Bud Smith's Blog: Bud Smith , page 10

two poems 75th street and 78th street

It was a strange weekend, here are two poems about my weekend. There are more coming from this series. We started out on 75th street and made some stops on the way until we hit 173rd around midnight.

75th Street



my wife and I go day-drinking

in the city on a Saturday

and wind up in a bar that has a TV movie

on in the corner, but the sound down

there is also candy at the bar, so we are eating

Reese’s buttercups and Almond Joys for lunch

like adults

I point at the juke box and say, ‘Last time I was in here

there were these Portuguese exchange students

and they kept giving me quarters

and had me picking all the songs for them, so know what I did?’

‘you played all the long long songs and kept their quarters

when they got tired of listening to this is the end my only friend,

this is the end and finally left, thinking

America officially sucks, America is depressing …’

‘How’d you know that?’

‘You tell me that story every time we’re drunk here’

‘All coming back to me now’

there are board games in the corner too

but all the pieces are missing, so if you go to play

Clue, the weapons are missing and half

of Mrs. Peacock has been ripped off, the rest is sticky

the bartender suddenly does something

to the TV and there is noise now

and there is flashing

Horses.

Horses on the TV. And bright banners and jockies.

‘Oh look at this! The Belmont Stakes!’

‘So?’

‘So, we actually have money on this race

—guy at work put it in. Twenty bucks.’

My wife leans forward in her chair

I squint at the TV, ‘Number 5 horse, American Pharaoh.’

The race starts and everybody stops eating candy

and stops losing pieces to Jenga and to Monopoly

and they stare at the TV, and they cheer

as the horses launch out of the gate

I can’t believe that our horse is in the lead

and stays in the lead the whole time

“WE WON!!!!” my wife yells

“WE DID!!!”

“WHAT’D WE WIN!!!!”

I take my phone out and look at what the odds

are paying out from the post

we bet something called a superfecta

and I don’t understand superfecta

just like I don’t understand:

mercury in retrograde

pheromones

active listening

rechargeable batteries

spandex-bicycle-people

compound interest

trumpet

but then I see the payout

‘WE WON $8.50!!!’

I open an Almond Joy

she opens a Clark bar

we bite into the candy

‘How did you know the kids were from Portugal?’

‘They all had on shirts that said Portugal on them’

‘Dead giveaway.’ She sips her beer, ‘Would you wear

a shirt that said America on it in Portugal?’

‘Send me to Portugal, I’ll wear whatever’

the channel is flipped

back to the TV movie

there is smoke now in the TV movie, pink smoke

and someone singing a love song

in a cemetery I think

it gets cooler though

when the lion leaps into the frame.

78th Street

I’m embarrassed of the T-shirt I have on

it’s the crappiest T-shirt I own

black pocket t, too short, belly almost out

the sun dips behind a building

in the shadow my wife takes my hand

and I remember when she used to smoke

American Spirit cigarettes and  I used

to run every night across the bridge

listening to my headphones

we were assholes then

I like us better now

at the intersection

there is a beautiful couple

she is in a green dress, tall

blonde, leaning on him

and he is in a black polo shirt

with aviators and $400 shoes

they are walking two beautiful dogs too

fuck them all, I just had

candy bar lunch at Dive 75

and they look they’re on the way to

eat oysters and—wait, the light

has changed and they are crossing

but the girl in the green dress

looks suddenly wobbly

and ah shit—there she goes

down in the middle of the intersection

and she’s lying on her back

the dogs gathered around her

sniffing at their mother

blonde hair covering her face

her legs are bleeding

my wife grabs the girl’s purse

she stands there holding the purse

and the man in the black polo

is crouching down and saying

‘honey honey honey, get up …’

the dogs think it’s play time

but the girl’s eyes are flickering

and then I see the man in the polo

wobble and almost fall off his knees

he’s fucked up too!

right now my wife and I

are the most sober people on

78th street

my wife sets the purse down

I pull the girl to her feet

everything is fine

I take my wife’s hand and we walk

two blocks up and sit on

a park bench

we have organized

our Saturday

so that we can just sit on park benches

or not sit on park benches

whatever happens

a few minutes later

the beautiful-fucked-up couple

come stumbling up the sidewalk

‘heroin, probably’

‘rich people do heroin?’

