WALKING ON THIN ICE

New piece finished Sept. 8

It’s our second anniversary. Smith & I hooked up September 9, 2005. We’re in bed. I look into his eyes, and his face looks friendly. “Your irises have a purple edge,” I say. “And then they’re green and orange and rust brown next to the pupils.”

“They’re hazel,” he says.

We kiss, unhurriedly. I’ve devoted this day to him, to bed, to whatever it is we might want to do together. The kiss feels good, and I remember what it was like when we first kissed. How our mouths fit, how he made a little noise, an “umpf” when we kissed that first night. How if we take time to kiss, I still hear that “umpf” of pleasure.

“I’ve got to remember that we can do this,” I say.

“Do what?”

“Well, I have my companion, my love, my best friend. And we’re together all the time, but my mind is diverted by writing and correspondence and art. But what I like most is to spend unstructured time with you. I enjoy just being in your arms, kissing you.”

“Yes,” he says. “I understand the art and writing, but what I don’t understand is when you’re finished with that, and you go on the computer rather than spending time with me.”

“I don’t understand it either,” I say. “I’d much rather talk to you than read the news or read blogs obsessively. And I’m so pleased that you actually want me to pay attention to you. That’s what I want in a companion. I’m so honored to have you. It’s such a relief to have you. But things are always complicated, aren’t they? When you get what you want, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Happily ever after involves work.”

“Happy Anniversary.”

“Happy Anniversary to you, too. Just think of how much we’ve experienced since we left last year. It seems like it’s been years.”

“It’s been a full two years. And we’ve changed.”

“Yes. We are different people now.”

I look at Smith’s neck. I’m worried because he spends so much time in the sun, but I don’t hassle him about it. The radiation treatments he had to treat the cancer last year aged the skin under his throat. Where it used to be tight, it’s slack. But it’s tightened up a little bit lately. I think, “I’m going to put some positive energy on his throat.” I kiss it, and draw back.

“I love you,” Smith says. His eyes are now dark slits. Little drops of light are reflected in his irises from the window.

“I love you, too. My one. My true love.” I kiss his chest. It’s dotted with freckles that grow more dense towards his shoulders. His nipples are pink. It seems weird to recognize mammalian features on Smith. Precious to know his naked body.

Smith looks beyond me to the window. “The pattern on the lace curtains is a repeating vase with flowers.”

I look at the lace. Through its holes, cerulean blue sky, and purple mountains in the distance. I’d looked at the pattern for a long time, but absentmindedly, and I’d not seen the vases. But now they coalesce. I think, “I promise you, my true love, I will spend more time just talking with you. What is this all for other than to be with you?”

today is 2 years since lady and i began our relationship. she’d asked for a ride to my poetry reading, and didn’t go home after.

2 weeks later, i gave her the keys to my place. 2 more weeks, she moved in. 5 weeks after we started our relationship, we decided to sell the place and move to europe.

we’ve been together 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year since december 2005 when i quit work.

we married march 2006. left america august 2006. lived in england, netherlands, poland, croatia, italy, france, spain, morocco, england (again) and france (again) in the 13 months since.

interesting relationship. i’m 27 years older, 10 inches taller. she was a poet when we began, and since then she’s added writer, assemblage artist, photographer, blogger, interviewer, and world traveler.

she saved my life by asking me to have my throat cancer biopsied. i saved hers by showing her not all men are bastards.

she’s friend, biographer, comrade, traveling companion, artistic collaborator, lover, wife.

shows that if you never give up, sometimes things turn out right.

wrote this poem for her on the 10th day of our relationship:

Dada Greybeard

A lady poet followed me home
And asked if I could keep her
I replied
It must be denied
For I had no room in my freezer
She engineered her stay
Of relocation with play
Charm and elocution
Praised this and that
Allowed a wee pat
Counted on evolution
I may be cheap
And easy too
But for female I’m hard-wired
And too
It’s sort of cool
This once being the one that’s desired
Though I question her taste
Her need of rat waste
A too hasty fade
Will shatter shades
I cannot replace
Best to see
What she reweaves
What treasure in her trundle
Though it fracture my plan
I am but man
And man is meant to bundle

bused into beziers to look for cannabis. didn’t expect to find the same people operating the same game from the same bench in the same park after our 6 months away - and i was right. no body home. walked by the hash house - it was being refurbished. walked the parks - found a lot of police, but no young and restless. so september is straight and sober. about what i figured. relieved in a way - allows me to re-enter the un-united mistakes of america with a clear mind. 3.5 months stoned, 10.5 months straight in 14 month travel. i’m thankful for the stone, i’m thankful for the straight. gotta flow with the go.

besides, i think my brain’s blown anyway.

