AD.

WALKING ON THIN ICE

fickle fackle


solve – foto by Smith

Life’s a sweet deal with a raw deal hidden within
Then a raw deal with sweet sin ridden again

The problem with waking in the morning ecstatic from a joyous dream that lifts you in wonderment and paints your day in golden glow is there’s only one way to go — down.

Yesterday’s blog blogged my happy dream, and my natural high resulting from it slowly ebbed during my morning ritual of reading the news, and enduring the heat and humidity, and was finally dulled by ending the evening watching a mediocre movie — The Happening (M. Night Shyamalan, 2008).

Today was basically a good day — Lady and I did chores and talked and shared and she finished editing the book of Wendy Shaffer’s poetry she’s publishing via her The City Poetry Press. Wendy is one of my two favorite living poets (faux modesty prevents me from naming the second).

But I made the mistake of reading this morning’s news in depth, then reading the latest Alex Cross detective novel by James Patterson (which approaches torture porn), and then actually going back and reading the evening news in depth again.

All of it of course on the heat-trapped third floor on a day in the upper 80s with the humidity in the 70s with no air conditioning except for our bedroom at night.

It’s getting weird out there folks — weirder than a snake oil convention in a broke down Bible van. Folks running for the Senate are calling each other Dark Lords and Anti-Christs and Nazis and Baby Killers and worse. The liars are lying and the cheaters are cheating and the stealers are stealing and the killers are killing and the supposed Christians got their fingers stuck in all of it with the most God-awful Godlessness.

It’s madness, and today it sucked my sunshine away. I think because I was so happy yesterday I expected it to flow over to today and when it didn’t I got down.

Thank Goodness for my Lady and our cat who through it all still provide a smile and heart hum and reason to be.

So I go from a pain blog on Monday to an ecstatic happy blog on Tuesday to a minor loss of hope in and for humanity blog today Wednesday. You all are going to start thinking I’m a fickle fackle, but facts are faxed and the faux needs to be fixed, fled, or forgotten.

I may have to stop reading the news. Like the pilots sorta said in the movie Airplane, this was a bad year to give up grass.

You can smell madness
It pours from the pits, the eyes,
the words that ring wrong


policy – foto by Smith

written perplexedly fast and punny


sunarise – foto by Smith

So much joy this morning, which is astounding after yesterday’s darkness and resultant pain blog. Now that I’ve searched my 47 years of poetry for the word pain, I’ll have to see how often words like joy, laughter, goodness, wonder, happy appear. The joy’s even more amazing because I’m still thrice hurting with yesterday’s physical body pain and will be for awhile.

Haven’t been smoking grass lately. Simply can’t afford it up here in America on my fixed income — what costs $300-$400 an ounce up here was $6 down in Oaxaca. Plus I could buy opium there for $2 a gram which completely stops pain, and that ain’t even an option up here. But my bodymind needed a break anyway, so need and circumstance co-conspired.

When I smoke daily, my short term dream buffers seem emptied when I awake and I can’t remember a darn thing. A few segments have been poking through lately though as the grass wears off, and they weren’t all that nice – more fear and worry warts than bursts of sunshine, so I was a wee bit fearful what my dreams would show.

Yet by not being my normal assholish selfish self, I just had the most joyous dream I’ve ever had and woke the happiest I’ve ever awakened.

This morning Lady woke at 1:15 with anxiety – she has an office workshop to give this morning to potential customers on how to incorporate online social networks into their business model, and the natural stress of speaking and teaching wound her up to such a point that sleep fled. Then the air conditioner was too loud, a bit of nausea crept in, her period made her achy and bloated, she was desperate for sleep, and she just felt bloody awful knowing that in hours she had to perform — or else.

And for once I didn’t make things worse with my selfishness.

Told her her fear and worry were extremely logical, but I knew she knew she knew her subject well. And when she thought maybe she’d drink a beer and try to go back to sleep, Doctor Smith suggested she make a rum and coke instead, and in fact why didn’t she take one of her tranquilizers that help her sleep. She said they’d make her too foggy in the morning and I exclaimed “Not if we cut one in half.”

She sat on the kitchen floor in low kitchen sink light on the Persian carpet she’d hauled back from someone’s trash on one of her runs, drank her drink and popped her half pill while I sat in a chair yawning and saying good things gently. For some reason I felt no resentment about being awakened and no worry about her as we sat and talked and yawned and petted the cat.

Went back to bed and rubbed her back back to sleep and found I was unable to sleep so came out on the couch so my tossing and twitching wouldn’t disturb her and fell into the happiest most wonderful dream of my life.

Of course I can bring little of it back but anyone who has seen the dark grim live-action fairy tale movie The City of Lost Children has a starting point — take all that dark, odd, surreal bleakness and keep the odd and night and surreal but change all the tears and pain to joy and happy outcomes and there you go.

Dream started here in our apartment in real-time – 2:00 in the morning. We had a couple guests who were getting way too loud and boisterous and I tried quieting them because folk in the apartments below would be disturbed.

Suddenly Lady and I are in a mental institution dark and gothic with odd unfunctioning inmates catatonic in the dark halls, yet we weren’t locked up but there to party, and party we did. The crazy folk laughed and played tag with us and we all broke bottles of medicine and made such a raucous noise we attracted the guard who got scared and ran for help so I told us all to run away through the corridors and clean it all up before he could bring the Mind Police down upon us.

We picked up pills and put them back in their broken bottles and laughed and danced and created smoke with our minds to fill the halls to confuse the normals chasing us and even the most catatonic inmate broke out of their shells and helped and talked and laughed and we all ran around in joy and fixed it all so when the fixated normals came there was nothing wrong except the crazies weren’t crazy anymore.

