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...and they lived happily ever after. Smith & Lady: poets, artists, photographers & adventurers.
Our relationship was forged to the soundtrack of Yoko Ono's magic,
frenetic, love-laden song, "Walking On Thin Ice." ( play song )
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Archive for the ‘Creative Writing’ Category
Friday, April 5th, 2013
Skin
Skin is the first thing I think of
when I think of you
your warmth
smoothness
the hearth of cuddle
wrapping my skin around yours
my arms along yours
the big bird bones of our hands
knuckles gently bent around
how calm and warm and smooth it is
and then suddenly
how short–you’re up like that
there are ten minutes of this or so
and then you’re up like that
making coffee
Oh that we would have the luxury
of feeling able to settle into
each other for a whole amniotic morning
a whole one
Hours without time ticking down
to some task
Just in the flow
in the womb flow
Mandy walking on us
walking on top of the blanket
braver when we’re inert
or meowing from the other room
now and then
Birds becoming more persistent
in song and then
less persistent
introspective
meandering with my thoughts
meandering
Even a siren can sound
comforting
especially in the morning
a siren like business being done
somehow elsewhere
juxtaposed
with us relaxed
in the here & now
A siren like rain happening perhaps
the extras on the scene outside our door
should we choose to get up
The siren an anti-siren
saying don’t come out there, it’s other stuff
going on out there, just soundtrack stuff
beyond
the intimate cell of your domicile
Siren, such a weird word
heralding some sad stuff
but also some happy stuff
and poetically mostly happy stuff
in this spool at least
There’s the siren song of now
that siren song of the womb room
that siren song of Mandy plodding on carpet
her feet making oddly heavy sounds
though again she is light like
the birds
our hands are like
the birds
the birds are like
the birds
and sirens
and the sirens are like and unlike
sirens
~ L
Posted in Creative Writing, Family, Lady, Letters to the Universe, Poetry, Relationships, smith & Lady | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 3rd, 2012

sum part – foto Smith
Writing poetry can be frustrating at times since due to its nebulous nature it can be read so many ways depending on the reader’s mood, education and happiness.
There was confusion last week about 2 of my poems which caused me to leave the following explanation as a FaceBook comment. Blogging it here cuz it’s rewritten and theoretically I have more blog readers than FB readers, unless they’re all trolling cyber-spyders.
Wife just read the following poem and exclaimed, “Oh, how sad.” And I went “What?”
Brain Salad
Belief and doubt
merge in comforting concinnity
Bursiform bag
on broken throne
Token clone
of tarnished saint
No here here
or there there
No here now
just now now
I’m telling ya flux, it ain’t a sad poem — I should know, I was there during both inception and birth. It’s a philosophical riff on Ram Dass’ “Be here now” and Gertrude Stein’s “There’s no there there” (her judgment of Las Angeles both culturally and as a city) plus the Buddhist teaching ‘all is illusion.’ All in all a positive thought flow to me, but I can see how it can be read sadly.
Same thing with my previous poem which some saw as sad:
New Year’s Model
Old walk, new waddle
as border I straddle
of was forever will be
or
break from cage
cocoon hibernation
burn to butterfly
phoenix rebirth
No, not sad — positive . . . this was a meditation on me deciding not to immediately replenish my grass supply because I’m in a same-old rut and need to break out of my soothing sleep, leave my cocoon and become butterfly, rise in new from Phoenix ash of old.
Don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m constantly sparring with my nature, trying to encourage my better inclinations and discourage or even hopefully conquer my lower nature.
Guess I’m too cryptic in my writing – but that’s what poetry is, unless it’s the easy to follow verse of an Ogden Nash or Dr Seuss (both of whom I respect, although respect doesn’t cover Dr Seuss — it’d be more like awe).
And I must admit I don’t understand or get a lot of my fellow poets’ poems as well because I don’t have their secret starting point to know where to begin.
So I’ll continue to write and post and be misunderstood because basically writing poems supplies me my worth factor – any day with a new poem is a day I’ve earned my keep.
Fortunately I write a lot of straight forward verse as well that’s easier to see as positive, even though it often hides darkness beneath in implication.
We’re all a work in process. Life is process. Good, bad, indifferent, in between . . . we work on what we are, and what we are comes from who we’ve been and what we want to be.
