Vinaigrette Vignettes
Just had a brain spasm. Lady and I are together most 24/7/260. Sitting here reading, I listened and tried to locate her. Nothing. Looked up. Computed situation: daylight – late afternoon – is she running? taking bath? nap? hair? at work? – wait, am I supposed to be doing something? or have done by now? – brain jerks along until “Saturday” cog finally pops in place and I realize it’s monthly Rufus poetry workshop day and Lady and Kimmy Bones went on afterward to Root Cafe to share mindroot – so all runs well, grid girds time’s purpose and place cuz Lady is located in thyme and taste and I am not the designated flux-up, so surf go flow well.
And the Godz laugh.
You really cannot trust anything, no matter how competent and solid looking it appears. For more than 6 years each time we’ve turned on the kitchen water and moved the faucet to the right, it unscrewed a tiny bit at the base. Today I turn on the water, move the faucet, and it falls off into the sink, and I get a face full of shooting geyser. Woke me right up with a laugh. Special moment. Reality has a sense of humor. Sometimes.
Friday night in the basement performance space of Guide to Kulchure’s used book store I was going to read the last line from an 8 minute libretto Akron poet Steve Smith had written for an operetta Rob Jackson wrote about killer Gary Gilmore. Akron Smith read in Cleveland last winter and some folk went thinking he was me, so Rob thought we could play with the two Steve Smiths by having Akron Smith sit down without reading the last line and I’d stand up and recite it instead.
This was to happen at 7:30. Things went bad, music computer files went missing, the later acts went on first, and at 9pm I had to leave to take Lady home for her 7:30m bedtime, so poet Ray McNiece said he would pretend to be me and do it in my place. My line was “Gary Gilmore is a human building demolished, slumped in a box, a wrecking ball for a tie tack, the sun embalmed and glassy to the mourner’s eye.”
While waiting, Lady went down the street and had her nose pierced.
