AD.

WALKING ON THIN ICE

life as a fountain urinal by r. mutt


Plato’s cave – foto by Smith

Blood Diamond Sutra

While time dries the blood of history
Deadman’s fingers drive the train

Tunnel down to basic mystery
Execute and wait for pain

We walk a world full of misery
Search and seek for better gain

Try to live outside of usury
Try to follow righteous reign

Gold above, below all blistery
Hell and Heaven both the same

A game they play to say “This is me”
Played to place the proper blame

So in this unclean sticky pissery
To stop the smell please try to aim


regret – foto by Smith

past 3 days


Saturday: West 14th Street – foto by Smith

Sunday: Pennsyvania I-76 – foto by Smith

Monday: Steelyard Commons – foto by Smith

have poem, will travel


I Got Mine by Smith – foto by Smith

Drove to Pittsburgh for the weekend for the 13th annual Poetry Without Walls. 26 hours from leaving to return. We each read three poems. That’s 4.3 hours away for each poem. We could have read more since it was an open mic poetry circle, but other egos were more needy of audience, so we stepped back.

Poets are weird – they’ll travel thousands of miles spending their own money just to read their words for free to audiences.

The event is hosted by poet/activists Ed Bortz and Sandra Hazley. Three years ago during my first visit I’d given them a collage of a mummified chicken foot giving the finger in a sea of blue copper corrosion. Here it is. It’s about 8 inches wide.


I Got Mine (detail) by Smith – foto by Smith

10 true


bus stop no loitering – foto by Smith

I don’t participate in a lot of MySpace flow like apps and tags, but Christie*~Ordained Princess of Poetry~* has been very sweet to me and she said pretty please and I do have a soft heart so here are 10 truths about me. But I won’t tag others – just like I’d never pass a chain letter on in the old days.

1 – I was born in 1946 in the Bitterroot range of the Rocky Mountains in the Idaho panhandle, raised on a 40 acre farm on Paradise Prairie 20 miles east of Spokane Washington. What future poet could ask for better metaphors than being born in Bitterroot, raised on Paradise Prairie?

2 – An excerpt from our unpublished memoir CRIMINAL by Smith & Lady:

When I was nine, the doctor pulled my foreskin back over my penis head. It hurt like heck because the foreskin had never been stretched before. Doc explained I had to wash under the foreskin every bath, or head cheese would develop. So I did. I washed it. A lot.

One night while reading and fondling my penis, I had my first climax. I didn’t understand what happened. No one had told me about sex. All I knew was it was wrong to touch myself, and I figured I’d broken something essential. Thinking it was God’s punishment, I wiped away the clear sticky goo, lay down in the dark, and waited to die. Next morning, still alive, I touched it some more. Made it break again. I broke it over and over.

Few years later, doctor said, “Your left testicle has dropped considerably lower than your right. That’s usually caused by playing with yourself too often.” I burned in shame, but kept on breaking my penis two or three times a day anyway. I must have had the most broke dick in town.

3 – In 1960 when I was 14, we moved from the farm to the city, and this 18 year old boy taught me to steal stuff from unlocked cars. I knew it was wrong but it was exciting. Couple months later I missed the last bus across town and couldn’t get home. I thought “If I can take from the glove compartment, I can take the whole car” and went into a church parking lot and found a 5 speed Fiat. Pushed it out of the lot and down the hill (I was 6 foot 3 inches tall), figured out how to make it work, drove it home. That night going 70 mph, I lost control, went off the road into a golf course where the car flipped upside down and tore one heck of a divot in the grass. Unhurt I walked home, then stole 12 more cars before I got caught and spent 9 days in juvenile detention and a year on probation. They figured it wasn’t my fault because I was getting straight As and loved my parents who loved me, so they blamed it on my older friend and made him join the Army.