I ate a phoenix once. With a lizard for dessert. Everybody knows that phoenixes regenerate through self-destruction, and lizards grow new tails.

Once I assimilated this meal, I found each night, I could break off my penis and a new one would grow. That way I have a new penis for each sexual act. I no longer have to wash it.

Unfortunately, I haven’t quite figured out what the factor is, but sometimes I grow little penises, and sometimes I grow big penii. Usually have foreskins, though. Once I had a negro’s penis.

When I date, I can only go out after dark, to make sure my penis has grown back. Once I tried to have sex during lunch, and I only had a little stub with an eye in it. Scared the woman. She became a lesbian.

So I’ve done my bit for women’s rights, and wrongs.

Vineyard in September, Abeilhan, France

We’re staying in Grape Country. This little town of Abeilhan is in the Languedoc region of France. We’re about 30 km from the Mediterranean and Pyrenees. Abeilhan is a hill town. I’m not sure how old it is, but it seems medieval to me. The old cities here are on hills, and in between the cities are grape fields. Almost all the land is cultivated with grave vines. It seems to me that they overuse the land. The climate is very dry but there are all these lush vines around. The ground that’s not irrigated seems parched to me. This area is supposed to turn to desert with global warming.

We were here in the late winter, and when we left, the vines had just started to grow. It’s neat to come back near harvest time.

Smith and I walked in a vineyard the other day. We plucked two grapes off a vine. They were the sweetest grapes I’d ever tasted, and they were rich, really grape-y tasting. I thought they’d make excellent grape juice. We didn’t take more, because the French are really really serious about these vines. (Although we did take some fresh cauliflower from a field in Croatia. The cabbage and cauliflower fields ran right up against the rocky shore of the Adriatic Sea. It was the strangest & most wonderful thing I’d ever seen.)

Here in Abeilhan we’re surrounded by beauty, but we’re marooned. It costs $20 to take the bus 18 km in to the nearby large town of Beziers. But if we’re to be marooned, this is where I want to be. It’s a quiet town, and I can sit in the nook of the kitchen window and soak up sun and write, or lay in the hammock out back under the fig tree and fall asleep to the susurration of wind in the leaves.

We also felt trapped in our neighborhood in London. The suburbs of London are grey and monotonous. Shop after shop after shop. Our neighborhood was more interesting than most, because it was so diverse: Caribbeans, Indians, Senegalese. And we had really nice neighbors. But any time we wanted to go downtown it cost about $15 to take the subway. This made exploring the cultural scene prohibitively expensive. I felt thoroughly depressed by how poor I felt. It cost us $300 to take a train to go camping in the north of England, which was just like 250 miles away. The Lake District was bucolic, but there was no real sense of nature let wild.

Clevelanders are lucky to have access to places like the Metroparks. The US still has great natural resources and it’s cheap to take public transportation. Before I came here, I had the idea that the British were much more progressive than the US when it came to sustainable living. But it turns out everyone’s taking Ryanair for a holiday weekend across the continent. Flying here is much cheaper than taking a train - it seems so wrong to me - the British establishment makes big noise about global warming but it turns out they’re just as hypocritical.

For kicks, I researched what it’d cost to take Amtrak from NY to Cleveland. Turns out it’s much cheaper than flying. So we’re going to do that when we land in NYC.

Vineyards in March, France

lady spent at least 8 hours today writing of her non-fiction past… and 4 hours yesterday, 4 hours the day before. good stuff too. makes me think she’s more writer than i, more thinker than i, more disciplined too. i have more life stories than she, and they’re more lawless, anti-social, wilder, edgier, freakier - but her’s are more thought out, detailed, human, humane. it’s like she’s real and i’m not, as if she’s a novel and i’m a comic book. makes me wish i could write like her… but then if i could, i wouldn’t be me, and i wouldn’t have all my unreal life stories, wouldn’t be able to say things like i’ve run from the cops 10 times, got away 9. maybe it comes down to she’s human and i’m mutant. what a team we make.

since i don’t watch tv, i’ve had the good fortune of never seeing more than the accidental 5 minutes of any tv reality show - but that wicked little made it obvious it’s all played around the humiliation game. and i’ve been blessed with never seeing even a single second of american idol - could never understand what it was all about outside producing mediocre middle of the road las vegas pseudo singers.

now i understand - i just read ben elton’s visciously funny dead-on parody of the genre titled Chart Throb, the funniest wickedest novel i’ve had the pleasure of reading. in it, folk are chosen for their flaws rather than their strengths, so as to enable the new teletube version of the old carny freak show.

seeing how such is so popular these days, i wondered where my own story (our memoir manuscript we hope to shop is titled Criminal) would have a place in said milieu. and then i got it - i’m a freak show with wit, style, intelligence, and class… i’m more like On The Road extended into a 61 year trip.

onto the dark side of amerikkkan idle - george w bush is in sydney australia… here’s some of the things austrailians are saying about him.

