AD.

WALKING ON THIN ICE

wave waft weft woof


Lady’s kitchen Tibetan prayer flags – foto Smith

Apartment 3 & We

Walk up 4 sections of stairs
thru 3rd floor door
5th flight to plant and window and art
then 6th to final see
of loop de looped
Tibetan prayer flags
25 strung in welcome home
rollin’ ‘n risin’
a 5-colored rainbow row
waving in window breeze
or flail of fan
wafting our hand-written prayers
in weft and woof to heaven’s ear
while silent we wait for solace

I stand beneath the flutter
blow over and over
up and up
waking our wants with my wind

PRAYER:
happiness for Lady K
SENDER:
her favorite human
PRAYER:
Hope 4 the children. Fairness in the heart
SENDER:
the body vehicle my am inhabits
PRAYER:
May I be worthy, fair, compassionate
SENDER:
over-egoed
PRAYER:
may all these wantings come true
SENDER:
me

Wave, waft, weft, woof

— Smith 7.21.2012


Rainbow row – foto Smith

Lady’s Granny


Lenore Ireland (Granny) & Lady, 2010

Dark cloud horizon
Rain falls on wife’s Grandmother
Must bring her our sun

— Smith 7.20.2012


Lenore Ireland reading her poetry at Visible Voice Books with Lady, 2010

Community Supported Agriculture

CSA veggies

Week 7 of our CSA haul – GFF serves Lake, Geauga and Ashtabula Counties

The jam & honey were ordered outside of the week’s share

Night Tide


Midnight sun – foto Smith

Night Tide

Beneath midnight sun
aurora borealis
one sky breath away

— Smith 2009


Sun flare – foto Smith

$uper$old


Super seek – foto Smith

$uper$old

“The true light is at the bottom of the funnel”
sang sweet Alice as she fell
out of Madam’s darkroom
after one too many mushrooms
with no knowledge of the knell
pelting past the unplugged tunnels
to the land of $uper$ell.

“It only important if it affects the cave,”
the Caterpillar coos
simper smile slipping in his dollar drool
he fingerslips your wallet
your money microsized
ramming down your gullet
the latest of new lies
freshly come from $uper$ly.

There’s money in the mountains
much more money in the sea
supposed to seep to seeker
in this land of money tree
better bow to golden beacon
than hang amongst the meek
who know not what they beckon
when bringing home the bacon
here in $uper$eek.

— Smith 7.18.2012


Super sold – foto Smith

Jump Start Cable


B4 – collage & foto Smith

Jump Start Cable

Slowed, down, disabled
I take my first four sips of pre-dawn coffee
one for each direction
season
heart ventricle
space-time dimension
feel the caffeine bless my bones
restart my clones
rev up my owns
begin interest ticking on today’s life loan
as I and I in I alone
atone
for past koans missed in the mist
lost in the loam
begin again reality roam
seeking return to higher home
where soul whole
mess less
groovy grail pre Big Bang one-ness
hung high somewhere in sky
where we rejoin in final sum
consumed in zone
instead of being just one of the poems

— Smith 7.16.2012


After – collage & foto Smith

Do wop and rattle, do rap and roll


Redline – foto Smith

New Ball & Smith song — and no, this ain’t the 1957 Ricky Nelson song of the same title . . . it’s more of a sexual bop >>> Be-Bop Baby.

Be-Bop Baby

Do wop and rattle, do rap and roll
you gurgle my girdle, fine flux my flow.
Smile for me baby, give me a grin
been lonesome lately, been wanting back in.
Grip on my gripper, zipper my chin
prepare you pure proper for serious sin.
Wrap my poor rattle in your jelly roll
my pretty petal your saddle to sow.

Wake to the wonder of thunder and thyme
the rosemary plunder in rhythm of rhyme

Grip on my gripper, zipper my chin
prepare you pure proper for serious sin.
Wrap my poor rattle in your jelly roll
my pretty petal your saddle to sow.
Petal to mental then mental to mime
in most elemental pleasure sublime.
So work with me baby, work till we whine
work till we’re gravy and wavy in line.