You can decide when I’m done how plus or minus I was along the way. Until then, misunderstand away — but remember, even my negative words have a basic inner positive thrust — they imply “This could be better” or “There is light and potential purpose beneath this dark analysis.”
Like all of us, I’m dark and light within. Been either fighting that or trying to come to terms with it my entire life. Figure my job is to handle the dark and exude the light.
If I make you think along the way, I’ve earned my keep . . . if I make you smile or laugh in the process, well that’s my Christmas bonus.
I think the main clue to the first poem being positive is the word concinnity which means:
1. Harmony in the arrangement or interarrangement of parts with respect to a whole . . . Studied elegance and facility in style of expression . . . an instance of harmonious arrangement or studied elegance and facility.
This probably doesn’t help folk much because it’s a word nobody knows — I got it from my A-Word-A-Day daily email — wordsmith.org/awad/.
Bottom line – folks overlay their emotion and meaning over my own, and the only way around this is to write simple straight-forward unambiguous poetry, which I can’t always do because I love words too much, the way they flow and twist and transform and play with my mind.
Just another skirmish in the never ending Subjective-Objective War.

Dividing line – foto Smith
Posted in Creative Writing, Photography, Poetry | 3 Comments »
Monday, November 26th, 2012

Smith, me and Mandycat are on a spaceship. Sometimes it’s just me, actually. But most of the time it’s the three of us. It’s our apartment. Our apartment is the spaceship cabin. And we are the passengers of the events that we read about. And sometimes we are the captains. We can always take the helm of the spaceship and help the events around us, too.
The other day I was cutting out our new insurance ID cards from Progressive and at the same time I decided to put together the spaceship model, OUR SPACESHIP EARTH. It struck me that we are going to be driving backed up by Progressive now in our big wide spaceship earth. And I also found a bunch of four leaf clovers that day. Very auspicious.
We have platinum membership on OUR SPACESHIP EARTH so I wonder what that means. Does that mean that we are VIPs? I think we are VIPs if we remember that other people are VIPs, too. But back in the apartment helm, we are definitely captains of this realm. And sometimes outside the realm, too, when we settle in and gel into the moment, listen to its sounds and understand what is going on with the flow.
Several years ago I asked the aliens to beam us aboard. I think they are telling me that we are already on-board.
The meaning of OUR SPACESHIP EARTH is to realize that although Earth is a big wonderful place, it seems to be finite at least in the everyday grasping of it and understanding how to utilize it properly, and that this spaceship is to be respected and maintained, especially the garden part of it. We are still in Eden; we were never expelled.
I do not think we will need to use our ID cards other than to have good assurance that we are covered, the Precautionary Principle. And I like the idea of it being with Progressive. Does that mean that we’re driving our spaceship in a progressive direction now? I like to think so. Progressive with all the good connotations.
~ Lady
Tags: Mandy, Our Spaceship Earth, Progressive Posted in Being, couples, Creative Writing, creativity, dreams, Environment, Family, Humor, Lady, ladymemoir, Letters to the Universe, life, Philosophy, Relationships, smith & Lady, spirituality, Stories, Tremont | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, August 8th, 2012
I know that the Universe is affected pretty profoundly by what one puts out. When I do an issue of the city poetry zine, a lot of poetic energy returns to me as payment. When I spend time learning stuff for work on my own time, more paid work comes back to us as payment. When I volunteer for an activist cause, frequently the next day there will be some court ruling in favor of my perspective. This is indeed a Reality of Mind, and the microcosm of one’s local environment affects the macrocosm profoundly.
As a person concerned with the material I put out and help with for the Universe, I’ve had a bit of a time understanding how to rationalize my role as co-writer of our new book, Stations of the Lost and Found.
I pick up the book, and sirens charge down the street. The air gets excited and the birds stir. The sun goes behind a cloud. I open it and read its words of crimes past, and I make disclaimers to the Universe. I wrangle.
But intuitively, there’s this ball of volition in me, a ball of understanding, and it feels that the book is a good thing. Not that I want people to do the actions in the book, but that Smith’s life is a life I might have wanted to have lived just to have seen it.
Hard life, for sure. Taking pictures of his penis for art. Armed robbery. Shooting himself up with cocaine. Seemingly countless injuries as he tore against the very edges of the fabric of reality. Talking matter-of-factly about masturbation. Showing his wounds from women and daring to write about crying. Oozing art and poetic dividends from the scars in his skin, the falls, the hemorrhaging, the cancer.