1) i feel the presence of this single person who has created more apocalyptic risks than any other in history like a black cloud in my city. ‘the great satan.’

2) there’s no doubt about it, Bush is a fuckwit

3) Yes, the Bushman cometh. But, he will goeth, too.

4) Now, I was tempted to suggest you could protest, get arrested and live off the tax payer but The Most Hated Man in the World, and his buddies, have a bad record for care of prisoners.

5) My city of Sydney - The most hated man in the world is in town. We know he’s the most hated man in the world because the entire city is armed and locked down just to make sure nobody tries to murder him. It’s not a good time to be on the streets of Sydney. Not without your passport Anything could happen to you. You don’t even have to look Middle Eastern to get locked up. You just have to look vaguely pissed off and be carrying a placard. If you raise your voices too loud they might turn the water canon on you. Because we don’t want him to know he’s the most hated man in the world, it might hurt his feelings.

6) and here’s my bush say from 3 years ago on my other site:
traitor to american values award
&
heil to the thief - bush league central.

“The only difference between Bush and Hitler is that Hitler was elected” - Kurt Vonnegut

i’d like an order of deep freud, please, with a side of wise.

lady’s sitting here typing away like mad words of her youth while i sit in fog and wonder where i’m at. i’d need an emotional / life transistional / spiritual / mental global positioning system to find my own arse today.

while i’m waiting for my brain to reboot, i’ll leave you with this poem from back in my drinking, shooting up days (i’m in my 17th year of not drinking, my 10th of not shooting up, my 8th of not doing chemicals… still smoking grass and doing coffee though, although both have been seriously downsized):

i’m too jung to be a freud.

spent past 2 days reading harry potter #7 - Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows. it’s easily the best book in the series. i’m in awe - amazed how intricately interwoven and finely plotted it is. extremely well written too. it tugs at the heart, brings a tear to the eye, hope and light to the soul.

i was starting to doubt potter for awhile because harry had turned into one rather whining rude obnoxious prick the past few books and the first half of this one.

now that i’m done with his life, i have to get on with my own. have less than 4 weeks here, 3 nights in barcelona, 1 night in new york city before returning to cleveland - the city we left 13 months ago. we’re both experiencing a bit of dread - going back to america seems like going behind enemy lines into the heart of darkness. but if the cheney-bush beast does start world war III by bombing iran, and if they do cancel the 2008 presidential elections, then it’s best to be back in the thick of it at ground zero. after all, it’s our country, wrong or wrong.

it’s time to restart my typing lessons and begin my long delayed exercises, two things i decided to do before we left the u.s… the former because i’ve things to say, and the later because i’ll soon be facing folk who’ll be judging me after our long lapse and adventures. and best develop my chameleon powers so i can walk again amongst the normaliens.

we begin in ambiguity, end in enigma.

We’re coaxing happiness out of the last bit of French sunshine before we return to the US. The kitchen window looks out over an ancient hill town, old Mediterranean roof tiles - directly across the window, vine hangs on wall, heavy with passion fruit.

The back bedroom window looks over fields of grapevines, and the Pyrenees mountains are purple on the horizon. In the back yard we have several fig trees, and they just happen to be ripe right now. The owner made some fig jam and left some for us to try. She bade us eat as many figs as we like. I roasted some in the oven last night and served them over yogurt.

In the morning Smith walks three minutes to the bakery, and brings back fresh croissants or a baguette.

I have the feeling that it won’t be possible to travel here again - with global warming, we don’t think it’s ethical for us to fly across the Atlantic - and more than once is more than we can afford to do unless we make it as artists or writers. So this month is my good bye to Europe. But I’m excited that we’ll be settling (at least for a while) in Chicago. It’s always been one of my dreams to live there as well. Kind of like a big version of Cleveland. Familiar Midwestern culture plus a lot of diversity, a literary scene and arts scene. The future is a big unknown but I feel positive about it.