Life Ain't Easy

Morning Gold

—Poetry and Visuals by Smith, Cleveland, OH

BUSY SIGNAL

I broadcast from my ground zero.

You receive from your ground zero.

Ground varies point A to B
assuming common ground at all.

What I transmit retrieved by you
may be garbled by flux and flow.

Or said right yet heard wrong—
wrong by chance,
wrong on purpose to repurpose say.

You may hear well and clear yet still unhear
because your here not my here,
your hear unsaid.

You may clear hear wrong song
or near hear err way.

I may not know what I say
but say I know.

I fall to ground.

You call ground home.

 Accident

THE VALIDITY OF RELATIONSHIPS

Full moon

Dead
Moonlight drips
Drips down
Moistening
Dead realities
Dead realty
Dripping down
Motioning
Dead
Dead
Realities
Dread reality

The moon is moist in Autumn
Great, rotund.

 Smokescreen

DEATH DANCE

Take one crisis forward
Two disasters back
Do the death dance baby
Spin the man in black

Don’t you mind the drooling
Or the puddles on the floor
I don’t care who you’re fooling
Death destructs the poor

And way before you’re dying
You creak and crack and groan
Then comes along the diapering
The one-way ticket rest home

Where drenched in piss and TV
You’re just one more peopled pod
I tell you life ain’t easy
With or without your God

 Dead End

FUNGU STEW

Old piano roll’s wrong:
Slime can’t slide.
Hot crotch coffee time's
Limited clearance
For the effluent affluent,
The halfway whores,
The herd nerd cud kulchur,
And the old ass versus mass. 

Psycho servitudes feed the fever,
Fodder optional.
Prime apes ape pre ape,
Mom's ashes my dust.
People getting fat.
Soft.
Old.
Luxury cushioned
Nurture negating nature.
Easy pickings.
Easy meat.
Easy feeding easy street.

Women leak.
Men bleed.
My country 'tis of greed,
Cleveland cop corruptus.
Onion nation bent on killing shame.
Sodom insane.

 Cateye

FERTILE LIES

Small particles of truth lace love’s lies

Peeping one-eyed cat’s seafood stores
mount used two-love carnivore rides
cast past sated loss

Self-to-self slip service schemes for the day
emasculation Mama stiff with semen
screams dreams porta piss shit machine
messaged me to mine

Bile regenerative truth du jour:
loving spoonful’s pearl jam
nirvana to my hole 

 Rust Never Sleeps

ECO SYPHILIS

This earth rolls old through fading sun
as all partake of all
yet few return from feeder's lure or feathered palm
interest on said sin

Let other purse our sloth rehearse
refresh without refrain
for fascists flee from failed fight
to worshipped imagery
which doubted doubles pain

When tables turn
most mock concern
and ramble on in shackles
dogs of dust neglecting trust
entranced by past disasters

Since truth be known
by no known tome
until enhanced and factored
let's be done with rough rerun
membrane's sour remorse
pre-paid replies
defacto lies
return our lives to act/or.

 Wetwood

DEATH BY CREDIT CARD

Her body old,
her weight gone,
frame down to bone and fur
her love for us still bright,
she was done,
had had it,
cancer,
pain.

She rubbed unsteady against my ankles,
looked up
and howled piteously for release.

I felt shame
because I hadn't loved her enough
to kill her yesterday.

Next day we lay her on vet's table
on a warm blanket,
pet her awhile,
and talked.

I knelt
and we locked eyes,
the tip of my finger
between the pads of her paw
as she held me.

When the drug hit
I saw no fear,
she just looked up and away
in brief startle,
and was gone.

Such a small creature
for so immense an impact,
blackhole of loss.

First time I've paid to have love killed
and we had to put it on credit.

 1ststep

BIRD WALK TOXIN TALK, DIKE 14, CLEVELAND

We walked a bird walk guided talk today
on 88 acres of peninsula,
land carved from Lake Erie water
by 20 years of dredged river muck dumped
from the bottom of the Cuyahoga River,
silt and dirt and toxins and runoffs
from the industrial flats,
chemical poisons from steel mills
and coal and asphalt and salt and sewer
and chemist only knows what
taken from the bottom of a river that caught fire
and burned for two hours in 1969,
a river described by its 1880 mayor as
a sewer that runs through the heart of the city,
a river first fired in 1868 and then burned repeatedly
before its multi-million dollar 1952 inferno,
all ignored until ’69 when white national reporters
asked America's first large-city black mayor
just what he was going to do about it
so he cleaned it up
showing Congress and country it could be done
igniting the nation's clean air and water act
leading to boating riverside dock bars
and Goodtime cruises,
though I still wouldn't drink it, or even swim
(thank you Mayor Carl Stokes),
and today we walked river muck reclaimed
by grass and plants and trees and time
and seeds shat by birds and mammal
and blown by wind,
we saw loon, towhees, tree sparrows,
over a dozen great blue herons,
more redwing blackbirds than I've seen in my life,
egret, robins, mallards, crows, seagulls, tern,
flickers that used to be called yellow-shafted flickers
until they changed the names to sell more books,
song sparrows, blue-gray gnatcatchers, falcon,
fox sparrows doing their back ’n forth shuffle dance,
a yellow-rumped warbler, downy woodpeckers,
cooper’s hawk, redtail hawk, turkey vultures, cowbirds,
morning doves, and blackbirds
all amidst a constant chorus of birdsong
with solos by angel-wing butterflies, poison hemlock,
deer, wild cucumber, boxelder,
and a host of birds plants trees butterflies I missed
and I gotta tell you
it's a nice this

 Skywatch

Today’s LittleNip:

There's shouldn't
and there's is—
some die so some live

—Smith

____________________

Thank-you and grateful to The Smith (Steven B. Smith) from cross-country for sparkling poems and visuals today—always glad to hear him pop into the Kitchen!

This is, indeed, the time of the Internet. Here is some interesting stuff to check out on Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/?category=invites&notif_id=1589985453104751&notif_t=page_invite/.

In our area, two online readings tonight: At 6:30pm, Sac. Poetry Center presents a reading featuring Laurel Rayburn, Rick Rayburn, and Marty Rayburn (https://us02web.zoom.us/j/98450376585). And then at 8pm, Poetry Night in Davis presents Liliana Valdez, León Salvatierra, and Francisco Aragón via Zoom at ucdavisdss.zoom.us/my/andyojones/. For upcoming poetry readings and workshops available online while we stay at home, scroll down to the blue column (under the green column at the right) for info—and note that more may be added at the last minute.

—Medusa

 Ozsmith

—Visual by Smith

Photos in this column can be enlarged by
clicking on them once, then clicking on the x
in the top right corner to come back to Medusa.