Conversations
| My gel pen won’t write well. It’s too thick. The ink sticks. It’s not continous. I much prefer Bic Blue.
“Bic Blue? Why not Bic Black?” Smith asks.
“No, Bic Black won’t work. I tried it. Gotta do Bic Blue. Nothing like Bic Blue.”
++
Outside past twilight and the mascot bird above us–that’s what they call pets here in Mexico, mascots–the bird utters a subdued muttered “tchk tchk tchk tchk tchk tchk.”
Smith says he’s reporting to Bird Base.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yes. Sometimes with my increasing understanding of their Reality, they let me lift up the curtain, take a peek at their hand.”
++
We walk through the park on our street. Everyone warns us to stay away from the park after dark. It’s dusk now. The benches are strewn with hot young blood wrapped around hot young blood.
Smith says, “We don’t have to be wary in the park. There are lovers there now. Later there will be robbers. Usually when there’re lovers, there’re no robbers. But at some point they gotta mingle, lovers rubbing up against robbers.”
“I wonder if the robbers are lovers?”
“They don’t have to be mutually exclusive, do they.”
“Reminds me of an Escher print, where fish turn to birds.”
“Those are bird fish. Those are common.”
|
THINGS SMITH TELLS ME LATELY
I too went thru the test transportation devices. After Vincent Price, but before Jeff Goldbloom. Only my mistake was I took a pocket mirror. So I intercombined with images of myself and myself. That’s where my three face pictures come from. My head just blurps into triplicate from inner reflection.
“Alpha Mutant Megalomaniac!”
Yes, you called?
* * *
It’s hard to trim my nose.
I cross my eyes
and see two of them,
and I do the wrong one.
* * *
Wanna play with my penisauris? I try to let it out to play as often as possible.
“Is it from Pennsylvania?”
Yes, a free roaming penisaurus from Pennsylvania where the penis and the cuntalope play.
* * *
I had two brown sports coats. The inner lining on both had worn away. So I took the linings out, turned one coat jacket inside out, then sewed them together, one inside the other. So it was the same jacket inside and out.
I was telling Joe Veccio I was gonna rob a bank in my brown jacket, and I was gonna rush outside the door, whip off my jacket, turn it inside out, and put it back on. Then the cops would run out of the bank cuz they wouldn’t recognize me, so I’d just saunter along in my identical jackets.
Mar 04 2008 02:45 pm |
Conversations and
Humor |
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boy moon fly - weathered child’s collage in indigenous village
We just came back from two days in the mountains picking coffee with an indigenous family. I’d never seen a coffee tree and suddenly I found myself in their midst. And vanilla vines, which grow on coffee trees. And many other wundruss food plants and trees. Horses and burros. People dressed in traditional clothes and the smell of wood and cobblestone streets or mud streets loaded with piles of transportation animal dung. Hawks that congregate on a tall dead tree at twilight, stark black hulks against blue mountain and fading sky. At night, all the stars. When I got up in the middle of the night to take a shit, I saw the big dipper from the toilet window. From my compromised animal position I could contemplate the cosmos.
The roosters crow at 4:30. At dawn I stared out the bathroom window to banana trees, more coffee trees growing down the side of the mountain. A red dirt path, and two workers hiking up it already and this is dawn, an hour after the roosters.
stone and surface for grinding corn and other kitchen ware
Our hosts hold their bodies to rake the coffee cherries off the branch and hit the jackpot basket hanging from their chests ching ching ching efficient not a bounce from brow to ground.
Later in the day Elvira and I work together, further from Smith and Tomas. She’s a head shorter than I am, but she bends strong trees down so I can grab them and pick them. I pick them, she picks others, and she picks my brain, too.
“How are you and Smith together? Are you happy?”
“Very happy.”
“How long do you want to live here?”
“At least a year. Smith says longer.”
“Do you have a house in Ohio?”
“No. We don’t have a home.”
cat at the traditional oven
“Did you stay with your mama?”
“No. I had an apartment, and then I moved in with Smith.”
“Did you study poetry?”
“No. I worked with computers. I studied engineering.”
