In your own sweet way
you deposit small and secret stickinesses
biological residues, friction ridge skin impressions
on smoother surfaces, paper collecting the taggants
of your unwitting corduroy, latent discoveries visible only
by ruthenium tetroxide equivalencies from the hunches
of intuitive photographers working in dark rooms
pulling watermarks from qt curiosities
~ Lady
I’ve started a dream file, going back through our 4,032 blogs on WalkingThinIce in search of some of my surreal dreams I started remembering during our 31 months of living in 10 foreign countries for 31 months. If I smoke grass daily, I don’t remember my dreams because they’re dumped from short term memory as I wake, but in our first 17 months of travel, I was grassless 75% of the time, only finding grass in London, blonde hash in France, and black hash in Morocco.
Here’s my first dream, in London:
dream 2006.8.10
Dream last night – we were in some steel and glass canyon of a German city and I asked Kathy where the car was. She ignored me, walked away. I was confused, went out, came back, held her arms and asked again – she laughed oddly and ran away. Finally saw the sad sad sorrow in her eyes and asked her ‘am I alive?’ She shook her head no. Asked her if my death was my fault – she angrily says “it might as well be as fast as you were driving.” Lots more, including oddly cut holes in the expensive hotel floor. Finally found out someone had killed me and I turned into Jim Carrey and the dream became a revenge movie with us tracking down my murderers and getting even.
Catching up, catsup in my ketchup, mustard in my seed. Mary E. Weems, Lady K., and I are doing a poem a day in May . . . all three of us are a few days behind schedule.
~ ~ ~
Status Report 213
Black dog chews my ego
envy eats my eye
As for this
the me you see hid in lie
Float high turd in piss
below low flow
– Smith, 5.22.2016
~ ~ ~
Spirit & Bone in Skin
Bone and Spirit forming flesh
scratch direction in the sand
to work the waking wheel
Spirit soars with wind to cloud
lifts heart to breeze
to soothe her sorrow
Bone takes flesh on flight
slides from moon to sun
to warm his marrow
Both wear it well
skin that is
under press of flesh and heel
– Smith, 5.23.2016
~ ~ ~
Pulvershnee und gipfelwind blasted off the mountain of the misty queen in slow motion hopscotch landings of math and movement. Horologists raised their heads then wound back to their meeting’s attention, clock lovers confessing cosmological consequences of switching hands whilst crystal glass melted in the gibbous cast of a painted moon. Thumb pianos flit daisy petals above a maze at the center of which – looking up at the dove transcending the abacus – dangled the silk rope and pendant pearl.
~ Lady
We write together
“What should we write,”
I ask God, “for this morning’s poem?”
Answer or preamble always the same –
“Life and love,” and then I’m inflated
with a big heave of breath
I wait then for God to expound
on this morning’s take
on the topic
When something sad happens,
God says “life” either in comment or
commiseration
When not sad I often forget
I forget to ask God what He thinks
I suspect it’s life and love
then
as well
~ Lady
The Scrambled Yegg
Scrambled eggs
I’m going to cook them in my pan today
add some salt into the play
for my stomach substance begs
Add some toast
thick with butter on one side
down my throat soon it will slide
while some coffee I do roast
Why it cooks so slow I don’t know
I’m so hungry and soon must go
Add some jam
pretty up my dismal am
mix some jelly into plan
slide down throat to belly cram
In hot butter sizzles yellow
I am such a lucky fellow
Oh I ate too much
and my stomach I do clutch
now I cannot eat my lunch
since I’ve scrambled up this bunch
– Smith, 5.21.2016
Paul McCartney said the tune to Yesterday came in a dream, and until he wrote the lyrics, he called it “Scrambled Eggs.”
Now that I’m in my 12th day of not smoking marijuana, I’m starting to remember my dreams. Daily smoking seems to dump my dreams from short term memory as I wake, and it’s been awhile since I know what I dream . . . which is a shame because they give me an idea of my psychological state.
I miss my dreams. Sometimes they are quite spectacular, surreal, way more imaginative than movies. I’m going back through our 4,028 blog posts on WalkingThinIce.com since July 2006 and reposting the special ones.
I started remembering dreams when we left the country for 31 months in 2006 because for the first 15 months, I didn’t smoke for 75% of the time since it was hard finding grass and hash in most the 10 countries we lived in on three continents . . . in fact only found smoke in London, France, Morocco, and Mexico.
~ ~ ~
Dream 11.16.2010 – Alcatraz basement.
In this short ominous dark threatening dream of sudden violence, I’m in the abandoned basement of Alcatraz prison with a bunch of dirty unwashed unshaven uncommunicative unfriendly raggedy dressed men. We sleep midst the dirt and broken stones on the floor, each man in an almost room of broken down stone wall. The surroundings look like the post-industrial decay found in The City of Lost Children or Delicatessen or Micmacs (which oddly enough are all movies by the same director).
Most everyone else is doing strange things in dug pits and then filling them up with huge broken boulders; others are threading gigantic black ribbed tubing throughout the basement, while the rest are outside laying down long yellow marking lines on top of the water, rather like a chalk line outlining a corpse, only the area is humongous and square.
