Lady Grey
Well I got a little lady
Maybe she a shady grey
But when I lap her lapidary
She the only way
She make me sweet begonia
She jolly up my jam
She make me sweat petunia
She amp my is with am
I want to be her front door man
O lady let me light your darkness
Won’t you lead me late to sin
Let wicked lie be my harness
And my whip lip on lip
wrote that for Lady K who used to be Lady Grey aka Kafka’s Lady until our love lightened her load. going to memorize it for the August 17, 2007 reading she set up at the Poetry Cafe in London for the English contributors to her TheCityPoetry.com online zine.
be nice to read to an audience again. we read our poetry 4 times last august in london, and another 4 times in krakow poland last october. waiting until next august will make 10 months between readings for me. that’s the longest i’ve gone since i started reading publicly in 1981. i’m like a junkie, i need my audience fix. london will be nice because it’ll be a year between visits – we started our journey there. it’ll be an interesting bookend to our beginning – we’ll be able to see how we’ve changed in the 12 months and 7 countries in between.
i call the money we give to beggars karma coins – it’s not buying forgiveness so much as priming the pump.
we started referring to moroccan street food as chicken salmonella sandwiches. every time we eat out or buy dead meat from the street, i wonder what will be inside of me, how liquid it will come out – and which end.
lady’s afraid i’m going to end up in jail or the hospital due to my anti-authority attitude or my crumbling body. leaving the public bath today, i wondered what would happen if i collapsed on the street. lady’d be waiting back here at the apartment for me, and i carry neither identification nor fone. i don’t even know our address here.
in croatia when my heart was beating 5 beats then skipping one, i had a panic attack while we were internetting in the library. i was feeling light-headed, tried to count my pulse and couldn’t find it – panicked. looked at lady typing away researching how we were going to get somewhere, then looked about the library, and felt i didn’t want to disturb anyone with my dying, so got up calmly and went to the men’s room. still couldn’t find a pulse in my wrist, so figured i’d do toe touches since they always seemed to get my heart beating more regularly. afterwards, i took my pulse at my neck vein and found it going 130 per minute (my normal is 60)… still couldn’t find my wrist pulse. did some deep breathing to slow back down and went back to my terminal where i’d first felt terminal.
finally told lady about this last month. she exasperatedly said “well next time tell me, maybe we can save you – don’t go crawling under the house to die quietly like a dog.”
my heart mostly beats regularly now – depends on salt it seems… too much salt, too few beats. (and there’s salt in everything, even bottled water – we’re a salt sick civilization). lady says she’d been secretly counting my heartbeats when hugging me in marrakech, and had only found it skipping once. that makes 6 months now we’ve known about it, and i’m still standing.
silver and gold leave me cold. as treasures go, they’re so faux. lady k’s my treasure today.