‘oh yeah, most def’

‘never knew that’

‘well I’m not positive it’s heroin’

‘I’d say it’s a great guess though’

‘do people still do morphine?’

the girl’s legs are bleeding more now

the blood is thin

and coming down fast

‘ah shit, those are nice shoes’

‘that’s like a $700 purse’

she hikes her dress

up around her waist

she’s got no underwear on

black polo man sees, he doesn’t care

the dogs don’t care

me and my wife kinda care

when she passes us

we take a look at her bare ass

as they turn the corner and walk

away up 81st street

drops of blood

right there on the sidewalk

in front of us

look like cherry ice slush stain

from the ice cream man

parked up the block

and all the people coming

up the block now

think that’s what it is

no big deal

people miss what they miss

my wife and I kick our feet

Goldy

Just now I discover that my salt shaker has gold dust in it, not salt.


All summer, I’ve felt important, but sluggish—weighed down like a motherfucker.




On the last day possible, I go to the doctor.

He’s studied the X-rays.

Consulted the blood work.

Even looked down my throat with a very high powered flashlight.

“What happens when you try to swim in a pool?”

“I sink right to the bottom.”

“Oh.”

“What should I do?”

“Keep eating, you’ll be rich soon.”





Sometimes when I came home things in my house were different.

A TV remote on the couch where I don’t sit.

Toilet lid left down.

Jar of mayonnaise sideways in the fridge.

I’d had a problem once with squirrels in the attic. This time, when I pulled the string and took the stairs up, I found a girl sleeping in C in a nest of pink insulation.

She lifted her head, “I’ve been paying rent.”

I said, “Listen, you should come down here and talk out your mysteries.”

Service

The girl is crushed by a falling tree. Her father digs her out from under, saves her. She grows up, but unevenly.

Mostly she is indoors and can roll herself around in a wheel chair made from part of the tree that crushed her. She reads a lot. She writes a lot too.

When she goes out into the snow, she is pulled in a sled by a strong dog.

The dog is attacked bringing the girl into town.

Wolves.

The wolves do not attack the girl. They are full from eating the strong dog.

She drags herself back to the cottage. A trail in the snow in the shape of a girl.

The father, who is always leaving, comes down from the mountain with two dogs, even stronger. Within a month, they’re eaten by the wolves too.

So the girl decides to set a trap and catch one of the wolves. Partly for revenge. Partly because she likes to try to do things that she is not supposed to be able to do.

That old story.

A wolf in the pit! Look at that! The girl smiling from her wheelchair. And then at night with the lantern looking down into the pit while the wolf howls. And howls. And howls.

And her feeling so bad.

The next morning she helps the wolf up out of the pit by lowering branches and nets. The wolf does not attack her, it runs back into the snowstorm. But in the bottom of the pit, the girl sees three wolf cubs.

She raises them to pull her wheelchair sled. Fine. Friendly wolves.

But her wolves are attacked by a bear. Eaten.

The girl is able to escape, dragging herself through the snow back to her cottage because the bear is full from eating those friendly wolves.

The inconsistent father comes back from an expedition with an elephant gun.

He teaches the girl how to shoot it. How to brace herself like a tree shouldering the wind.

Of course she shoots the bear.

But the bear is only wounded.

And it moans in the snow as it dies.

And of course the bear is pregnant. All the wild things in this story are pregnant.

The father teaches the girl how to use a knife. They cut a cub out of the dying bear.

And that is that.

The girl is no longer pulled in a sled.

She is carried by a bear.

Carried through the snow.

Carried up the mountain.

Carried to the village.

The people there are frightened of her bear.

But they can do nothing.

The bear has a vest it wears. And a tag that says, “SERVICE ANIMAL.”

She burns the wheelchair made from the tree that crushed her.

She leaves her father, wherever he is.

She goes to the library with the bear. She goes to the movies with the bear. No one can stop them. The bear carries her in its arms. Or she rides the bear, up on the shoulders.

Up in an airplane. Up over the mountains. Over the frozen sea, until the sea thaws, until the sea is surrounded by green places that the girl has never seen in places besides the library.

The people on the airplane are not complaining about the bear.

Things are often eaten in this story, these people don’t want to be eaten, either.

The girl goes to a university, not to study. To teach.

No one teaches anyone anything who is carried around lovingly by a bear.

The girl is carried to the center of the lecture hall.

