WALKING ON THIN ICE

two olde farts & a young chick

we read with Beat-inspired London poet Jazzman John Clarke under the banner Two Olde Farts & A Chick. John is 59, Lady 34, me 61, so I thought that a fair title.

it was a marvelous evening of 9 acts interweaving music, song, spoken word, comedy and magic card tricks. so now we’ve heard and seen more creative good than bad this london loop.

here’s what lady and i recited last night:

Lady & Smith – 7 poems recited at London’s Railway Pub
or
MY LUSTING RIBS by LADY
JANUARY AT THE BEACH by LADY
OUR BEST MEMORY by LADY
WHEN EYES WERE TERRIFYING by LADY
Bye Buy by Smith
Alone This Train by Smith
Marriage Proposal by Smith

homeless bound

lady and i each have 5 minutes to recite tonight alongside beat-inspired poet jazzman john clarke – we’re performing as Two Olde Farts & A Chick (john’s 59, i’m 61, and lady’s 34, so i thought the title apropos). this gives lady 4 reads and me 3, so london has been more than kind to us.

however, we are tiring of this grey chilled damp english weather. we’ve had 2 weeks of sun in the past 8 – which is a shock to my system because the 3 months previous were spent under moroccan sun. we left 100+ degree daze to come to 60 degree haze. of course the hot heat there had no cool poetry readings, while the cool readings here do have heat.

been in london 5 weeks. leave for france in 8 days. it took me 3 weeks this time to bounce back from our 6 residence changes in 4 cities on 2 continents the previous 4 weeks. the more months we’re on the road and the more moves we make, the longer it takes me to bounce back after each. i began tiring of our journey last april in spain enroute from france to marrakech. of course the painful spanish trainful to barcelona, the madrid airport food poisoning, and the multiple diarrhea attacks in morocco didn’t help me body or soul.

humans take comfort from familiar surroundings, from having a home base, a circle of known aquaintances, knowing where to buy what they need, how to get around, where what is. lady and my not having a link to the familiar has cost us enormously emotionally and mentally – even physically.

we started a ‘process’ when we sold our place, gave away our possessions, and began open-ended world travel. we more or less choose where we’re going next, and for how long, but beyond that, it’s been out of our hands because it’s always in a new place with unknown people unknown problems unknown rules. we’re in never-ending turbulant waters trying constantly to stay upright. we have little control, even less focus. we’re process, not procedure.

we began this journey knowing it would change us, refine us, strengthen us, fulfill us, charge up our creative databases. and it has – we’re just not sure yet how because we’ve not stopped in familiar grounds to evaluate where and what we are.

i’ll be good to stop our wandering after 16 months and settle down in chicago for a year or two in december (before we hopefully begin wandering all over again). i’m tired of being homeless bound.

bohemian rapsoday

found these lady words on the floor –

lady ripped them out of one of her new poems and tossed them aside, so i scavenged them. she’s constantly tearing things out of her new assemblages as well. lady’s a hard woman when it comes to her art and poems – she sneaks up on them when they’re not looking and starts removing bits and pieces without warning. thank goddess she doesn’t have kids – they’d likely be missing arm, eye, tooths, assorted fingers, ear.

there weren’t enough open mic slots at last night’s poetry reading (they call them ‘floor spots’ here), so i crossed my name off the list to let another read. my ego’s already big enough, plus we read tomorrow. let someone else play. lady read. unfortunately those i stood aside for weren’t worth hearing. we’ve heard a lot of so-so poetry here in london – lady wonders if it’s due to a language/culture gap. we have heard some good poetry though – the featured readers lady had at her City Poetry reading last week were delightful… they put a grin on my face.

especially ronnie mcgrath. the worm lady was out of town, and he took her place. good words, good read. good human. we spent this afternoon at his place sharing his art, his 2 daughters’ art, rai music, video of his defunct group, and ani difranco. he gave us a copy of his first novel – On The Verge Of Losing It – as we left. i copied this from the jacket blurb:

Ronnie McGrath is a founder member of the now defunct musical group The London Afro-Blok, who performed for the Queen and opened the 1994 Commonwealth Games in British Columbia, Canada. he is a poet, artist, researcher and lecturer, with a string of achievements to his bow. In 1993 he was commended for his writing by ACER (Afro Caribbean Education and Resource), who also published and rewarded his writing first place in 1994. A graduate of Manchester University’s MA in novel writing, Ronnie’s formidable short story The Day Before That One is published in the very successful IC3, The Penguin Book Of New Black Writing In Britain. His other published work is a book of poems entitled Poems From The Tired Lips Of Newspapers.

