WALKING ON THIN ICE

foto by smith

we had a homecoming poetry reading thursday, a poetry reading at another’s goodbye party friday, saturday we had a monthly poetry group afternoon followed by a poetry pot-luck party night. today sunday we go to another poet’s apartment for dinner.

i think lady’s trying to tame me to civil ways using rapidly repeated social engagements - desensitization through social shock. but i don’t believe this particular beast is tame-able. the longer i live, the less civilized i become. and the better i get at hiding it.

feels wrong to be back here in cleveland - but logical, essential. we started both us and our journey here, so it seems correct to end here in rest, reset and re-examination before starting anew in a new state and new city new neighborhood new poetry/art scene new she new me. she’s not the she who left the u.s. last year. nor am me.

i lived in cleveland 29 years, 21 in this very neighborhood where we’re staying. right now, every place we go, i’ve already repeatedly been. this past 14 months has been a constant stream of refreshingly new places, new problems, new vistas, new people. only reason right now to be here is to see i shouldn’t be here. though it is nice to see some old friends… but my friends seem to stay friends just using email, so my physical presence ain’t required. can’t wait to move on so we can start moving on with our lives again. my dream is after a year in chicago, to start traveling again - greece, nepal, thailand.

it’s cold here. thanks to throwing weight away along our backpack way, i’m down to 2 pair black jeans, 6 black enigmatic tee-shirts, 1 pullover, 1 shirt, 2 sweaters, 6 pair sox, 5 handkerchiefs - and i have half of that on right now in a vague attempt to keep warm. we saw a lot of french, spanish, croatian, and moroccan sun in our journey - not used to cleveland cold.

lady’s huddled in bed beneath the covers, refuses to get up and make warm coffee or warm oatmeal. my cooking skills consist of the ability to open a cold pack of cookies, or pour cold milk over cold cereal with cold bananas on it. but i think i’m going to chance it though - be worth the effort for hot coffee. sometimes a man just must take a chance and step up to the stove.

thoughts on society, survival of the fittest - we’re fixing too many of the broken, bringing too many of the lost back.

foto by smith

foto by smith

lady k has abandoned me - went off to spend the day with a girlfriend. hmmm, wonder what she’d think if i spent the day with a girlfriend. actually i do - i spend every day with my girlfriend, who’s fortunately also my collaborator, my companion, my wife.

so, being abandoned, i resorted to my old pagan ways. went down to lucky’s for an egg n cheese croissant sandwich and a big tall strong dark coffee. read the daily pain dealer, something i used to enjoy every morning, but don’t anymore - after traveling and reading deeply beneath the schemes, the local newspapers seem no-newspapers. even lost my love of the morning comics page. i find i am not as i was.

then i toked a couple tooks and blogged. i have a serious blogging addiction - in krakow poland i sometimes blogged 3 times a day. love to write, just don’t always have words worth.

and finally, as she’s re-bonding with her friend, i’m re-bonding back with my old smilth of guilty pleasures - i found in a drawer a copy of The Cosmic Man, 1959. “OUT OF THIS UNIVERSE! - The Cosmic Man - Is IT TRUE? Are creatures from space watching us NOW?” stars John Carradine, the man who apparently appeared in every movie ever made between 1930 and 1990 ( actually, he was in 336 movies and tv episodes in those 60 years of film ). it gets an imdb.com user rating of 3.8 out of 10 - which is fair. the movie’s fun, so sweetly gentle in its simplistic moral world of creams and greys. the bad guys aren’t really bad, just morally confused and afraid. the crippled kid in the wheel chair is walking by the end, while his lonely sad but good mother who lost her man in the war has found a new man in square-chinned good-hearted good-guy scientist who likes and understands crippled kids.

been a long time since i watched a bad film all alone. they’re more fun and easier alone because i don’t feel any guilt for the other’s suffering.

we each got to read 2 more poems from the stage of the beachland ballroom tonight for susan channing’s going away party. she was spaces gallery director past 22 years. poets don’t often get actual stages.

the 31 minute video of our reading last night ran out of time and cut short the last minute or two of the raucous explosion of hooting and laughter as i recited this final poem:

Pumpkin Time

You know what time it is?
It’s pumpkin time.