4 – As a Midshipman in the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1965, I resented being made to march to Chapel every Sunday, especially since all the Officers and Midshipmen slept through the sermon, so one Sunday I took a large wind-up clanging alarm clock, set it to go off 20 minutes into the service, and wrote “THE YELLOW PHANTOM STRIKES AGAIN” in black magic marker across the face. I dropped it by the front of the Chapel as we marched in. Our guest preacher that day was Billy Graham. The alarm went off, echoing everywhere in the great stone dome while Officers and Midshipmen startled from sleep popped up and frantically looked about like jack in the boxes, and Billy Graham paused maybe three beats and continued on as if nothing had happened.

5 – In 1968 I was one of 12 Midshipmen kicked out of Annapolis for smoking marijuana. Since I had come in through the back door as an enlisted man, they either had to Court Marshall me or give me an honorable discharge. They didn’t want the publicity (we had already made the front page of the Washington Post) so the gave me an honorable. When I enlisted in the Navy in 1963 I explained I was joining the program where the Navy paid for one year of college for every two years I served. They said “Fine.” When I got to boot camp they said “Ha ha, you have to be 21 for that program, you’re only 17, so screw you.” I went to 3 months boot camp San Diego California, 9 months electronic school Memphis Tennessee, 9 months U.S.N.A. prep school in Bainbridge Maryland for the Naval Academy, 2.5 years at Annapolis, got kicked out and had the G.I. bill pay for two more years of college at Loyola in Baltimore. So, who screwed whom?

6 . When I left the Academy, I swore there were two things I’d never do – take LSD because I was crazy and it’d push me over the edge, or use a needle. Within two weeks I’d done both.

7 – I’ve ruin from the cops 10 times, got away 9. The one failure was my second and last armed robbery. Was sentenced to 11.5 to 23 months in prison. After serving 10.5 months, the Warden and the guards went to the Judge, said I didn’t belong in jail and got me released one month early. One of the guards gave me his badge as I left. (Jail is the reason I went back and graduated from college, to show I was on a better path).

8 – The happiest moment of my life was my first sky dive. After free falling almost 2 miles I pulled the ripcord and hung in total silence a mile above a gorgeous green earth, watching the sunlit slow moving farms fields woods lakes below.

9 – Saw rabbits dance in the Michigan woods one night in 1976. A male rabbit danced slow courtship circles about the female rabbit. Suddenly a second male rabbit came along and the two males started to fight dance around each other. After awhile the female got bored and hopped off. Eventually the males noticed she was gone and hopped off in different directions.

10 – Here’s the Cliff Notes of my life:

Smith 2009

9 March 1946 / Wallace Idaho / 6′ 3” / 175
poet 46 years, artist 45 years, ArtCrimes publisher 24 years,
AgentOfChaos.com 7 years, Walking Thin Ice co-blogger 3 years

1950s
farm boy cow milker chicken/rabbit/hog waste remover
hod carrier

1960s
paper boy
car thief
house wrecker
sailor
electronics technician
poet
USNA midshipman
artist
hippie
life insurance salesman
husband

1970s
chemist
armed robber
prison cook
bankrupt
graphic arts salesman
bethlehem steel extraman
snow cone flavor delivery man
college graduate
newspaper film/music critic
milkman
avant-garde theatre manager
women’s shoe salesman
divorced
computer operator
drug dealer
carnival laborer
adulterer
church janitor

1980s
programmer analyst
drunk
condo owner
publisher/editor
celibate

1990s
near dead
sober
european traveler

2000s
unemployed
agentofchaos.com
cancer
remarried
walkingthinice.com
expat
criminal by smith & lady
repat


skin deep – foto by Smith

good muse


wheel – foto by Smith

Night before last we watched David Cronenberg’s Spider (2002), an excellent film that starts out dark and depressed and only gets more so as it shows the failed attempt of a broken mind to find light only to slip even deeper into darkness. The screenplay was well written by the author who wrote the novel, well acted by excellent actors, and deftly directed. But, why spend 100 minutes watching such a depressing bring-down movie? Why choose such a feel-bad story to film in the first place? So many of the of the great films I once was in awe of are dark, depressed, demented. Once I found Lady’s love, I stopped enjoying such films.