Working in wonder for thunder and thyme
rosemary plunder of rhythm and rhyme

— Smith, July 13, 2012

Music, mix, recording Peter Ball; words, voice me.


DNA dance – foto Smith

Alice Cooper, Tiny Tim & me


Cool, man – foto Smith

In the early seventies I went backstage to interview Bill Haley of the Comets. The usher took me back and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Haley, this man’s here to interview you for the paper.” Haley looked me in the eye and said, “Go away, kid. I’m counting my money.” And that was it. The sad part is I could have interviewed Little Richard instead of a pudgy man who looked like a used-car salesman.

I was at a radio station to interview Alice Cooper and his opening act, Flo and Eddy, who were half of the Turtles and who also played with Frank Zappa. The radio station supplied dope and we all got wonderfully stoned. Alice Cooper was cold and kept insulting fans who called in, while Flo and Eddy, who also recorded as Phosphorescent Leech and Eddy, were warm, funny and friendly, absolutely marvelous folk to be around.

As I left the radio station stoned and without an interview with Alice Cooper, I encountered a parking lot full of screaming teenyboppers. A little girl ran up to me and breathlessly asked, “Are you somebody?”

“No, I’m nobody.”

Got drunk with Paul Williams who had written a bunch of hit songs for other people, such as We’ve Only Just Begun for the Carpenters, and who had a couple hits himself. He was very funny, and very short. He ordered up a box of French white wine, tore it open, and we spent the afternoon talking about Hobbits. He wanted to play one in the movies.

I interviewed Tiny Tim when he was broke and reduced to touring backyard honkytonks. I watched his act, and after he went through his normal routine of Tiptoe thru the Tulips and the vaudeville jokey stuff, he went into a fifty song medley: one song would be from 1890, the next a Credence Clearwater Revival rock tune. After the show I told him, “I’m blown away. I think you’re a genius.” He was so hungry for recognition, he took the tape recorder out of my hand and for 45 minutes he talked and sang into it. He did a Bob Dylan song in Rudy Vallee’s voice, then a Rudy Vallee song in Bob Dylan’s voice.

He told me about a party in New York City where he opened a closet and found George Harrison in a cloud of marijuana smoke. He said he was ripped off by his managers and was flat broke—they’d stolen everything. Every now and then his wife, Miss Vicky, would try to get him off to do something else and he’d brush her away. After my time was up, the manager came in and said, “Mr. Tim, there’re only six people waiting for the next show. Do you want to cancel?”

Tim said, “I don’t care if there’s only one person in the audience. I’m going on.”

He wrote his address in my notebook and made me promise to send him the review, which turned out to be a front page piece. I wrote what a genius he was but then I never mailed it to him. Man needed it. I promised it. I didn’t deliver, and it still shames me.

— excerpt from Stations of the Lost & Found by Smith & Lady, available for sale in about a month


Rock stare – foto Smith

Born in Bitterroot, raised on Paradise Prairie


Front cover – foto Smith

Our proof-reading copy of my memoir arrived yesterday. I’m tearing through it fixing typos and occasionally shuddering wondering what folk are going to think of this early me mixture of the weak and the wild.

But as I said before, it took that less-than-stellar me to get me to this somewhat better me, and this me is fair and decent most the time, so it’s the it it is. Of course some of my in-laws are going to see me differently once this is published.

Of course anyone who reads the back cover blurb has no excuse for being suprised.

Drug orgies, massive refindings of reality,
the acceptance of interdimensions. Errant
life scout, cultural adventurer, perception
tester, court jester, inner seeker, reality
adjuster, flow surfer, servant and searcher
of Other.

Born in Bitterroot, raised on Paradise
Prairie, farm boy, car thief, Naval
Academy, expelled for dope, society
marriage, armed robbery, jail, illegal loft
dweller, Artcrimes, rat attacks, overdose,
celibate, remarried, expat. Ran from the
cops ten times, got away nine.