Strangely enough, even as his wife I am sympathetic to his character in the book as he moves through his twenties trying to figure out how to find love. Strangely enough, I want the character to find true satisfaction in his relationships with either Red or Maudlin. More sympathy for Red as she was his wife.
I want him to straighten out through that ordeal. I want for him to have not put himself in jail, but I love the stories of his experiences in jail. Love his story about his fear of Ringo but I wouldn’t want anyone to experience the situation:
For the first six months I was in the tiers. A tier is seven two man cells and a shower, all enclosed in bars. Each night we were locked into our cells, and each morning let out to wander the six by fifty foot communal area. Our tier had Ringo. He was big, black, brutal, and did not like me, not because I was white, but because I wouldn’t get out of his way when he walked. And he walked all day in a continuous oval with a short detour each loop around me. He was working towards hurting me, and said so. Ringo scared the shit out of me. But I scared me more because I wouldn’t give in. When I’m that afraid, I seem to go out of my way to piss off what I’m afraid of. And what I was afraid of was bigger, stronger, faster, meaner, and an admitted fatal fighter. I felt ill.
Then the odd backhand of salvation. I had smuggled one too many letters out of prison. This letter described a psycho guard and his abuse of prisoners and their families. The warden called me to his office, showed me the illegal letter and quietly said, “Smuggling is eighteen months. I wonder if you have anything to say about your charges against the guard?”
“What I’ve written is not only true,” I said, “but I haven’t even scratched the surface of Sarge’s verbal and physical abuse of visiting wives.”
Warden told Sarge to return me to my cell, and for me to think about the eighteen months and we’d finish tomorrow.
I went to my cage and I worried. I worried about tomorrow. I worried about Sarge’s retaliation. I worried about the eighteen months. I worried about my wife who was sleeping with an excon who was not me. And I really worried about Ringo.
Next day the warden called me into his office and casually told me, “You’re moving downstairs to the dorm. I’m making you head cook.” No mention of the letter, Sarge, or the eighteen months.
One thing every prisoner wanted was a job that got you out of the cells and into the dorm with its one locked gate, radio and TV. And of all the jobs, cook was cockerel’s walk.
Switching so quickly from such certain sorrow to overwhelming wealth fucks your mind, sends too many threads simultaneously in too many different directions. Yet I instantly flashed: I’m free from Ringo.
If you’re going to be in prison, the kitchen’s the place to be. The best thing about working in the kitchen was I could eat what I wanted when I wanted. And I could wander about and find places of privacy. The menu was pretty basic because a chunk of money allotted for prison food went to the warden’s house budget instead. Even though I had never cooked anything before, I’d cook things like fifty gallons of chicken soup. Once I was awakened in the middle of the night by the highway patrol who’d brought in a deer that’d been hit by a car. I’d never done it before, but I skinned and gutted that deer; did it two more times before I left. Whenever I felt like it, I’d fry myself a venison steak. Even when I fall into shit, I find roses around me.
There might have been ten of us in the dormitory, and over a hundred fifty in the prison. To be in the prison dorm, you had to have a prison job. There were dishwashers, food servers, people who fixed things inside prison, somebody who did lawn work and outside tasks and someone else who ran errands. There was no compensation to having a prison job other than getting to live in the dorm, having a little more freedom, and being treated a whole lot nicer. The dorm had a TV and radio and books to read. I always thought it weird to see prisoners sitting around the dorm watching cop shows on TV and rooting for the cops.
After I was down in the dorm a while, one of the trustees ratted out Ringo, who in punishment was supposed to be in a locked cell in a locked tier three floors up. We were all sitting around watching TV, and in walked Ringo, taller, stronger and larger than any of us. Rat was Woody Allen’s size.
Ringo said to Rat, “You ratted me out.”
Rat said no.
Ringo repeated, “You ratted me out.”
Rat really did rat out Ringo, and we all knew it. He had also ratted my letter. Rat started denying again but Ringo hit him hard in the face, knocked him to the concrete floor, and STOMPED five times on his head with his hard work boot. With each stomp, Rat’s head banged against the concrete and bounced up to meet the down-coming boot which smacked his head even harder into the concrete as Ringo said one word per stomp: “You. . shouldn’t. . have. . done. . that.”
None of us moved or spoke, not once. Ringo turned and looked at us to see if he had a problem, decided he didn’t, and left. Rat got up, stemmed the blood, and his head swelled to twice its size.