No, not pumpin time
Pumpkin time

cuz at midnight
everything turns into
a pumpkin
and the mice run away

Now midnight you also might
be pumpin pie,
depends on what yer doin
at the time

Somethin
you might be fuckin
might turn into a pumpkin

So you fuckin pumpin
pumpkin pie

reading may be seen at The Literary Cafe’s poetry site

foto by smith

foto by smith

this is a small love shack out back we’re staying in. the shower is in the kitchen between the fridge and the stove. this morning as lady got in the shower, i pulled up a kitchen chair in front of the glass shower door, grabbed some oatmeal cookies, sat down and said “o good, a free floor show.”

there’s no place here for lady to dress away from my hungry eyes. just now as she put her bra on i said ahhhhh, a tit and a mammary… but i don’t know which is which. “this is the tit, this the mammary” she said pointing left and right. thanks, i say, i always forget, that’s why i keep staring every time you’re naked, trying to figure it out.

told her i was blogging her boobs and she said, “nothing’s sacred.” that proves it, her mammaries are sacred. maybe i could get a cool cult client religion going worshiping her breasts

as lady said in her poem June:

Or in some place
where They
would worship
your breasts

build temples to them
twin towers
to capitalism
and the American Dream

i could charge our cult flock two/tenths tithing for the privilege of bowing before her breasts, three/tenths if one’s bared, four/tenths for two. have holy communion be a nine/tenths quick lick and a nipple nibble - sort of a boob lube. i could make a mold of her aureole area and sell it as sacred nips. perhaps reproduce one whole breast in hand-painted latex velvet as a mother mammary and/or face massage souvenir.

i tell you, you combine religious ecstasy with nude boobs, and you got serious possibilities.

on the ecstatic, last night’s poetry reading went well. here’s a video of us at
there’s no place here for lady to dress away from my hungry eyes. just now as she put her bra on i said ahhhhh, a tit and a mammary… but i don’t know which is which. “this is the tit, this the mammary” she said pointing left and right. thanks, i say, i always forget, that’s why i keep staring every time you’re naked, trying to figure it out.

told her i was blogging her boobs and she said, “nothing’s sacred.” that proves it, her mammaries are sacred. maybe i could get a cool cult client religion going worshiping her breasts

as lady said in her poem June:

Or in some place
where They
would worship
your breasts

build temples to them
twin towers
to capitalism
and the American Dream

i could charge our cult flock two/tenths tithing for the privilege of bowing before her breasts, three/tenths if one’s bared, four/tenths for two. have holy communion be a nine/tenths quick lick and a nipple nibble - sort of a boob lube. i could make a mold of her aureole area and sell it as sacred nips. perhaps reproduce one whole breast in hand-painted latex velvet as a mother mammary and/or face massage souvenir.

i tell you, you combine religious ecstasy with nude boobs, and you got serious possibilities.

on the ecstatic, last night’s poetry reading went well. here’s a video of us at The Literary Cafe’s poetry site. (video is 31 minutes long, 33 poems). lady had 122 of her travel fotos projected over us as we read.

my video voice is gravelly. i went smokeless all day so i’d have my purer voice, but it went bad anyway due to being tired from travel, the pre-stress of performing, and the tail-end of my cold. one of these days i’ll have my never recorded deeper post-throat-cancer poetry voice - the voice i had in our london readings, the voice no one here home in cleveland has ever heard. maybe for our goodbye reading next month.

i’m so looking forward to our move december 1st - it will be nice to settle down in one town for a year or two, rest, work, reanalyze, decompress, document, experiment, represent to what extent evidence presents. time to start figuring out what been’s been, what is am, and what might be will be.

lady and i are also in this katie daley open mic production of My Dick: The Literary Cafe (10 minutes)

it’s odd seeing yourself perform. you immediately see obvious failings like looking down at the list of titles instead of out at the audience more, and passing the mic too quickly. still, it went well. i’m proud. learn and live livelier.

no nervousness at reading, but the inevitable daily dread overtook me. been reading poetry in public 25 years now. each reading i look eagerly towards, and yet each day of the reading i feel this stupid dread wondering why i even bothered setting up a reading cuz nobody’s going to come and even if they do they’re not going to want to hear what i have to say. then they call my name, i get up, and everything is fine. last few times having lady k right beside me at the mic has made it all feel easier. but we both get these poetry day dreads.

we had a full audience for our reading, and a half dozen of the major name poets showed up, so i felt validated. don’t get any money for art, poetry, writing, publishing, fotoing, so i have to turn to the respect of my peers for external validation of my worth.

is odd, i know my worth within myself as artist, poet, writer, etc, so outsiders saying yea or nay shouldn’t matter. but it does. i always get a small warm thrill when someone i respect shows offers respect in return.

what is the sound of one hand clapping?
patting yourself on the back.

this it is the it it is.

here’s one of lady’s poems from last night i especially like. actually, i especially like a lot of her poetry - more so than she seems to herself. once we settle in chicago, i’ll have to gather her words together for her and show her her goods worth. this one’s wonderful to hear as well as read.

