dream – foto by Smith

Cannibal Saliva

Marijuana and Mozart on a Sunday morn
Plethora of complacencies
Of tongue, beard, bush

Poets fall down
Dream
Drown

— Steven B. Smith, 1975

dream – foto by Smith

One of the reasons I’m not smoking grass right now besides the heavy burden on our budget is that daily smoking means I don’t remember my dreams. I know I dream, just can’t recall them the next day, which is a shame because I have fantastic surreal dreams, with all the details down to nail heads and wall dents and dirt pebbles on the floor in full color and total realism.

Well after eleven days straight straight, I had a doozy of a dream last night, and of course it included grass.

Sleeping through last night’s thunder lightning heavy rain pounding against the window storm, I dreamt we were visiting a couple’s large new mansion and they had a lot of herb to smoke. When we left, I hesitated in the rain and asked Lady to wait in the car because I was going to go back and ask for a bit of grass to take with me because they had promised it to me and then reneged. Went back in and the mansion had grown exponentially, new rooms, new floors, new dimensions, like an Escher Heisenbergian Quantum Reality Hotel. As I wandered looking for the couple (whom I never found) I passed thousands of people of all ages and classes and epochs, some dressed in ancient long robes with alpacas grazing around burning campfires on the floor, standing next to business men in suits and briefcases and homburgs. I went up a curved staircase but never reached the top because it keeps growing. I turned back and went down but got lost, was suddenly on another floor with weird rooms with odd dimensions that made no sense. Finally found an elevator and said “Aha” and went to punch the up button but the buttons were in hieroglyphics and indicated it went up, sideways, diagonally and more. Lady finally found me and dripping wet from rain said she was going to make some chocolate strawberry fudge while I looked for the grass. After that everything became so strange my brain can’t even hold it or remember and I realized I was actually wandering through the Quantum Probability Wave and was getting frantic, unsure I could handle it, when Lady came in in real life at 4:30am, I woke as she got in bed and said “I’ve just had the strangest dream I ever had.” She shushed me, saying I was talking too loud and I went back to sleep.

She couldn’t sleep and got up a short while later to continue work on the online newsletter due today for one of her mother’s web customers and I sleep on into part two of dream.

Helen Mirrin came offstage in a gold lame bikini and asked me to wait outside her dressing room door while she changed, then left her door half open and arranged her second mirror door to make sure I’d see her change, then naked she got confused looking the wrong way in the mirror for me and panicked, called me in to ask if I could see her. Suddenly swishhhh, she’s back in the gold lame bikini tied lengthwise to a gigantic roasting spit on stage with the spit being turned by a gigantic ape and the audience is applauding. Then my wife wakes me coming back to bed at 6:30am after finishing most of her work and I start caressing her and she politely reminds me it’s the wrong time of the cycle.

Normally in my dreams I can’t see the nude details of women I haven’t actually seen naked because I don’t know what their curvy bits look like unwrapped, but Helen Mirrin’s body is burned in my brain from seeing The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover four times over the years.

When I was 11 and had finally uncovered my 12 year old girl friend’s bare breasts but not anything further, I had a dream where one of my aunts was in our cow barn and was going to introduce me to sex; she stood in the hay naked to her waist, her breasts visible, but from the stomach down she wore an old wooden barrel that hid the rest because my young mind simply couldn’t supply the details.

I love my dreams. Think I’ll repost my dream in London where I robbed a Spanish train (again to buy marijuana) and the lady cop caught me and poked out my eyes — but there was no pain and I could still see and the folks saw me as a hero.

As for the circumstances of the poem Cannibal Saliva; in 1975 I’m lying in bed in Baltimore on a Sunday morning in early summer sunshine alongside my girlfriend. We’re nude, spent, stoned, Mozart flowing from the living room, my beard wet from her bearded bush, my spirit & flesh happy, satisfied, glowing – when I hear the words ‘cannibal saliva’ whisper through my mind and I laugh out loud at this mutant merging of my cannabis sativa stone, my cannibal eating of her, the mixture of her vaginal juices and my saliva. I didn’t have to write the poem, just write it down.

dream – foto by Smith

flesh – foto by Smith

Have two new poems, but they’re dark and don’t read right yet, so here’s an old thought.

Stormy Weather

Whether for wonder bred or welfare bread
Flesh is ego manifest in the palm of paradigm

— Steven B. Smith, 1985

the blues – foto by Smith

junk funk – foto by Smith

Reading about Jimi Hendrix recently I learned there was an incredible gulf between his gregarious reckless confident showmanship on stage and his shy insecure manic depression off stage. He even wrote about it in a song titled (what else) Manic Depression — have a listen.

Wow – how could the not-yet famous guitar player who played with such brilliance when he jammed with Cream that he depressed Eric Clapton so much Clapton had to put down his guitar and walk off the stage be insecure? I mean, the man’s likely the best guitar player dead or alive. Of course, Hendrix said he didn’t play guitar, he played amplifier.

I think it’s basically biological but I always get depressed this time of year, just before my birthday (this will be my 65th). I believe it’s birth cycle depression, perhaps my blood memory of what it was like in the womb, so my psyche knows this is the anniversary of the shocking passage from the warm wet soft darkness of the womb with its soothing thump-thump thumping of my mother’s heart lulling my ears to being squeezed into the restricting unpleasantness of the birth canal and thrust into the shocking cold light and hard noise and slapping violence of the delivery room. Plus mom told me the doctor was holding me upside down by my ankles and slipped and dropped me on my head. No wonder this is my annual depression.