Everyone is quiet.

Listen.

Word Riot with an Excerpt of F250

The other day, F250, my novel Numbero Dos, came out.

Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the novel, over at Word Riot. There’s also an audio recording of the first 7000 words of the book in this link. The voice work in the recording is by David Anania.


It’s raining like crazy here in NYC. I’m fine with that.

Much love,

Bud Smith

Check it out here

New Novel, F250, Released!

I’m thrilled to say that my new novel, F250, is out from Piscataway House. This is what the novel is about:

Lee Casey plays guitar in a noise band called Ottermeat that is on the verge of leaving its home in NJ to somehow make it in Los Angeles. For now, Lee is squatting in a dilapidated house on the lagoons, and working for himself as a stone mason. As a close friend overdoses in his sleep, Lee begins a strange relationship with two college girls, June Doom and K Neon.

Below, is the opening chapter to F250.

0

Right Before the kid with the bloody face appears, a glass smashes in the kitchen. Someone shouts. I do nothing. I barely live here. My things are still in the pickup. Seth is trashed. I’m still horribly sober.

This is my first day back. There’s a purple Post-it note lying

dusty on Seth’s coffee table. The note is dated months earlier, when I was probably in Idaho or Utah or Arizona or on the moon. It says, simply, “Call Natalie.”

Sure. That’s exactly what I want to do with my life, call Natalie. But here I am, on the back deck, alone, in-between calling her and not calling her—a state of telephone limbo. I should be getting trashed with everyone else at the party at this dilapidated house.

I have a handwritten letter from long lost mom in Florida that says she’s still not dead. She’s feeling better all the time. “Come visit. Ha, blue water and long legged white birds, come, come.” Signed: Mom. But I don’t read that one anymore. I keep that one folded in my wallet. I hide that behind her photo.

Instead, I just stare at the lagoon, all green and uninviting. No blue water here. No long-legged white birds here. The sun is smothering things out. The biting flies are circling.

Inside the house, someone is fucking with the stereo and having trouble. I ignore their trouble. I ignore the yells from down the hall. I can’t believe I’m gonna live here now. Some- body else staggers into the kitchen and checks an empty pizza box again.

Seth calls my name, “Lee! Get in here!” I fold the note about Natalie into a tiny paper airplane and toss it into the brackish water. It floats off. Purple. Floating. Leaving. Ducks weave between the floating bits of trash. One duck eats my purple Post-it note airplane. That duck is my favorite.

Seth sticks his head out the sliding glass door, “What you doing out here? Come on in. Gonna hit some shit.”

“Not in the mood to hit any …”

A scream claws up the side of the house. Screams always interest me. A girl. A car door slamming. I hop off the deck and trudge through the stones to look.

The kid with the bloody face falls against the screen door. His girl isn’t far behind. His suit is bloody too, around the col- lar mostly. She’s wearing a puffy black dress. I know her. Damn.

“Trish,” I say. But she yells, and he falls. Comically drunk. I haven’t seen Trish in ten years. He gets up. “Tim,” she yells, “wait!”

He rips the screen door open, practically off the hinges, and collapses inside the house. People, strangers, stagger off the front lawn, where they are smoking cigarettes. They gawk in Trish’s direction.

“Go home! Go home! Party’s over!”

No-one budges. She kicks the recycling can over. Her high heel snaps. She falls to one knee.

“Go!”

I go around the back again and up on the deck. In the house, I can see the kid on the tile floor. More blood coming. Goddamn.

Everyone at the party is off the couch now and standing in the living room doorway looking into the small kitchen. I stand with them for a minute, with my mouth half open. The kid groans.

Seth staggers out of the room. “Fucking Feral, you alright?”

The kid pukes on the floor.

“Everyone out,” Trish screams.

I don’t move.

“Everyone!” She starts throwing things, whatever is around, things off the shelf of no value. Books. Movies. Toys. A girl narrowly dodges a trophy.

“Hey!”

People in the house scatter, pushing towards me at the back door.

“What happened?”

“Same thing that always happens, Seth,” Trish says. “I’m done …”

Someone falls off the back deck, laughing. I say, “Come on, get going.”

The smokers, finishing their beers, ignore me.

“Take that beer for the road,” I say. “Cops are on the way. Paddy wagon. We’re all going if we don’t clear out.”