MY LUSTING RIBS

I always got this thrill–
the idea of being Olive Oyl,
tied to a railroad track by Bluto

My pale skin, my
pulsing pulsing pulsing
So frail, so prone
a limp bird just waiting
for Popeye to untie me

But Ohhhhhhh, Popeye,
an ache filled with thrill

Rescue equally exciting
as to succumb to consumption,
the train cracking rack of
ribs on the track

foto by smith

foto by smith

tonight’s our first american poetry reading as featured readers since mid 2006. we’ve memorized 33 poems and will both stand at the mic bouncing back and forth each reciting one poem at a time. our back and forth changes the pacing, plays with the potential reasons why one poem follows another, and keeps the audience less bored. and reciting from memory allows us to look at each person and see how each poem goes over. should be a gas.

here’s one of mine for tonight.

Sold American

We’re born in blood, raised in flesh
In Ragnarok n roll Armageddon
So let’s go let’s go let’s go go Sell American
For the red, white, black and blue

Schrodinger’s cat is dead, perhaps
And we but lie, lie dreaming
This tit for tat means this this ain’t that
No matter what the ragweeds weaving

My Little Bo Peep’s down eating her sheep
With Darwin doubtless her handle
Your Little Boy Blue’s sniffing glue
While cooking his spoon over candle

So drink a drink for all that hasn’t happened
Bleed in need for the all that never will
3 cheers for the crippled, the misbegotten
All hail politicians fingers in the till

foto by smith

We protested Tuesday outside the Union Club in Cleveland, a venue hosting a $500 breakfast fund raiser for Guiliani. His speech was canceled so we took our “SUPPORT THE TROOPS, BRING THEM HOME NOW” signs to a traffic-laden corner.

Some demonstrators ridiculed the people in suits who entered the Union Club. I don’t think wearing a suit is an offense. I joke about “suits”, but I’m not hostile to someone wearing one, and I’ve worn my share. I feel sad for someone in a suit. It seems like a prison uniform.

One demonstrator tried to get passersby to sign a petition to put the Libertarian candidate on the ballot. He approached one man who didn’t even wait to hear what the inquiry was about. He dismissed the lot of us saying, “I’m a Republican.”

I don’t see Republicanism and peace as opposing concepts. A “limited government” party that examines itself should have qualms about spending 750 million dollars a day in Iraq and bloating the debt.

The demonstrator approached another guy who just said, “F- off.”

Blind team affiliation is a natural and regrettable behavior. I used to be a Democrat. I just assumed that the Democratic party was “for” my interests. I didn’t bother to dig deeper and see if the party’s actions followed its words. After more research, I see the Democratic leadership as corporate kowtowers.

I remember the viciousness directed against Bill Clinton, his daughter and wife. I couldn’t understand then how people could be so cruel, and I didn’t think Chelsea deserved scrutiny. That viciousness is repeated in the personal attacks against Bush and his family. Yes, I’ve relished the attacks because Bush and Cheney are de facto mass murderers and their crimes arouse ugly feelings in me. But the problem with hostile discourse is that it undermines opportunity for constructive dialogue and change.

It’s important to recognize that there is a class war in this country, and the class war is escalating, and it has real consequences for most people in this country. But it’s also important to recognize the potential for change in individuals. Ridicule reinforces boundaries. We need to try to get beyond boundaries and parties and classes. We need to try to humanize and empower each other rather than demonize. (I appeal to my better nature here, but I expect relapse.)

foto by smith

chiplis took us on a tantalizing growing tour of the grounds - besides a multitude of roses, grasses, and other flowers, there’s sage, oregano, lemon balm, mint, thyme, raspberries, chive, dill, basil, horseradish, green beans, peppers, carrots, collards, red currents, and potatoes known as peruvian purple. what a gorgeous name. i’d buy them just for the sound of saying it aloud as i ordered - a pound of peruvian purple if you please. make a great dope name too - pass a puff of peruvian purple please.

darn, now my brain detrained on sheb wooley’s 1958 hit “Purple People Eater” - a song about a one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater coming to earth to be in a rock n roll band.

i also like sage - the word brings shimmers of wisdom and the wide open west what with zen sages and sagebrush. i broke a sage leaf in my hands, inhaled earth tang. made me remember when i rode shotgun on the sage coach between nowhere and no exit. crushed some oregano too - smelt like pizza.

it’s raining right now. often in our travels i found myself entranced by water, the meeting of land and water, the way light plays on both. i’ve moist memories of amsterdam canals… venetian waters… the mediterranean… never-ending english rain on the roof of our tent… walking the west african coast looking out at the atlantic… the long way the train tracked the hudson river’s mountain meanderings.

the past’s went water
the present rapids
the future fog in mist

foto by smith

foto by smith

i wrote this from vice dick cheney’s point of view.

