butter drenched in honey.  turns out 4 of the foods i should not be eating are white bread, peanuts, butter, honey.

when my heart went south and decided to skip every 6th beat, my basic diet was coffee, cookies, coffee, candy, coffee, salted peanuts, coffee.  of those 4, i’m allowed 2 cups of coffee a day.

my food in krakow poland was street french fries and mushroom pizza.  gone.  ice cream – gone.  eggs – gone.  red meat – gone. ketchup, mayonnaise, salt, sugar – gone.  pastries – gone.  hot chocolate – gone.  bananas – gone gone gone.

kathy translated the croatian pamphlet from the doctor:
no input of cupboard solids
no meat of gentle rabbits
no offal (brain, liver, suet)
no pig fat

i can eat undefiled apples, blue sea fish, albino chicken, water. 

where does one get undefiled apples these days, outside the garden of eden?  and if a fish were blue, wouldn’t my eating him make him even sadder?

looks like i’ll be losing those 10 pounds i wanted.  thank godz for the 5 day delay in picking up my lab results – gave me 5 more days of guilt-free goodies.  the two visits to the doctor totalled $13 u.s.

reality’s forcing me to become the best me i can be.  kinda cool, actually.  i always wondered what a 100% smith would be like.  i operated around 33% in the old days, 77% lately.  ever up to higher ground.

hunger comes not always from the stomach or blood need.  there is psychological hunger as well. i always eat more when winter comes on, so i can add weight in preparation for the sun’s hibernation.  i eat more when my future seems uncertain job-wise or money-wise or direction-wise, in an effort to store flesh calories now for a coming future lean in food for the flesh.  i eat when i’m bored.  i eat when i’m dissatisfied with myself. and now i’m hungry not only for those reasons, but because i cannot eat what i want when i want, what’s convenient to consume now this minute when my mind sends false signals to my body.  i am hungry on multiple levels.  i must wean my mind, my soul, my spirit, my flesh from need.  the road from here to there is long and rocky and not easily mapped.

“courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to carry on with dignity in spite of it” – Scott Turrow, The Burden of Proof

cut my thumb last night washing the fish knife.  tonight i was extra careful, but it bit my third finger anyway … two bleedings in two nights.  told kathy it wasn’t fair because i was not a fish.  “you are a pisces,” she pointed out.  the fish knife was only doing its job.

dark side seepage … george w bush in his 2007 state of the union lies said “one question has surely been settled — that to win the war on terror we must take the fight to the enemy.”  george w. bush IS the enemy – of the world, of americans, of the constitution, of peace, of honor, of morality, of life – so let’s follow his advice and take the fight to him.  he and cheney are the world’s greatest terrorists.  they’ve done more bombing, killed more people, destroyed more earth, reduced more property to rubble than all the rest of the world’s terrorists combined.  bush says terrorists “preach with threats … instruct with bullets and bombs” – sounds like a fairly accurate description of the cheney bush corporate american foreign policy.  cheney / bush – the axis of evil.  bush / cheney – no lie too small to tell, no oil too far to steal.