The cops aren’t coming.

I walk into the kitchen. The kid is unconscious now.

“I SAID EVERYBODY OUT,” Trish screams at me. But she blinks and realizes who I am.

“Lee,” she mutters.

I’m a magic trick. I’ve materialized out of nothing. Where have I been? What am I doing here?

“I live here now,” I say.

“Oh thank god. Help me get him into the bath tub.”

The tiles are slick from the kid’s blood and puke but he looks heavier. Seth is terrible with blood, shrinks from it like so many people I’ve known in my life.

I’ll be posting more info about F250 as it comes along, as well as additional chapters of the book. When my first novel Tollbooth came out, I serialized the whole thing. I will do something very similar again with F250.

F250 is on Amazon now and will be on Kindle soon.

email me at budsmithwrites@gmail.com

if you’d like to obtain a book for review

swap for something else, or buy a signed copy.

“Tarantulas” and others at Revolution John

hello,

Summer is here and the hydrants are open on 173rd street. Today at the lit sit Rev John, I have some pieces running. “Lupus”, “Tarantulas”, “Fuck Ups”, and “War Baby”. Check it out Here

Thanks to the editor over there, Sheldon Lee Compton. And thank you for reading. 

When I Touch Your Face

The woman at the desk has frizzled hair and sharp teeth. We’re old friends.

“You don’t have to sign in.”

I wave and walk down the hall.

On Thursdays for community service hours, I read to the blind.

But like everyone else on this planet, the blind have no use for books.

I have lied about the Wizard of Oz. I have re-fabricated the false past. Huckleberry Kim. The Little Women all had flame throwers. Jane Eyre died in a spelunking accident.

The worst girl is by the window, maybe twenty. I am being punished by being given her. She is being punished harder by being sentenced to me. She has no pupils. Her eyes are solid milk.

I say, “Hello.”

She springs from her wheelchair—onto sure legs, surprises me.

“You don’t need that, I guess.”

“Oh me? I’m a back flipper from way back,” she says.

With her palms, she smooths the creases of a dress overrun with gold finches. Maybe she is at an eighth grade mixer waiting to be asked to dance, but is feral and just got done foaming at the mouth through the braces. I have no corsage. My parole officer wants me to take a job at the municipal dump: night shift.

“You can tell a lot of things about a person from their hand shake,” she says.

Her hands are like frostbit ice cream.

“What does mine say?”

“You were in a fire.” She grins.

I sit down on the bed. “Yeah, I was in a fire, Nancy Drew.”

She plops down in her wheelchair, proud of herself. Probably somebody else in the home told her about me already. They’re kicking field goals with me here. The blind have no love for me either.

“How’d the fire happen?”

“Ah shit, shut up. Why you roll around in a wheelchair if you don’t need it?”

“I like to bump into things, demolition derby-style. I’ve listened to them on TV. They sound fun. I’m tired of feeling around. How’d you get cooked?”

“Oh it was stupid. I was trying to set my motorcycle on fire. I was trying to blow it up. For the insurance money.”

“What’s it like to ride a motorcycle?”

“I’d feel bad describing it.”

“Probably feels like being a loud bird I’d guess. Did you hurt anyone else, burning the bike?”

“Just me.”

“Do you want to feel my face?” I ask.

“No, that’s okay.”

“Don’t you want to know what I look like?”

“I can tell from your voice and the things you say that you’re ugly, but don’t take that the wrong way. It’s the tone of your voice.”

I laugh. She’s right. I say, “You’re no looker either.”

“We make a good pair, an asshole and a blind girl.”

“Well, you’re not just blind, you’re also an asshole.”

She stands from the wheelchair and walks over. “I changed my mind, let me feel your face.”

I close my eyes and she runs her fingers across the rippled folds of my cheek, my brow, my chin, my twisted nose.

“You were foolish,” she says.

“I’ve heard that.”

“You don’t even have glasses on. Do you wear contact lenses?”

“No.”

“20/20 vision.”

She smiles again. Her teeth are perfect but for some reason still have metal braces. I let my lids fall.

She rests her fingers on my eyeballs, applies slight pressure.

With the pressure I see my blood vessels.

I see a faint purple light rising.

Then a pink.

The light becomes brighter. It transitions to orange and then white and then back to pink.

She presses slightly harder.

I sigh, completely relaxed.