As The World Turns

Slant the shade
Dim the blight
Dampen shame
Skim the light
Play the game
Place your blame
It’s best to screw
Your partner right

No need to kiss
Or cuddle coo
Ain’t making love
We gonna screw
Screw the good
Screw the weak
Screw the hood
Screw the meek

No good guy here
No humble geek
I do you ill
You touch my cheek
No turn of head
For second blow
I knee you now
I lay you low
I lay your life
I lay your wife
I lay your dog
I go hole hog

Don’t mess with me
For don’t you see
It’s how I’m made
I don’t work right
This step aside
For weaker scum
It ain’t my stride
I’m different drum
I’m psycho cur
I’m whiskey fun
It don’t occur
I’m making some

I do my do
I deal my deal
You slow my pace
Ain’t no appeal
No human race
Can help you heal
For once I done
I be done deal
So no more nice
Call me ice
Pick to the heart
The darkest part

foto by smith

foto by smith
~ ~ ~
unused notes, leftovers part 2
~ ~ ~
the barcelona battles made me consider joining the neo-nihilists… nihilists believe in nothing, but neo-nihilists don’t even believe in that.
~ ~ ~
been reading about the failing american infrastructure - all our roads, bridges, water mains, sewage lines, land lines, ports, rivers, etc appear to be decaying - i flash on my own ailing failing infrastructure… teeth, arthritis, pulled groin, brain bog drowned in sorrowful fact. i’m a man of the time.
~ ~ ~
need to get some money coming in - been two years no paycheck. thought perhaps i could open a toast shop, pinch small holes in the bread before toasting and call it The Holey Toast. probably pick up a lot of old time catholics as customers.
~ ~ ~
first thing we noticed about america was jfk airport - every non-american city we flew, the baggage carts were free for the convenience of the airport’s customers. here in america you have to rent them. thinnest toilet paper ever in jfk restrooms too. expensive cart, cheap wipe.
~ ~ ~
american trains are slower, noisier, creakier than european. in europe, trains are electric, here they belch petroleum toxin.
~ ~ ~
in a study done awhile ago, rats had electric wires wired directly into the pleasure centers of their brains, then allowed to push a button to receive a shock as often as they wished. the rats kept pushing the button until they died from dehydration. first time i ever wanted to be a rat. gonna get me a drill, and a long lamp cord.
~ ~ ~
we’re killing the future for the fleas. the fleas being of course corporations, the rich, the righteous, the ruling class, the republicans, the reductionists, the redundant, the redolent, the ransackers, the reborn run-a-muckers and the rah rah georgie-boys.
~ ~ ~
dumb, dumber, dumbest - how we got here:

richard m. nixon, 1977 - “when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.”

ronald reagan, 1981 - “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.”

george w. bush, 2006 - “i think — tide turning — see, as i remember — i was raised in the desert, but tides kind of — it’s easy to see a tide turn — did i say those words?”
~ ~ ~
then there’s always vice dick cheney’s words to senator patrick j. leahy, the ranking democrat on the judiciary committee, when leahy brought up cheney’s financial connections to halliburton: “go fuck yourself,” he said. sort of the same message vice dick’s given the rest of americans too.
~ ~ ~
we’re busing downtown cleveland this very early morning to protest rudy giuliani’s existence as a human and politician. despised that man ever since he tried to censor the art scene when he was mayor of new york. i’ve heard as bad as reagan was and bush is, giuliani’s worse. even his own children can’t stand him.
~ ~ ~
this is smith, reporting from otherside the mirror.
seize you on the downsize in tarnished silverland.
~ ~ ~

foto by smith

Harlem

My first couple days back alternated between vicissitudes of dread and comfort. Much of the dread was due to cold and jet lag and an uncertainty about what this whole trip meant and what we’re going to do now.