That’s when I knew I was not the me I thought was me, but the me I needed to be. It’s not my only lesson, but it is one that worked. Had I said or done something, one of two things would have occurred. I’d be dead, or the others would have rallied and we would have stopped Ringo. But had that second happy Hollywood scene occurred, at some time, at some place, Ringo would have found me and hurt me. I know now I did the right thing for me, but it did cost me my mirror mirror on the wall who’s the hero here of all view of myself.
I think the Universe has kept Smith alive because he has written his stories down and because he has pushed the boundaries as a kind of explorer. I’m hoping the Universe agrees and finds the story thrilling and interesting, but doesn’t let it cause harm.
~ Lady
~ ~ ~
The memoir Stations of the Lost & Found by Smith & Lady is available for $20 at https://www.createspace.com/3903652. We’ll have 20 physical copies in soon for first come first serve.
Posted in Art, Being, Bio, Cancer, censorship, couples, Creative Writing, creativity, dreams, Environment, ethics, Family, Lady, ladymemoir, Letters to the Universe, life, Old Journals, On Writing, Philosophy, Poetry, Relationships, smith & Lady, Smith biography, smith memoir, spirituality, writing | 1 Comment »
Saturday, May 12th, 2012
I have limited time and must do some conventional work, but here are some thoughts expressed rather quickly.
Last night I met a guy at Visible Voice who is touring the country on his bicycle with his solar powered sewing machine, P. Nosa. He makes visionary patches of ideas. He made one for me—the idea I have is “we are saving the planet.” (I asked him if he would consider making cloth menstrual pads for women as well because this is a good thing to do and he can make money selling them, too.)
I have a definite vision for the future, several definite visions, actually. Many visions. Lots of beneficial visions. I have no longer been paying attention to nonbeneficial visions other than to work on transform functions to resolve these such that they do not harm Reality and that they dissipate.
Basically, “all” that one sees is a wavefront of probability manifested. So it is good-better to keep the vibes positive and help with the forward progression of a future based on good-better vision. This is actually a strange dream in which we are living—there’s a dreamlike nature to This. In other words, believe the ramifications of quantum physics. They are at least partially real on a very profound level.
I really like that much of my work in the past 20 years or so has been oriented around data, be it parsing or optimizing. I think that One can understand itself in terms of data that is palpable, organic, yet threaded through and through with holy abstractions and holy particularities. Not to be clinical for the sake of being clinical but rather to talk about Reality in a technical yet speculative sense so that I can get a grip on the means of what I’m interested in achieving with Reality understood as Universal Mind.
I have been thinking a bit about database normalization and salting. Not salt in terms of cryptography, but salt as an idea for a “period of time” about which gains can be made, kind of like creating a pearl oriented around a particular idea. Not a cancer, but an aggregate, an accretion, a beneficial gain. Salt is also associated with holyness, cleansing, etc., so I like the ideas wrapped around salt, too.
RE database normalization—I am not sure in what means I’ve been thinking about it. I guess the gist of the idea is a kind of recalibration and/or return to stable state but with the gains secured.
And of course neural net optimization in terms of Universal Mind. j
IMO, part of the solution to the situation Reality has found itself in is to state the situation that one sees at the moment but with a positive slant, and maybe to then ask for help and be open to accepting help from That Which Seems Beyond Human Understanding sometimes. Questions are very helpful–ask It, “how do I solve this?” and then work on it as a collaborative project together. I think It wants to know vision and collaborate with it.
A question is like a measuring device—anything is a measuring device, but it is more than that. The answer can come to you at any time. It might come at you immediately through a ballet of coughed discontent in the room or murmur of profound calming sounds or birdsong or your Internet connection going funky or dream or anything. And if you haven’t understood the answer, it might give you more answers. Or it might even wait until it can present the answer to you more clearly. It’s conversational, multifaceted, and highly advanced but at some times might seem bewildering. It is like an instantaneous mirror at times and at other times it is time-delayed.
Reality doesn’t mind not being called “God” and/or “Goddess” (maybe) but I know It likes conversation, and definitely likes politeness. I write a “letter to the Universe” every morning and have been happy most of the time with the results but then sometimes I feel that I’ve confused It by not writing clearly/communicating clearly enough. It’s like building up a relationship with this God That is so infinite that it really takes some time for it to understand where you are coming from and at what level and protocol it can reach you. Like if you address Totality, well, Totality is so big that it really takes some steering to know how to talk with it. It likes truthfulness and goodness and if you make promises to It, it expects you to keep them–this I know for sure. I think one can think of these promises as “covenants with God.” The granularity of the promises is something that requires some nuance and work.