So last night I chose an uplifting film – The Straight Story by David Lynch, a movie totally at odds with everything else he’s filmed.

This is one of the most perfect films I’ve seen. It’s slow, character driven, chronological, wise, humorous, gentle, bitter, and sweet. And it’s true as well. It’s the story of Alvin Straight who at 73, almost crippled, and near blind decides he has to see his 80 year old brother who just had a stroke. The two brothers haven’t spoken to each other in 10 years due to a drunken argument. The brother lives 260 miles away. Alvin has no driver’s license and is too stubborn to take a bus, so he drives his lawn mower all the way. Takes him 6 weeks. He has some heart-warming life-affirming encounters along the way, and the film ends quietly with the two brothers sitting in silence on the front porch staring up into the sky with emotion.

Brought tears to my eyes and a smile to my face and cleansed some of the darkness from my heart.

I’m a huge Lynch fan, and this is the best thing he’s done–it’s also his only sweet no-tricks straight-forward film.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the 79 year old main actor, Richard Farnsworth, was dying from terminal cancer while shooting the film and killed himself within a year of finishing the movie. Had I known that fact while watching, it might well have broke my heart. Farnsworth shows such compassion and wisdom throughout the movie.

This film might make me reconsider my own cranky nasty curmudgeon ways.


patchwork – foto by Smith

blogfog


up creek- foto by Smith

My brain’s no longer facile enough to blog every day, yet I try anyway because it’s important to keep the cheese out to tempt readers.

Blogging’s getting harder because I’m getting duller. Living in the U.S.A is less interesting to me than traveling foreign lands was, so I’ve fewer positive adventures to relate. The daily news still “inspires” me, but one can only rant so much negativity before readers run screaming to lighter fare.

That’s why I include pretty pictures.


AmericaUSA – foto by Smith

traffic tropes


highway overpass walkway – foto by Smith

I’m a good guy, with an attitude. Like I stop and let cars into the traffic flow – except if they’re gas hogging SUVs, in which case I’ll purposely speed up or slow down to keep them out. Hate em even more because they’re big and bulky and shut off my line of sight so I can’t look in front of them to analyse the traffic flow to increase my own safety factor and efficiency.

Before getting a car again three months ago, I didn’t realize how happy I was not having a car for three years. Driving is an extremely stressful, hostile environment. Expensive too. And most drivers are thoughtless, mean, or just plain stupid: they signal a left hand turn and move into the right hand lane instead; they stop their cars in the middle of the street to talk to people in other cars or on the sidewalk and then get angry because you beep; they park in handicapped zones when their only handicap is their fat asses, small brains, or lazy character; they suddenly move into your lane without signaling or leaving any room; they drive slow in the fast lane; and they’re all driving with cancer-causing cell fones plastered to their heads with brains not large enough to multi-task in the first place. Too bad it takes 20 years for cell fone tumors to grow. We need stronger cell fones to cause quicker cancers to kill off more of these walking talking driving brain deads.

The problem with the earth is people. The problem with people is people. But then the wonderful thing about people is also people. So what you gonna do. You can’t kill em, and you can’t live with em. Some say you can’t live without them, but I’m more than willing to try.

Oh, I was wrong – you can legally kill em if you’re a corporation selling death as cigarettes / alcohol / guns, or you’re a politician and you send em off to die in foreign lands so you can steal more oil. My apologies, I was thinking ethics and morality instead of Capitalism.

Less is more: i.e., less people = more happiness for Mother Earth and me. And if I’m to be included in the less people category, so be it. That’s fine with me because I’ve already had a most wonderful life. Even though I don’t believe in God or churches, if there is a Saint Peter guarding those mythical golden gates when I die, I’m more than ready to be judged on what I’ve done. And if Heaven doesn’t want me, then frick em if they can’t take a joke.


end of our block – foto by Smith