There was so much wonderfulness I awoke amazed, thanked the Universe for this gift and begged to be allowed to bring a little of it back in my memory. Awaking in such wondrous joyful happiness I realized I needed to go back into Lady’s bed and lie next to her so some of the sheer goodness would seep into her as she slept. When I got to the bedroom, our cat was sprawled next to Lady in my place so I stroked her and picked her up in both palms and she just lay there in my hands trusting and unmoving as I laid her at Lady’s feet where she normally sleeps and she purred and I lay next to Lady and went to sleep. When she awoke at 5:15 I hugged her and said good morning gorgeous and she said she dreamed of music, and thanked me for being so nice in the night and helping her get over her anxiety and back to sleep.

The folks in the mental institution weren’t crazy so much as had gotten a bit too close to the Oneness of the Universe and it’s hard to balance having one foot in Heaven while living in Hell so they had to be locked away for lack of functionality in this malfunctioning whorl we call world. And when they were freed from judgment and became our fellow party partners and co-conspirators and accomplices in messing the Fix then fixing the Mess, their real saneness and goodness and impish clownishness burst through and we were all one joyous mass of seductive productive sanity.

If I can keep just a little of this dream with me it will change me and my life for the better. And I believe I was given this dream because for once in my small meager selfish ego-driven life I felt not an iota of any of that when Lady awoke me in anxiety and angst but instead felt calm and helpful and concerned and loving for another who needed exactly that.

There is magic. We just don’t know how to access it and usually fail to understand it when it appears.

It’s not we in the mental institution who are crazy – we’re locked up because we’re not crazy enough to be let loose in this insane world.

True class lies in being clown. True happiness lies in denying the frown. There’s enough goodness and food and water and money for all on this Ball of All. All we need to do is laugh down the frown. Don’t heed the greed. Don’t seed and breed need. Don’t let power flower. Don’t fall for the fake or the failed’s take.

Reality is what we make it consensually – Heisenberg and Quantum Physics say so. One smile can defeat a thousand snarls. Schrodinger’s cat’s life or death is up to us – we just gotta look the right way, see the safe scene, malfunction man’s maiming machine.

We can turn this thing around, run our game on better ground.

~ ~ ~

PS – Lady just returned early from her pre-dawn five-mile run saying “I only did one loop because I had to come back to poop, then I’ll do another.”

“So that’s your strategy huh – loop and poop?”

Maybe that’s our answer – loop the poop and graph the laugh.

May your morning be as merry as mine. And may mine linger.


Lady’s brother Corey’s t-shirt – foto by Smith

pain plane


out of order – foto by Smith

My body and I are living down to my own poetry today.

Been in a bit of extra pain from a five year old muscle injury because I’m trying to exercise it away; plus my back spasmed from too much couch potato lap topping; and my dentist-loosened tooth is getting looser and tenderer because I keep forgetting not to chew on it; so I thought I’d go through my poetry and quote any line that used the word “pain.”

Found a lot more than I expected.

In the earlier years (these quotes span at least 38 years), most the “pains” were used in a metaphorical or social or philosophical sense, but as my badly-used-along-the-way body aged, more and more of the “pain” usage referenced actual physical pain.

Plus I’m always in mental pain because most times I’m the person I like least, even though there’s no one else I’d rather be than me. Go figure.

So let the pains begin.

“I look to pain to gain” – Alone This Train

“Won’t ease your pain of killing shame” – Bad Bush George

“then execute, and wait for pain” – Blood Diamond Sutra

“Daily pain begins’ – Easter Mountain, Mexico

“which doubted doubles pain” – Eco Syphilis

“While sipping the pain blackened cup” – Heroin

“In Xeroxed pain” – I’m For Falling

“Per ache and pain” – O Zone

“In the Church of Not Quite So Much Pain & Suffering” – Plant Shepherd

“It is pain and piss” – Quantum Cookie

“getting through the day in pain” – Quantum Cookie

“My outside pain” – Rainbow Rain

“Through pockets of pain” – Serial Cereal

“Receiving Laertes’ pain poisoned harangue” – Suicide Note

“Morpheusly oblivious of pain” – Suicide Note

“Part and partial pain” – The New Drool Blues

“Pains main stain” – To The Mad Poet

“Taped in pain and spam” – To The Mad Poet

“Art as r pain as 1 print” – Two Week Vacation

“Now is pain of then” – Unfortunate Cookie

“Pain from one end to the other” – White Boy Blues

“nothing is free / pay / or pain” – Working Class Warfare Blues

“Easier to accept the pain of the udder” – Zen Lesson

“This drivel due mad jolting sane pain” – 21st Century Schizoid Man

And I’ll end with

63 Years of Wear & Tear

Pain walking, pain not
Pain sitting in pain pain’s lot
Pain sleeping, pain knot

Hope all this hasn’t caused you too much pain. Sometimes I agree with my dead mother — Hell is life on Earth, and pain is our punishment.

Of course I’m not sure what my crime was, other than being born.

Guess that’s called Original Sin.


“never give up, never surrender” – foto by Smith

lines left over


street trash – foto by Smith

Another harvest from my pocket notebook — lines connected solely by being bound by the same covers and back pocket.

Lines Left Over
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

What is the capital of I? — Me

What is the present tense of Iowas? — Iowis

I used to go with Big Jump’s daughter — Small Bounce

I’m consumed with licking what one wishes rather than looking at what is.

Jealousy is my daughter, fathered on ego out of fright.

Water light butterflies dancing on the Winter Blues.

The color twixt the claw and the quick.

Laughing in a room alone. (said by Wendy Shaffer)

Bee Bibles. (said by Lady K)

My wife was named after her mother’s friend who was killed walking across a train track trestle.

And one or all of the three of us said, “Democracy? Why should we be ruled by the masses when they’re just pawns of the assholes?


the Winter Blues – foto by Smith