May 2010 – WALKING ON THIN ICE

9 lives

May 31, 2010 5 Comments

Mature cat seeks young kitten
for yarn pull
You pull my yarn,
I’ll purr yers…

Schrodinger’s cat is dead, perhaps
And we but lie, lie dreaming
This tit for tat means this this ain’t that
No matter what the ragweedâ€™s weaving

Riding now into never
With every sly lie
I’m cool cat copacetic
In absolute time
Jig forever together
In metaphoric fire

So Eye and I still walking
Though Eye and I not talking
But Eye on I am watching
So do your duty Buddha buddy
Cue this cat to paradigm

Pussy willowâ€™s virgin burp
Soft centers assorted creams
As satin sins Satan sent
Well at will
Damn stencil pencil schedule
And the dead cat band police

Your fuzzy wuzzy fur
I’ll kiss into a purr
lick you like
we’re cat and cur
when limbic low I go
ain’t no one better slow

Peeping one-eyed catâ€™s seafood stores
Mount used two love carnivore rides
Cast past sated loss

Cat lies on table
Tail twitching, body curved
Sleeping liquid flesh

poem excerpts and fotos by Smith

trickster god

May 30, 2010 2 Comments

behind the scene – foto by Smith

Trickster God

I once knew a man
who returned my shoes dirty
yet kept his own clean

Lady slippers – foto by Smith

odd lots in mod thoughts

May 29, 2010 3 Comments

the snake and the Buddha – foto by Smith

Heisenberg Reality is really fluxed up.

The skeleton is
the bridge that carries the flesh
from birth to death

My skeletonâ€™s dragging. Lady’s morphing back into going to bed by 7 or 8 and getting up at 1 or 2 or 3 which means I go to bed at midnight and get awoken at 4 or 5 inadvertently and sleep unevenly until giving up and getting up at 6.

Our mismatched sleep patterns make for conversation surreal.

Me – If I had an xtra $15 to burn I’d buy three small skinny glowing flashlights down at Home Despot – one red, one blue, one green. But money’s tight and we can’t afford $15 to play, so maybe I’ll buy just one for $4.99. Which color would be best do you think — blue?

She – What are you going to do with it?

Me – We’ll sit in the dark and watch it softly glow blue.

She – Really?

Me – Yes, we’ll sit and watch it glow blue in the dark and when we get tired of that I’ll push the button and it will slowly blink blue-off-blue-off and when we tire of that I’ll turn it off and we’ll sit in the dark and meditate on what we’ve seen and then start over and over again with blue glow, blue flash, dark until we’ve absorbed the lesson and we move on to a second flashlight I’ll buy red and we’ll watch red glow and flash and dark then blue glow and flash and dark and on and on until we buy green yes we buy green and we glow and we flash and we dark and we learn by golly we become one with the Innie the Outie the One the All the Both the In-Between hallelujah evermore amen.

Photoplay – foto by Smith

Shopping list

May 28, 2010 1 Comment

– cheese cloth
– rivets
– quality paper for letters of inquiry
– envelopes
– Listerine
– wet food (we’re down to one can)

Smith & Lady

right write

May 28, 2010 2 Comments

but you can follow me cybernetically – foto by Smith

18 months ago I sent out 40-50 inquiries trying to find a literary agent for help in getting our book published, but all I got was totally ignored or no’d except for one woman who insulted my writing but asked us to send her a non-fiction book proposal anyway, and then dropped us when I did.

It’s taken me 18 months to get ready to try again. After a year of final rewrites and months dragging my feet, last night I finally reread my original letter to see how I might tweak it a bit to try again and was embarrassed at how bad it was. I’d written it using a How To Find A Literary Agent manual and it seriously sucked — I was lucky to get the one response we did.

So I wrote my own letter — screw the accepted rote rules. If this doesn’t get a bite in these content-hungry times, something’s seriously wrong with this universe.

~ ~ ~

Dear Literary Agent

Criminal – A true story of armed robbery, stolen cars, alternative art, mainstream poetry, underground publishing, robbing the cradle, and leaving the country by Smith & Lady.

Criminal is the story of my first 60 years, which began in the Bitterroot Mountains in the 1940s; grew on a forty acre farm on Paradise Prairie in the 50s; got kicked out of the Naval Academy and into the drug art hippie scene in the 60s; started the 70s in prison; spent the 80s getting established as an artist poet publisher drunk; drank to death in the 90s; and in the aughts ended up married to a lady ten inches shorter and twenty-seven years younger while living out of backpacks in ten different countries on three continents.

My wife and I have turned this and more into a self-deprecating, slightly humorous 103,530 word 326 page memoir which we hope you would consider reading for representation.

The Delinquent magazine in London, UK, published three excerpts in their first three issues in 2006-7, and Troubadour 21 currently has five excerpts online at troubadour21.com/author/smith/.

There are forty-three newspaper reviews, articles, and blurbs from 1984 through 2006 online at agentofchaos.com/reviews.php which cover my art, life, publishing and poetry.

My first poem was published in 1964, my latest this year. I’ve been in perhaps fifty group and solo art shows and have over a hundred poems and collages published in the small press in the past 27 years.

We have three websites — our life travel art blog WalkingThinIce.com, my art and poetry AgentOfChaos.com, and Lady’s art poetry zine theCityPoetry.com — which combined had 1,853,693 page views in 2009.

We have a non-fiction book proposal we can send, and have included one chapterâ€”My First Armed Robberyâ€”after our signature.

Thank you for your time and consideration. We hope to hear from you soon.