Available for sale sometime next month. Cover and book design by Lady; cover foto a manipuated Polaroid by Smith.


Back cover – foto Smith

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ENERGY JOBS

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ENERGY JOBS

These will be healing, and fun. We’ll be zipping around, yet plodding or stationary as required. Reduced hardship, the promise of civilization, the idea implicit. That which we read about through columns and our colored plates.

Let me tell you more about 21st Century energy jobs. It’s a real deal, the whole package, based on new green energy. This new green energy means people have to work less unless they want to work more. This new green energy provides jobs and leisure, distributed to everyone, fabric from the thread. Cultivated.

It helps animals roll, too, such that they follow the opening of the widened corridors left to let. Sprouting nature through variegated patter, breath showing tapestry, jaw interlocking into flank when that fits the weft, or feathered heads rubbing loving, woof. Et cetera.

Our new green energy intimates, “Everyone is to have at least three months of rest and vacation every rotation around the sun.”

This new green energy says, “Thou shalt be paid for poetry.”

This new green energy says, “Thou shalt be paid for oration.”

This new green energy says, “Thou shalt be paid for riding your bike to get organic fruits and vegetables.”

This new green energy says, “Thou shalt be paid for taking walks in woods.”

This new green energy says, “Thou shalt be paid for raising your family.”

This new green energy says, “Thou shalt be paid in every way we can pay you.”

Twenty-twentying before twenty-twenty, people, animals, dream.

We had our oil lamp dreams. Yellow like yellow sun. The oil light flickers, the coal light flickers, the gas light flickers, but sun doesn’t flicker, it licks.

The old sad viscous liquid energy underground.

It created a lot of containers and forms. Forms from itself. Forms that we could eat and drink from. It was everywhere. It created joy from time to time. It burgeoned us. It increased crop yields. The old energy didn’t realize it would explode us.

Sad, that old viscous energy of the large monoculture crop harvesting machines.

That old fossil energy we loved, we are to use less and less of. Old fossil energy, please do not turn fertilizers that burden, pesticides not needed.

Sad, that old fossil energy diffracted into 300 plastic chemicals in a newborn baby’s body.

Old coal, be done unspent. Let mountain remain mountain. We need not misuse. We can hurdle over unbroke remnant grace. Old fossil energy, may we use you less and less. Please remain dormant, let yourself rest. Sequester yourself from temptation. Gone wrong, it was, wad it up.

Winner took all took too much, old energy. Winner took all saw you diffracted into air that it didn’t bother to filter. We are shining a light into this, we are finding pollutants we’ll no longer hide behind the treeline, tipped past the vertex around the corners, bubbling behind the bends. We are to clean up what we’ve messed.

Winner took all lost itself, old energy. Winner took all could not find itself. Winner took all was a lonely place to be. Winner took all can not flicker into islands, gates and guards. Winner took all can not sequester into self imposed prisons through which air would flower into sicknesses of sheltered existences.

Winner took all can not hide behind gates–the gates are sirens. The gates are guarded by alarms that ring. Winner took all, please give yourself up. We know you are giving yourself up, winner took all. Buffet, Soros, Gates… Buffet and Soros and Gates are giving themselves up. Good for them that got and saw that they’d got too much. Good for them who got hot dog god to do good.

We, the human animals, are to follow the whirl of the grain of the promise that this Ness dreams for us.

The whirl that whisks us away from nightmares, past temptation.

The whirl that creates round tables, the whirl that creates constitutions.

The whirl that creates the Lower Middle Class Ethic, not as an ethic of the oppressed but an ethic of the blessed.

Let’s all have that ethic. Let’s let loose the stuff, let us employ in productive technologies that appreciate, repair, iterate over and sift. Clean, think, do. Make amends. Blend. Work wonders.

Earth is not a car with a depreciating blue book value. Earth is a space ship. Earth is a space ship and we have what we need to fly around the sun and the sun has what it needs to fly around its rotation, too. The solar system is a spaceship. We are being rescued. We are rescuing ourselves.

~ Lady