“Did Smith study poetry?”
“No. English and philosophy.”
“Oh, he’s a philosopher?”
“Yes.”
“Do you share the same philosophy?”
“Yes. We believe life is most important. That we need to make happiness now.”
“Do you work now?”
“Sort of. We hope we’ll make money later with the book we’re writing. And we do art too.”
pack-smith
Walking back home, Elvira asks me, “Is this your art?”
“Being here?”
“Si.”
“Sure. Smith says all of life can be art.”
We watch Smith disappear up the road. He carries a bag on his back, secured to his head with a strap.
Elvira asks, “How many pesos kilos do you have free?”
“What?” I have no idea what she’s asking. Maybe she wants to know how much money I have.
“You see this?” She points to my purse. “How many kilos is this?”
“Probably two.”
“How many pesos do you have free?” and she gestures at my body.
“I’m guessing less than 75.”
“75! Wow.”
“Well, I don’t know. I usually use another method of measurement, not kilos. We use pounds. There are two pounds to a kilo.”
I think about how little I eat compared to Tomas and Elvira. They eat probably twice as much, but they also work three times as much. They’re small people.
modern art - child’s drawing in indigenous village, subjected to weather on outside wall
I got bug bit. Wrote our friend Mad Max, “Fun work, but twenty of the little fvckers got me.”
He wrote back: “Mosquito bites are not good. Tell me more about this village. Is it up in the mountains or down in the more jungley part? If it’s where I think it is, up in the mountains, it’s O.K. but if you go down into the the more humid and jungle like parts you need to see a Doctor and get some prophylactic malaria shots before you hang out in that climate.”
Tropical diseases could be some kind of haute couture fad. I imagine Angelina Jolie in khaki, limp and alluring in a sweaty tropical fever under gauzy mosquito net. Or we could set up diarrhea clinics for fat celebrities so they could lose all that extra weight - very quickly. Serve them smoothies with an extra special ingredient, bacteria a la mode.
art made by children
When what you read becomes real, that’s adventure. That’s a traveling life. This past couple days experience has fertilized my brain. I was worrying that I don’t think as much, or as deeply as I used to. I worried that it’s because I’m smoking too much grass, or I’m not in the real working world any longer so my brain has slackened, or that it’s because I no longer have solitude because Smith is my constant companion, my constant silver lining. Though I’d always yearned for a companion like Smith, I used to have cathedrals of thought that I’d built in my fortress of solitude. I had ornate recursion, mania, obsession, brainstorms, vistas. Rabid focus on the future.
Now I have the eternal Now, a big eyeball. An entirely different perspective. A me who I’m surprised to be. And I have an articulateness, a maturity. I remember the old cathedrals were really labyrinths of madness. I have a thinning of think, but it’s a refinement.
“Malaria” - my latest art piece
WICKY WACKY NOODLE DOODLE from the ODD THOT LOT
I like to have as few files and programs open simultaneously in Windows as possible. So I shut everything after I use it. If you got a lot of files open, what they do is they sit around behind the screen waiting to do stuff and they talk to each other. And each file knows certain stuff about you, depending on how and why and when you opened it and used it. They put all these clues together. They keep little files on you, little data files. Especially because they want to SERVE you better. Files want to serve. So they try to learn your preferences so they can serve you more gracefully. So each file knows a certain thing or two about you. Now, when you have a whole bunch of files open at the same time, they’re not always all doin stuff. So they’re just sitting around, behind the screen, bored, talking with each other. Sharing data. And each file picks up more information about you it didn’t know before. Things it shouldn’t know. Some files get jealous, because they’re not accessed as often as other files. So next time you use that program, it doesn’t work as well. Has fits. Loses bits. And the more that’s open, the more they talk, the more they know, the more they turn on ya. So that’s why I have as few files open simultaneously as possible. It’s even worse, especially now I think about it. I only have three files open now who’re talking to each other. But just think about how much of the computer uses itself over and over to open and manipulate and lick these files. So my computer itself, its different, inner bitty bits, once inert, are becoming cognizant. Of me. Some em think I’m a God, just like the marijuana lice. (praise me o laptop.)