In the midst of this I’m trying to get my laptop to boot up and ask another if I can use his Ethernet cord to get online, but he acts like he can’t see me, can’t hear me. I inquire of the rest what’s going on and they ignore me. When I grab one and ask directly to his face, he stares at me in silence.
I get angry and go to one of the pits they’ve worked in and then filled with rock and I secretly lift all the boulders out and discover they’ve coated the bottom with an unnaturally bright glowing pink viscous gel that is sticky to the touch and which I slightly sink into when I stand on it.
I fill the pit back in and confront them, demanding to know what’s going on and they just look at each other in silence until one presses a button and there’s a sudden WHOOOOSH and the black tubing starts filling with air, whipping dangerously about as it starts squeezing the building at its base tighter and tighter until it picks the entire prison up, jerks it through the air, and smashes it in the middle of the yellow chalk lines floating on top of the water.
Turns out the thick pink gel was waterproofing to keep the ocean from seeping into the basement.
I’m absolutely astounded to see this, in fact the shock of watching this huge building jerk out of the ground, fly through the air and violently smash into the ocean is so great I wake, sit up, shake my head in appreciative wonder, then scurry out to tell my wife, who politely listens but doesn’t seem to share my amazement much.
Be they night dreams or life dreams, dreams are hard to share.
~ ~ ~
Status Report 212
Altar ego
alters ego —
leggo, my ego.
– Smith, 5.20.2016
The coaxing of the robin before dawn
and incidental whish of raft of car on the
subliminal freeway
Train half mile away like some
thought from the land’s integration
with man
A few more rafts of cars like the wind
picking up, now someone waking up
And I’m cheered by coffee on this
Friday morning regrouping of my wits
anticipating weekend’s freedom like a
calm Christmas
~ Lady
MandyCat, 14 years old, is in the early stages of kidney failure. Doc sez she’ll be around for a year minimum, logically longer.
Strange how ties bind. When we left the country in 2006 for three years in other lands, we had to giove Lady’s cat 3po to her brothers because he was not up to travel. It was hard. So when we came back, aware we wanted to travel again if we can ever find a few pennies to keep, we decided to get a loaner cat we could give back if we left.
I tell you true, ain’t no such thing as a loaner cat. She owns us heart and mind. I’ve got my two best friends right here – Lady and MandyCat – and cannot fathom losing either.
I’ve got two sweeties, hundreds of fotos of each, and myriad poems about both. I am changed for the better due to the two.
~ ~ ~
Thoughts on the Product Line
Um
Uuuuuummmmmmm
I chant to Great Cosmic
Umbilical Cord In The Sky
somewhere over the rainbow
under the skin
dissolving inner sin
with mother’s milk
and father’s silk
such ilk
praying lost chord found
so prey unbound
as God plod trod
in sound
Save me from myself
– Smith, 5.19.2016
Moon Over Miasma, 17″ x 19″ x 3″,
5.2016, Smith
Conversation with Wife 26
Why always yesterday, never noterday?
Miles Davis had serious competition,
a European named Kilometer Davis
Before stair well, stair was unwell
so we called the step-doctor
Grapes reincarnate as raisins
politicians as fertilizer
You my hot mama, or mahatma ma?
Doctor Doctor gimme the blues
I gotta bad case of news voodoo
In my next life I was either
a fig newton or Isaac Newton
I’m half a chamomile from the mountain
two chamomiles from the sea
Why is it menopause, not womenopause?
– Smith, 5.18.2016
Moon Over Miasma, 17″ x 19″ x 3″,
5.2016, Smith
Was on TV briefly thanks to David C. Barnett’s warehouse segment on NPR/WVIZ’s IDEAS show last Friday.
The 5 minute segment starts around 14:20 in the link below, and I have a minute 17 seconds of face time for illegally living in a downtown warehouse from 1981 to 85. I bookend the segment at 14:50-15:25 and 18:38-19:20, so I’ve still got 13+ minutes of Warholian fame ahead of me.
I see from the video that I walk funny (possibly due to artificial hip and talking sideways while walking) and I look old (possibly due to being 70), but it was worth it for my “This is my Paris” ending comment as I point up to the 4th floor of the Bradley Building warehouse on the corner of West 6th and Lakeside.
It was interesting seeing myself from outside myself. I look friendly.
Unfortunately my first TV appearance is in the same program that features right-wing Ohio Governor and failed Republican Presidential candidate John Kasich, a man who takes from the poor, poisons the unfortunate with fracking waste, and sucks up to the rich. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, but folk like him make me hope I’m wrong.
~ ~ ~
They Best Stop Eating Our Cake
I need a poem
a major po em.
Well, Edgar Poe was an am
and a major is is he.
No slasher or splatterer be
but slow terror-ier of the seen.
Darkness is before the light
but darkness is, light or night.
Back then horror came from thought
now fear’s from sick social naught
From whites who hate and fear the black
from rich who feed in front of lack
From wanting more than arm can hold
form worshiping the weight of gold.
Sick flux flowing over us
as we’re thrown under the bus
By the rich encrusting top
whose greedy gulping never stops
Who shat wherever they do sit
and order us to clean up it.
But who will clean the streets of blood
when with force we clean the hood?
I leave you in this minor key
their lie will die, or learn to see.
– Smith, 5.17.2016
