used karma lot
fried grasshoppers from the market - foto by smith
Used Karma Lot
I cut the cockroach off at the watering hole
Sent his brown backed soul
To that great black crack in the sky
May God have more compassion than I
lady asked me to kill a cockroach in the bathroom. big bugger. i don’t normally kill things since i left the farm in 1960 and stopped chopping off chicken heads and thunking rabbits with clubs. but one must defend one’s wife, so i stomped it with a bottle of bleach. while i was killing it, i was wondering if maybe the roach was trying to communicate with us, perhaps share its secret stash of gold and treasure.
i know i’m hypocritical on the death thing because i let the food industry do my killing for me. i also know eating meat is bad - bad for the planet, bad for the body - and certainly bad for the life form you’re eating. but my body, habits and tastes have yet to catch up with my mind and morality. lady and i are down to the occasional dead flesh for food though.
in 1977 i brought a dead spider in from the cold outside to use in a collage. the heat of my hand revived the spider, so i apologized to it and put it back outside. next day it was dead dead, and i put it in my painting. its soft abdomen shrank away to nothing over the next few months, and i replaced it with an oval crystal jewel. it was magic… a crystal with spider head and spider legs. also put my old 4-h club pin in that piece. sold it 12 year ago for $500 - vastly underpriced
44 years of art and poetry have not made me rich. or well off. or even adequate. art and poetry have in fact left me broke. but oh what a life lived along the way, what wondrous people i’ve met. the people and the life are the payment for the poetic path.
bathroom door in a coffee shop - foto by smith
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