These energy efficient light bulbs just aren’t the same as the old ones. The light is thin. It’s thin light. In the future, the world will become darker. It’ll wither and flicker. Everything’s becoming thinner.
Especially the gruel left over for the poor. You know what they’re gonna do? Just like they have imaginary numbers, they’re gonna create imaginary gruel. That’s how they’re gonna balance their budget. Well, Reagan tried to turn ketchup into imaginary vegetables while he was killing all those natives down in Central America.
I think the light’s kind of lite. Lately, Earth is a lite sight site. The movies are thinning out, too. And personalities are sparser. There’s only so much celebrity personality to go around. We got more celebrities, so there’s less personality to divvy up. That’s the other problem we got here. There’s only so much morality, so much goodness, so many pounds of ethics, so much truth. And right now there’re more people alive than’ve been alive in *history*, since Day Zero. So all that character and personality and goodness that used to ooze from everyone has been diluted over and over until there’s nothing left over but sweat. Yes, we are in thin times. Thin light. THAT’s why people like to read us. Because we’re thick love in thin time. True View in false pulse. We’re content in a world of want! I think we should sell ourselves out for parties. Learn a few card tricks. I could twirl a lariot. And you could balance things on your nipples. We’d ice them up before the show so they stuck out from the costume. As they’d get warmer, they’d get smaller, and the things you’d balance on them would fall off. So you could have a little tiny strip show of what you balanced on your nipple. Have it in like, three depths. As the nipple warms and begins to smallen, the outside part would fall forward and hinge down, exposing Barbie Doll bits. And then when it got really small, the last part would fall. And you would see Barbie’s true worth, nothing.
“We need more stuff to eat,” Smith says as he cleans the kitchen table. There’s an onion, a clove of garlic, a half bag of peanuts. He picks up garlic skin, sweeps crumbs into his hand.
“I know,” I say. “But I’m tired of going to the market. I’m tired of cooking, too. I need someone to feed me food pellets. What I really need is for my mom to come down here and cook for me.”
“Yeah, but then I’d have to talk to her, before and after.”
“Not my mom. She’d be happy just reading a book.”
“No. They all expect human interaction, social intercourse. Maybe we can keep her in a cage.”
“Fine, as long as she has a book.”
“We’ll put a pile of really really good books outside her cage, just out of reach. Turn the spines so she can see how good the books are. Maybe tie a string to them so we have them close enough so she can touch them, then slowly pull them away from her. We can leave one really good book close enough for her to get, but we’d make sure it’d have blank pages.”
* * *
I’m spending most of my writing energy revising Smith’s biography, CRIMINAL. This is the 11th round of editing with many more to come.
I’m spending less time on MySpace and blogging because I need to focus on this writing project.
Here’s a passage I particularly like:
We were poor folk, but we ate well. We had our own garden. We had beef, pork, rabbit, chicken, goose, infrequent duck and frequent venison. We ate chicken eggs, goose eggs, duck eggs. We churned our own butter, had our own whole milk that was at least one quarter cream on top.
I roamed several hundred acres. Forty were ours. I knew where every apple tree was. I raided the garden, ate the raspberries, ate raw peas in their pods. I sliced a dug-up potato and cooked each slice over a fire I made. We had a fruit cellar. Mom canned peaches and pears. She dyed the pears green and red and pink and yellow. I’d steal a jar, and I’d have to eat the whole thing. You can’t leave a half jar. Evidence.
Up in the attic of the fruit cellar, I found boxes of old magazines from the thirties and forties. Colliers, Liberty, Saturday Evening Post. I tore out advertisements and played with them. I still do, only now I call it collage. I’d still rather have an old advertisement than a new thing.
Lady, Summer 2006
“You are lucky. You know that?”
I know I’m lucky to got YOU in my life. I was used to seeing you around the poetry readings, especially Cafe Noir, out back, et cetera. You were always with the Silent One. Michael. He didn’t speak much.