First morning back we went to Jimbo’s Hamburger Palace in Harlem. It’s a kind of greasy spoon run by Hispanics. The customers were mostly African American; we were the only whites. It felt like home, like true America. Friendly gritty banter between customers and servers. We sat at the counter, watching the grill. The cook slid orders by us on the counter down to the servers, to the cash register, to customers. Shitloads of possible combinations and items available for breakfast, and still customers ordered things off-menu. And yes, the best American coffee, with cream or milk, unlimited refills, thank ya very much.

Taking Amtrak from NYC to Cleveland was like taking a time machine. The vocabulary of man-made structures was rivets, brown and olive bridge, black telephone wire. Edward Hopper. Long stretch by the Hudson, blue sky and possibility through dirty brown-tinted windows.

Quacks of Midwestern accents, overweight and happy or overweight and miserable Americans. The patois of the Midwest is a jarring juxtaposition with Europe. I think there’s an infantalization of adults here. We float in the amniotic water of a comfortable American existence, and the Midwestern dialect and our tendency to be overweight are emblematic of our isolation. But I have this dialect, too. And I was very overweight not so long ago. I should not be so elitist.

Dining car dinner across the table cloth from charming Mary and Ted, African Americans who are very concerned about our country. Ted’s convinced 9/11 was a setup. He laughed after everything anyone said. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses. I peered into his glasses, tried to fasten onto something.

Midnight in the Amtrak journey, I woke up to a flashlight in my eyes and someone asked me authoritatively, “Are you a US citizen?”

“Uh huh,” I croaked. Then dozed off again as I heard the same inquiry repeated rapidly down the whole car. Smith told me that a lot more happened (bad stuff) when I was asleep.

Jimbo’s and dining with Mary and Ted was great. Most worrisome in coming back was the midnight border patrol.

Felt empty and unloaded when Amtrak let us off in Cleveland at 4 a.m. Ten dollar taxi ride to the guest house of a friend, who’d left the key for us in a hidden location. Next day we walked in lonely anonymity to a city convenience store, where there were no fresh fruits or vegetables, and all the food was junk. The clerk tried to charge us $3 for a $2 frozen budget meal, and I thought it a bad omen. That there was no fresh produce was also an omen. I read omens into everything. My omens serve the next ten minutes or the next ten months.

There had to be a way to turn this around. I’d found such happiness in this Cleveland neighborhood when Smith & I started our relationship. Actually, I’d always dreamed of living here, Tremont, Cleveland, artistic enclave. But in my funk I couldn’t see past the indifferent foliage of large American yards, the subconscious mutterings of faulty mufflers, the opaque aluminum siding.

I went to the West Side Market for therapy. It’s the largest food market I’ve seen. The interior has a hundred stalls for meat and dairy and bakery vendors, and the exterior has 85 stalls for produce. You can grab a coffee and pastry and sit above the stalls, watch the hubbub of the crowd below. Outside, homeless people hawk copies of the Homeless Grapevine for a dollar, a rag championed by Smith’s friend, the deceased Cuyahoga County poet laureate Daniel Thompson. On Saturdays, the Northeast Ohio Antiwar Coalition holds vigil to end the Iraq war.

We bought watermelon and raspberries and strawberries and grapes, spinach pies, fresh bread, hummus. The wealth of food and seeing friends all weekend worked. I am happy, happy to be back here, happy to have all this culture, happy to have so many friends who welcome us back.

West Side Market, Cleveland

foto by smith

lived 7 weeks in london on friendly street with a black cat named marmite. marmite is a black spread made from yeast extract, a by-product of beer brewing, which the english spread on their bread. (they bread spread alotta chocolate too).

this cat could be black yeast mist the way he moved.

our first week there, marmite stopped eating, lost weight, slept a lot, woke listless. about the time we decided to take him to the vet, he disappeared. i thought he’d gone off to die. for 3 days we worried, agonized, wished desperately his return - so much so perhaps we brought him back from the dead.

because on the third day he rose, came back from the black, returned to the living room.

he was naught but bone and fur and eye. for days he’d sit erect atop the dining table staring at us, unblinking, as if he were between worlds, unsure which way was worth, so just watched, waiting.

took him 2 days to begin to eat, 2 weeks to return to his almost live self.

i think he did die, heard the strength of our need for him, and returned for us - because the bioform that came back was a stranger creature than the one who had left. but it was a friendly form - i’d kneel, pet his thin furred bones, hear the black purr within. he’d sleep at our feet on the bed. where ever i went in the house, he’d come sit by my feet, or jump up on the counter, watch me wash dishes.

it’s easy to like life like that, to care.

about half my friends in this life have been human - the other half have been cats and dogs, with a few plants thrown in. not sure which group was wiser.

foto by smith