~ ~ ~

my memoir co-author co-conspirator – foto by Smith

grandma poesy

May 27, 2010 No Comments

Granny reading at open mic – foto by Smith

Here is Lady K’s 84 year old Grandmother reading at her first ever open mic in this video John Burroughs aka Jesus Crisis posted on YouTube at Grandma Poesy – 84 Yr Old Open-Mic Poetry Virgin

Granny’s reading her own poetry from a book she handmade herself.

Burroughs frequently tapes poetry readings but wasn’t recording this evening until granny came up and after her first poem whipped out his camera.

We go to a lot of readings and they eventually develop a miasmic sameness — there are 2 or 3 featured readers plus a plethora of poets for open mic, and frequently we’ve all heard each other countless times through the years; but grandma captivated all the hardened veterans and made it one of those evenings that make poetry worthwhile.

Lady K with her Grandmother – foto by Smith

sartre, kerouac, burroughs

May 26, 2010 12 Comments

sort of Sartre – foto by Smith

I first read Sartre’s Nausea 42 years ago because that’s what young outlaw intellectuals did. Didn’t much care for it but loved that I’d bagged it for my trophy wall.

Couple months ago I began rereading it because I could not remember one single thing about it except that it was supposed to be important. At first I was enchanted — it’s decent writing and this time I finally understood what he was writing about the nausea of daily life. But a third of the way through I began to tire of his eternal crying over the nothingness he calls being alive — the book is essentially a 178 page repetitive whine.

So I moved it to the bathroom and read a few pages every day. Found I started dreading opening the book even for a paragraph. But I finally almost finished the fluxer — I say almost because with 12 pages left, I accidentally left it at the Soap Opera Laundromat. When I got home and discovered I’d left it behind, my first impulse was to drive back over hoping to recover it because it’s a $13 book, but then I thought why – it’s a pain to read, Lady decided it wasn’t for her, and I definitely wouldn’t loan it to anyone because I don’t loan books I don’t like. So I decided to leave it lost, allowing someone who may need or enjoy it to find it for free.

Just like my recent reread of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, I found Nausea to be another Emperor’s classic without any clothes — there’s no there there. On the other hand I recently reread William Burroughsâ€™ Naked Lunch and while it’s still just as nasty and unpleasant as I found it 40 years ago, it still zings with originality and power whereas On the Road came across as sad and shallow, less cool than desperate.

The theme of Nausea can summed up in this one line from page 133 – “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance”.

This is a true statement, but Sartre uses it as his end point while I’ve found it is but our starting point — life does frequently suck and make no sense, so deal with it. . . instead of whining whining whining and crying crying crying about the stark dark of it all, make yourself a life that fits you, benefits you, brings you joy.

Life doesn’t have to give you gifts – life IS the gift — it’s your unwrapping of it that makes or breaks it.

Now I go on to reread Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I didn’t care for it the first time back in the early 1970’s, but this is a new translation and I’m tired of reading how great a novel it is, especially since I can’t remember word one of it, so I’m going to reread it now that I more or less have a better grasp of the complexities we call life, love, crime, literature.

I expect it’ll be my bathroom book for awhile.

PS – I may be wrong, turns out Crime and Punishment is a decent read so far.

no lub – foto by Smith

climbing, killing, and cold

May 25, 2010 6 Comments

metaphoric mountain – foto by Smith

Coming back from the Annual Rainbow Gathering last year in Arizona, Lady was too tired to drive so I kept on trucking while she read out loud to keep me awake from Arlene Blum’s Breaking Trail; a Climbing Life about her adventures as a high altitude mountain climber and her tribulations for being a female in a male dominated sport. It was a delightful book, and I enjoyed Lady’s reading to me – her voice was soothing and the story inspiring.

Lady liked it too so she found a second book to read me a few chapters each week – A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick. From the back cover summation I didn’t think I’d like it, but it’s an absolutely fascinating novel of love, lies, poison, sex, adultery, poverty, wealth, revenge, marriage and betrayal in rural Wisconsin in 1909. A remarkable book on all levels and a first novel as well.

And that led to the 50th anniversary edition of Alone by Admiral Richard E. Byrd, his account of staying five months alone at Advance Base 100 miles south of Little America in 1933 during the Antarctic winter and almost dying of carbon monoxide poisoning from the stove he used to keep from freezing in 82 degree below zero weather. The book is slow and methodical yet races like an action adventure film even though he spends five months in the same spot, doing the same things day after day and slowly dying painfully. Even though I knew he survived the ordeal because he wrote the book about his experience, I was still impatient to see what happened next and amazed how any man could live with such pain and cold.

I was also quite taken with how well he wrote for a man of action – his descriptions of the Southern Lights and the desolate landscape are perceptive and pure poetry. The man had soul.

He impressed me so much I Googled him and found some disturbing news. His initial fame was based on being the first to fly over the North Pole in 1926. But it turns out he only got about 80% of the way to the pole and turned back — possibly due to an oil leak — and lied about making it all the way, even erased conflicting data from his private journal (though not too well).

There’s ample evidence he was the first to fly over the South Pole, but if he hadn’t faked flying over the North Pole, he never would have gotten the chance to fly over the South. His whole career was based on a lie that brought him world fame and all his succeeding opportunities.

To be fair, he performed admirably on all the rest of his adventures.

And to be even fairer, who among us has not weakened and failed and lied at some point. I certainly am not perfect, unless I’m perfectly imperfect. And I have not gone on to do such daring deeds as he.

But his lie has put a speck of tarnish in my brain and a man who was a hero to me an hour ago now is just another man manipulating reality to his best advantage. Makes me wonder what he fudged in his excellent book.

Lies are Kryptonite to my Superman brain, and yet I’ve told and lived so many lies of my own I guess I’m going to have to hang up my tights and cape and get a day job as a mere human.