Believe the long 3-4 months of winter cold and dark and ice and snow also contribute, as does cabin fever, the serious lack of light and sun, and lack of funds and fun.

Mostly by-passed my February depression past five years — in 2005 due to the new joy of Lady’s love in my life; 2006 because we were in Croatia on the warm Adriatic Sea and southern France near the even warmer Mediterranean; 2007-9 thanks to 15 months in the sun of southern Mexico. I didn’t have time to notice if it hit me last year back here because we were dealing with a nasty bout of Lady’s mania.

But this year it’s back big time, probably exacerbated by my giving up coffee 6 days ago. Plus Lady’s fighting through another bout of mania which tears us both apart, although she is suffering way more than I. I’d gladly assume her doom and gloom just to make her better.

Looking through 48 years of poetry for the word depress, I had to choose this to post — it’ll put a smile on some folk’s face, disgust in other’s hearts:

Station 4 of 13 from
Stations of the Lost – for Lenny Bruce

I’m impervious to plain
So I’m becoming mannequin depressive
Go out at night
Look up mannequin dresses thru dressing room windows
Down gaping blousefirm fiberglass form
Only female mannequins though
I’m not weird or anything like that
No sick puppy for me
Though I do remember fondly flocking an amoeba
While lost in amoebae lust
They kept bisecting
(were they bisectuals?)
And I used to go out after a rain to pick up earthworms
Take em home
Cut em in half
Watch em regenerate
(Aunt Em Aunt Em I’m home at last)
After awhile would have enough worm parts for an orgy
Though with worms I never knew which end I was entering
(going out the enter only, going in the only out)
Dead chickens and Vaseline are my favorites though
Cuz Vaseline leaves no fingerprints when licked

— Steven B. Smith, 1985

Slate Jesus by Smith, 2006 – foto by Smith

tinsel tree – foto by Smith

How Do
(late winter letter to sister Sue)

Thousands of icicles hanging from tree branches outside window.
Snow falling from sky.
Electric heat eating up money.
First day without coffee, voluntarily.
Fourth day without grass, voluntarily.
Bad sleep last night.
Life goes on.
Waiting for spring and sun and some money from somewhere somehow.
How’s you?

— Steven B. Smith, 2-21-2011

This is my 3rd day coffee-less, and for February my 16th day grass-less because I abstained 12 days before buying six days worth to share with dinner guests, as a proper host should. I’ve been going a week without weed monthly since November because I knew we couldn’t afford it, but I always gave in and bought some. Next weed will be a week’s worth in a couple weeks to celebrate my 65th birthday. After that, only Sky God knows.

Lying in bed this morning I realized my morning cup of coffee was my daily reward for getting up, and marijuana my nightly reward for making it through the day.

My other three rewards for daily being are my wife’s love and companionship, our cat, and my writing. These three are essential, but they flux in and out of focus because wife and cat have their own flow of self need and actualization, while writing ebbs and flows in its own mystic go gone get. Wife’s flow is especially private lately as she dances with returning mania, leaving me outside her inner whorl.

whorl wife – foto by Smith

The Joyous Cosmology – foto by Smith

Ever Now

I’m normally normal
but just not now
and it’s always now

there’re two times:
there’s now,
and
not now

today,
and
not today

it’s never tomorrow

that’s why I’m nearly normal
nominally now

— Steven B. Smith with Lady K, 2006

Another true confession captured poem direct from my mouth to Lady’s keyboard. Hooking up with her September 2005 has been very good for my poetic output and seriously upped my adventure quotient. And yes, this is the way I normally talk to her.

Buy Art – foto by Smith
(both fotos taken at Chiplis’ Studio)

Come on baby, let’s do the Twist – foto by Smith

Junkie Business

I’m losing my last two crutches:
coffee
and marijuana.

In the old days
I could have coffee
after dinner.

You know,
this junkie business
is for younger bodies.

You keep doing it,
and pretty soon,
you end up like Keith Richards,
falling out of trees
and landing on your head.

— Steven B. Smith with Lady K, 2006

Lady K gets co-credit on some poems because she captured them as they fell from my mouth during our conversations; she writes them down and arranges the line breaks. I figure without her, they would have dissipated into air, so in essence even though they’re my words, they’re her poems.

I have to explore giving up coffee again. I’m down to one cup a day; but I make cowboy pan coffee using Costa Rican, and I’ve been making it stronger and stronger lately and I finally realized yesterday I can’t drink it without grass to moderate the speed rush and I can’t afford weed which means weaker coffee or no coffee at all. So, day one no coffee.

She captured this particular poem in Croatia after we discovered my heart was beating five times then skipping the 6th beat — and that was on a good day cuz many times it’d beat three times and no 4th, although the worst was in Mexico on morphine after an operation when it started beating twice and skipping once, which scared me so much I quit the drug and lived with the pain.

We thought maybe my 2-3 pots of uber-strong Croatian coffee was a factor, so I quit drinking for 3 weeks — to no avail. My heart didn’t stop skipping beats until we returned to the old-fashioned stress of living in the U.S.A. in 2009. Go figure.

Interesting side-note — we went to a Croatian hospital to have me checked, and the bill for the emergency room, the doctor, the nurse and the EKG test came to a total of $37. Yup, thirty-seven dollars for something in the U.S. that would’ve cost 2,000-3,000 dollars minimum.

Let’s Twist again, like we did last summer – fotos by Smith

lines – foto by Smith

Lineman

Hey baby, what’s your sign?
Cum here often?
Wanna see my coloring book?
I’ve got a big red crayon
Fit right between your lines

— Steven B. Smith, 2005

more lines – foto by Smith