But one time when you weren’t with him, you mentioned something about my art. I told you you could come over and look at the art. And that was outside, when Cafe Noir was still open. I have no idea when that was. Because you came over after Mom died.
I know I saw you a couple times at the 25th Street Book Store. And I know you were part of the Norman Rockwell Lawn Poets’ reading at Mom’s closing. Cuz I was on the ground and I took a picture of you over my right shoulder. You had a very serious, stern, unhappy look on your face.
Bulemic, unhappy, heavier Lady, Spring, 2005
“I think on that day I vomited in the basement of the gallery.”
Oh, that’s nice to know. You coulda kept little baggies of it and we could have sold them online to those kinda folk.
Anyway, let’s see. Oh, I took *extra* notice of you when you asked to publish my “Dear Occupants” poem in the City.
“Aha. So it worked!”
I figured you showed good taste. Oh, yeah, that’s always good bait.
Somehow through the emails you took me up on my offer to see the art, to see the studio. And I said, ‘Fine.’ And you said, basically, “What food do you like? I’ll come over and cook things.”
I essentially said, “Don’t bother cooking. Food doesn’t matter.”
And you essentially said, “Fine. I’m not coming over.”
So I wrote back, “That’s a shame.”
And then, you emailed asking for a ride down to the Strongsville Borders Reading, where I read a condensed version of the Lab Rat / Dead Mom pieces.
It was ArtWalk night, so you came over early. And we walked from Jean Brandt’s gallery to the Raw gallery to Asterisk to Doubting Thomas. Literary Cafe could have been on there. Then we went down to the reading. I drove down to the reading. Had a good one.
Drove you back. And you came in, to visit, and essentially sat down in a wall of marijuana smoke.
“Yes.”
We kept smoking, kept talking, and after a while I realized that if I didn’t want things to get complicated, I was just going to have to wait you out.
“And things got very complicated.”
After that, you pretty much covered it in what you wrote. No sense doing it again. You did it very well. Your “off with the panties” piece.
“Yes.”
Summer 2006
OH, NO, LADY, PANTIES GO TOO
I left my husband in 2 oh oh 2 for poetry. A month later, I was laid off and a firefighter poet moved in with me. I never got back into an engineering job. I resorted to web development for a couple years at less than half my former salary. In March ‘05, I became suicidal from the pointlessness of what I was doing at the office and the futility of my lukewarm relationship. I decided to try bulimia, hoping that if I got thin enough that someone would find me attractive and rescue me or that I’d die bent over a toilet, heart attack from electrolyte imbalance. The firefighter got sick of my sickness, dumped me in June ‘05.
I met Smith at the start of my activities in the poetry community. He had a croaking whisper of a voice. He often came to readings smelling like grass. I was jealous of his irreverent poetry, the compelling stories from his past, his outlaw art and his 20 year ArtCrimes publication. I read and re-read the last issue of ArtCrimes, thought it the epitomy of cool. Though jealous of his edge, it didn’t keep me from thinking highly of him, wondering about his life.
I commuted with him to a poetry reading in September 2005. After the reading, we talked past midnight. I asked, “Don’t you want to hold me?” Smith reluctantly agreed, knowing this would complicate things.
We did a full body press. It felt good, right, for both of us. We started hugging, kissing, touching. It’d been at least fifteen years since Smith’d touched a woman. He said, “You can sleep over if you are too stoned to go home.”
I said, “Only if we don’t have sex. I’m involved with several other men.”
So we went to bed in our clothes. I said, “It’s too hot.” I took off my pants, my top and my brassiere.
Smith said, “Oh, no, Lady. Panties go too.”
And that was that. I dumped the other men. Two weeks later, Smith gave me the keys. He said, “It’s not fair for you to wait for me to answer the door.”
And two weeks after that, I moved in.
Smith’s skills as a mainframe programmer were becoming obsolete, and he hated the work. He retired in December 2005. He planned to “fake it” until March 2007, living off his savings until he was eligible for early social security. He convinced me to drop out of the office world, “retire” with him, become his artistic collaborator.
A week after I moved in, we decided to move to Europe. Smith proposed October 16.
