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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

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