can’t imagine my own blurb if i ever get a book – perhaps: “he’s run from the cops 10 times, got away 9.” anyway, now we can say we know somebody who’s been in the same room as the queen – altho when he first told us, i thought he was referring to the rock group queen (we will rock you / bohemian rhapsody / under pressure), so instead of an old wrinkled woman wearing too much jewelry, i flashed on a dead gay singer.

bring out your dead

one of my favorite monty python scenes is where they call out “bring out your dead.” we’ve got a bit of bringing out to do.

159,000 people die each day world wide. that’s 1 million deaths weekly, 4.8 million dead a month, 58 million dead each year. that’s a lot of bodies to burn & bury. disposal of the dead is very much alive.

in the u.s. alone, each month 3,500 die in automobile accidents, 42,000 from cancer, and 73,000 from heart disease. during my throat cancer radiation, the doctor told me 85% of americans die from 3 Cs – cancer, car, cardiac.

but, 133 million are born each year. since there are 6.6 billion people alive right now, we grow by 2%, while we die at 1% – that leaves 100% growth in 100 years. hmmmm, we gotta start killing off more folk. or maybe we should just start eating the dead – that way we could turn all those graveyards into something useful, like more golf courses for the uneaten rich.

meanwhile among the living here on the sidewalks of london, we frequently smell cannabis as we walk along. we smell more public grass here than anywhere in the 9 countries and 3 continents we’ve seen so far – including amsterdam where it’s legal. while talking to a guy on the sidewalk, i saw he had a hand rolled cigarette and said “excuse me for being brazen, but is that grass?” he said no, ask that musician over there. in poland, it was a musician also… france a group of x-gens in the park… marrakech a guide… essaouira a store merchant… the u.s. another musician. ahhh, the music of the spheres.

in england, possession of cannabis is a class c offense… police are instructed to confiscate, but not to arrest. stuff’s been around a long time… according to wikipedia, “evidence of the inhalation of cannabis smoke can be found as far back as the Neolithic age” – 6,000 bc – which makes 8,000 years of use. beer has been around 12,000 years. humans been getting down, decadent & dirty for 1,200 decades now. you’d think with that much practice we’d start getting it right.

gender bender blues

my friend r.a. washington blogged about a site that analyzes your writing and decides whether you are female or male – gender genie.

i tried my non-fiction story of mom dying as i held her hand – the gender genie says:
Female Score 2091 words, Male Score 1402 words
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

i looked down at my testicles in dismay and tried again with my self portrait bio:
Female Score 778 words, Male Score 715 words
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

finally i tried my resume:
Female Score: 0 words, Male Score: 0 words
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: unknown!

took a tv test given by barbara walters and tom snyder back in the mid-1970s which measured your male/female personality ratio. walters and my lady friend came up highly masculine, i came up feminine, and snyder wussied out and refused to divulge his score… sounds like a mama’s boy to me.

so i guess you all best start calling me mz smith.

got to see (but not meet) one of our heroes – John Pilger. went to his movie documentary The War On Democracy, and he answered questions afterwards. too many audience questions for us to get one in, and too many fans crowding around after for us to shake his hand and say thanks for exposing the mass murderers also known as the last 11 american presidents. the united states of america has murdered more people in the past 70 years than any other nation on earth – maybe more than the rest of the world combined. we’ve tried to overthrow 50 governments since world war 2, and have actually bombed 30 countries since then – many repeatedly. the u.s. is the major terrorist on earth – also the major arms supplier. if you want an eye-opening book, pick up pilger’s Tell Me No Lies, a selection of world wide government exposes by a variety of journalists since ww2.

saw links to these expensive items on yahoo: $100,000 watch… $7,000 flashlight… $3,000 perfume… $400 jeans … so much money in the hands of the so few. and of course the worst number right now is $9,000,000,000 a month for the iraq war – a sum that could feed and give health care to the entire world’s wretched.

welcome to the dark side, with absolutely no moral light at the end of the tunnel. mankind be bad and getting worse.