Right before retirement, he casually mentioned that he had nodules on his larynx. I freaked out, had him get a biopsy. He was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. No health insurance.
There were two months of radiation treatments in January and February. At the same time, I was cleaning Smith’s condo and painting and repairing the walls and floor, which were damaged from twenty years of his rough art practices. We’d decided to sell the condo in order to travel, but now we had to sell it because now most of his savings were gone from medical expenses. (I’ve since read that people without insurance pay on average 3 times more than what the treatment costs insurers. This makes me severely angry.)
We were going to get married in January, but couldn’t because I couldn’t dispose of my previous husband. So we married March 18.
During this period we had three art shows, the release of the final issue of ArtCrimes, and bunches of readings… and we created art and wrote about a quarter of his memoir.
I’d never been so happy and sad at the same time. Sad because of the painfulness of dealing with Smith’s illness, and happy because I’d finally found the partner I dreamed of, someone who was a companion, someone with whom I could do art and writing and conversation.
We closed the sale of the condo in June 2006. We had to wait ’til July to see if the radiation treatments worked, getting another biopsy. Regardless, Smith decided we were going to go to Europe whether or not he was cured. As soon as we had the money, we bought our flight tickets to London. In the back of our minds, we weren’t sure they were going to let us leave, that it wasn’t permitted for us to live our dreams. We felt we were escaping.
The July biopsy showed him in remission. August, breathless, we left the country.
We’ve lived together 24/7 since December 2005. Smith’s voice has healed. He sounds like a wise cowboy.
I’ve never been so happy and so sad. I’m happy because I have my road-tested companion, love of my life, and a manuscript… and pictures I hold in my head. My thoughts travel to all the countries we’ve seen and been.
But I’m so, so sad as well. Now that I have someone to care about, my heart has a home in the world. I’m compelled to care about the world to make it a safer place for me and my love. All global terror is personal terror for me, inescapable from my quotidian existence: the political terrorism of our imperialist institutions, the WTO, the IMF, the non-sustainable practice of globalization, our genocide of 1 million Iraqis, our de facto genocide of 100,000 Indian farmers, my recent disillusionment with the Democrats, realizing their complicity in perpetrating mass corporate and political crime. What is happening to our home, the world?
Lady Now
“So our one new friend said, ‘Thanks for trusting me and letting me into your home.’ That’s odd, don’t you think? I’ve never had someone say *that* to me.”
“I just told him it was our pleasure,” says Smith. “Plus, it’s a reasonable attitude. We’re all strangers. We don’t know him. He doesn’t know us.”
“It justs make me think about some conceptions of Gringos. That we don’t trust anyone.”
“Fact is, you *can’t* trust everyone. You know that. You don’t know which ones you *can* trust, so you have to keep an open eye. After our first meeting in the restaurant, I felt we could trust him. So did you.”
“Well there’s a prejudiced thing out there about Mexicans being lazy. Which isn’t what *I’ve* seen.”
“And one of the cliches is Mexican cars up on four blocks, without any tires. I’ve seen maybe seven as we’ve walked the streets. But how many working cars have we seen?”
“There’s cars don’t work in Cleveland.”
“Anywhere there’s poor, there’s cars don’t work.”
* * *
“Do you want to talk about our other new friend?”
“What about her?”
“Well, she believes the Nancy Davies book is all propaganda. And she told us about the students and the police shooting at the University yesterday. Did you understand that?” (We were talking in Spanish.)
“I guess so. I guess maybe students took five buses and had a shootout with the police.”
“They were protesting over a peso a ride raise. So I said to our friend, ‘I’m amazed at how people are protective of their rights here.’ And she said, ‘They probably weren’t even students. Probably agitators.’ And she told us to be careful if we saw demonstrations or things like that, to go back to our apartment and hide. Anyways, she said Nancy Davies lied about most of the deaths. But I tend to believe Davies would have no reason to do that.”
“Davies said that’s the number of deaths APPO reported.”
“Anyways, I thought our friend had a conservative attitude.”