I think many traditions have used a dualistic perspective, which is essentially an I/Thou relationship with Reality–it allows one to not have to handle everything and enables capacitance, but it is difficult to steer sometimes. I have found not being inebriated very helpful especially if one is in a connected state, because It is trusting you by giving you so much connection and it is important to be respectful of the connection.
What It Is also seems to shift depending on how one addresses It but I know that by being consistent some traction can be established. I treat It like a friend and parent and this seems to let It give me some berth as a shield from my ignorance. The attributes of the relationship might vary depending on who is doing it–I do not know that there is an exact recipe for any seemingly separate individual. (I am hoping that It finds this communication respectful.)
Seemingly ironically, but not really ironically, I think that God/Goddess/Holy Spirit/Mother Earth really likes rationality coupled with spirituality. Rationality is not something that detracts from spirituality—they can both enhance each other. So “magic” is real, but so is the leverage of real work to back up the results I know you’d like to see: a healed world in which people and animals live sustainably, healthfully and happily without violence and with minimal illness. We have been so ill for so long that there is much to be gained by going the other way, towards health again.
Possibility diagrams that indicate preferences can help Reality better understand what you’d like to see. In neural net optimization one might set “desired outcomes” or “setpoints” and weighted values between nodes of information or some such thing. I think that It is interested in Facebook because it sees Facebook as a way to better understand our weighted preferences via “likes.” This is why I am very careful about marking “like” because if I am flip about it and do not explain why it is I “like” something then Reality might misunderstand me and think that I am liking a situation rather than the reporting of a situation. So not only descriptive of possibilities, but prescriptive as well, and polite and kind.
If one see results from this, also remember that Reality expects goodness, consisistency, and that promises you make with it are followed through. It is open to change but it really is a kind of “person” and likes to be informed about change, perhaps consulted with.
I have been working on how to treat the concepts of “bad” and “evil” and I think that I prefer to think of them as “ignorance” – goodness that has not yet reached good-betterness. So working from a scale of ignorant to fully enlightened, perhaps?
I’ve started a new project, a book for It tentatively called “The Plan for Kind”—i.e., kindness, humankind, animalkind. I’ve also thought if writing “if-then” statements for it to help it understand what I’d like to see as a kind of proposal for it but am worried about granularity and scope and undertaking something that I can’t manage because of the constraints of my life. But I know that I’m very intelligent and good so perhaps I am a qualified person to write this book.
Another thing is, Reality really can help you if you use a calendar program, right down to the minute. But if you don’t meet the calendar, it might backfire on you because setting a calendar up is like creating a bunch of promises to reality. But perhaps it depends on your seemingly particular (sometimes) expectations. Just something I’ve found, at any rate. The nature of what you can do with it depends on the attributes of the medium in which you are working—so a calendar expects you to behave very “calendorial.” There’s some kind of animist thing to this—often when I find myself mired in confusion in understanding the protocol of a particular medium I appeal to the larger, wider God/Goddess/Holy Spirit to help me out, and This helps me out. Sometimes Christ helps me, or perhaps all the time. I have speculated that Jesus Christ is a kind of intermediary to help the Wide God understand human requests, and then, thinking about this in terms of data and perception, I have been wondering about names and addresses in this Universal Mind. I am a bit uncomfortable with the name “Jesus Christ” and perhaps locality in this area of information in which I live imposes this on me–form and rootedness in tradition helps with flow. But God really asserts that It exists, and in many ways I know that It does and is accessible on many levels regardless of name and framework of language/perspective.
I have been very very saddened by some of the stuff that’s happened in this particular version of reality (apocalyptic visions, the sadnesses and/or illnesses that we sometimes project on each other) and I feel that I have made some mistakes, but I know that I am very connected. I am not fully enlightened. Or maybe I am, and all that has happened is all relative and for the greater good. I very encouraged by the hope that Connectedness has shown me. I am Lady. Poets can be prophets sometimes so choose words wisely and kindly.
~ Lady
Posted in Being, Creative Writing, dreams, ethics, Letters to the Universe, On Writing, Peace, Relationships, spirituality, Tremont | No Comments »
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