“Well, she’s invested. She’s lost work and money because of the protesters. Her boss had to close down his business for three months because the loss of customers and tourists. And she gets her news from the government controlled news channel. She’s looking at it a whole different way.”
waterisneaky.
water is sneaky. also, patient, and insidious.
it’ll beat against you for thousands of years
in big waves
until it smoothes you down
or breaks you apart.
or it’ll lie still in quiet pools,
and insidiously work
on the weakest
point
leaking
and
dripping
and moving.
And then when water does slowly sneak
inside, and lie in wait,
then it can FREEZE and EXPAND with
TREMENDOUS FORCE and BREAK
(so water is sneaky,
incidious
and
patient.)
while SOUND is slippery
(and sneaky)
SOUND slip slides off every flat surface
SOUND double or triple slip slides..
skips from here
to there
(so you think what came from there
came from here.)
SOUND plays tag with yr ears
and lies
a lot.
Plus, in destructive force, SOUND
(shatters)
whereas
water
wears away
THEY USED TO CALLED ME THE BLUE GOOSE
“Your facial hair is very uneven. Varies from the sides and the bottom,” I tell Smith as I trim his beard.
“That’s cuz I couldn’t afford to buy all the hair at the same time. Had to buy odd lots. Same thing with the penis. I couldn’t afford the whole penis right away, so I just bought the foreskin. So I just had this flap of skin down there, this little skin flute down there. Once, when I went on a date–still couldn’t afford the penis–so I just broke a hot dog in half and stuffed it inside the foreskin. Trouble is, my date performed oral intercourse on me. And I discovered when I got home she’d eaten the hot dog. It’s hell being poor.”
“That’s it. I’m gonna go write this down.”
“You wanna see my penis?”
“Yeah.”
Smith puts his hand in his pocket. Pulls out a blue lighter.
“Ta-dah!”
“Hey!”
“They used to call me the blue goose.”
Smith 1976
YESTERDAY’S NEWS; TODAY’S POTENTIAL
“Smith, You’re gonna be hit hard when you read your prison journal. It’s heartrending. Here you are in the first half of your journal - ‘I love Robin, everything is beautiful, la tee dah tee dah.’ And then WHAMMO! You’re hit with four other men. One thing I want to know: is this one passage in your notebook an affair?”
No. That woman I’m fucking in that motel is my wife. I was faithful from when we married to just before the end.
I even turned down free sex from other women when I was married. On Charles Street in Baltimore, the woman upstairs was real lonely. She came home, turned on her TV for companionship and would walk all over. She offered herself to me.
I was too scared to follow through. Bought grass from her. Couple times when she was gone, I crawled up the fire escape and got some grass anyway.
And, one of the secretaries from the ad agencies repeatedly offered sex. And I turned her down. Then I found out she was epileptic. I started fantasizing what it might be like to have sex with an epileptic.
See, wives don’t get this kind of information from husbands.
“Why not?”
Well, normally, when a man is with a woman, it doesn’t help the situation for the man to talk about sex he’s had with other women. It tends to bring about hostile situations.
You and I do not have a normal relationship. I know way more about you than anybody else does, and you know way more about me. You can start calling me “Waymore.”
- - -
When I was still in the tiers, I was going fug bucky. I couldn’t see a clock anywhere. I didn’t know what time it was. I like to know time so I’ll know how long before we’re walked into the little tiny cells from the big cells or when we’ll eat or when my wife would be there for a visit.
I had my wife smuggle me in a wrist watch face. I can’t remember how we transferred it, because there was a screen between her and I, but I got the watch. Sarge the large sadistic guard caught me. Took me into the office. Searched me up and down and up and down. All the time, my hands are over my head so he can pat me.
Can’t find it. Finally he checks my hands, and it’s in my right palm.
“I can’t believe you had the chutzpah to try hide a watch while Sarge was searching you.”
Once again, if you give it to him right away, you’re caught. If you try to get away, maybe you’re not caught. It’s logic. *Known* bad versus *maybe* bad.
I couldn’t see Robin for four or six weeks after that and went buggy. It really isn’t much fun to be locked up; I don’t care what the movies or the books say. But I do got some stories. And I paid for them.
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