“Here it comes,” she says.

This is when she rips my eyelashes off.

“Are you fucking kidding me!”

The orderly comes to the door and pushes her back in her wheel chair.

And I’m walking down the hallway with my hand over my face, just a little blood, but oh god the pain and he’s saying, “You okay, you okay? You okay?”

“I’m peachy.”

The woman at the desk says, “They love you here.”

I’m all temporary hate.

As she signs my paperwork. Hate is my world.

Two more community service hours.

“You coming back,” she says.

I say, “Everyone is hurt—everyone is angry.”

“Bout sums it up,” she says, passing my pink slip to me.

Then gets me an ice cube, slips it in a plastic bag.

I rub that against my eye.

There’s no iridescence anymore.

I step outside. Bright world, stupid world.

Maps

Had a different map for everything. Some of the maps were nonsense and lead nowhere, other ones seemed to contain all the delicate details that made us work as a couple.

I could only kiss her if I followed a map through a zig zag maze of thorn bush paths and then up a cliff and flip a heavy boulder up with a stick to expose a small ammo box with another map folded up inside it.

Followed those dotted lines for years.

Went grinning stupid to the ends of the lava river earth—jumped burning stone to stone and onto a speeding bullet train propelled through sudden rain.

Oh the sound rain makes when it boils off hot rails.

Or the sound of my laughter looking at a blurry hillside and seeing that the cattle are forming another map, and the direction I am zooming towards has suddenly ended and it is time to leap into a river crashing below.

Other way. Other way.

Other other way. Never gets old.

But I do sext her maps. And text her maps. And even send maps in the teeth of wild horses blasting up the beach anyway, to who knows where those wild horses go. Have even used regular email to send maps. Once called her up on the phone and said, “Check your Christmas stocking hanging on the fireplace … No not in it. The actual stocking. It’s a map.”

If she wants to love me, she has to get to the right place somehow.

I do too. We all do.

That’s what love is.

Getting to the right place.

At exactly the right time.

Magic riddle shot with perfect bullet, and riddle falls over bleeding and spells out next place to go and look for clues to pickup the trail again. High adventure.

Have crawled through the walls of a an abandoned mansion for an entire summer, tracking my way through passages hidden in the heating ducts—space between the walls and insulation, the very floor boards and following a map she drew but didn’t know I knew she drew.

She drew beautiful things to follow through swirling darkness.

I’d wake sometimes and find a map tattooed on my stomach and I’d wonder how I slept through that.

And I left maps too. Even made maps sometimes of the very places where we stood, where we occupied, where we lived.

She’d finish her coffee and almost choke on a message floating in the bottom of the cup:

“Out Door! Sixty thousand and one steps north, climb ivy vine into purple clouds, race setting sun’s shadow for clues projected on the outstretched canyon.”

“Oh I love you,” she said, biting my lip as the kiss ended. And she’d run out the door.

I’d be alone again.

But there were always maps. Could only fuck correctly crashing together when our separate maps intersected by random interjection.

Called being alive.

We even broke up, briefly, via a series of convoluted maps. But convoluted is worth it.

Had a map of the hospital. Had a map out of the graveyard. Had my guts cut out and different guts put back in to save me. One map had a breast removed off of her and the cancer was black gum terror and we ran in different directions through life’s green spring new fog.

But a map in the morning explains that she is gone and there is probably no way of finding her.

Map of sailboat mapping out blue waters.

Well here is map of my fingerprints spinning the globe of the world.

And here I am on the side of a building, dangling with suction cups, making this coded map that looks like a story. And it’s not for you.

It’s for her, wherever she is, to figure out how to find me and the next map.

It’s all here.

Map of everything leading to us.

“Reset Your Heart” – Poetry by Bud Smith

budsmith:

The site Flapperhouse has my poem Reset Your Heart on their site. Thanks to Joe O’Brien.

Originally posted on FLAPPERHOUSE:

Jack of Hearts – Olga Rozanova, 1915

“Reset Your Heart,” Bud Smith‘s poem from our Spring 2015 issue, is thick with unforgettable imagery and indispensable life advice.

{ X }

FORGET YOUR NAME. Hold your heart in your palm till it finally

stops.

“Friends may know you better than you know yourself”

Fling silver key to City into sewer.

Deny mountain of problems: call them routine riots; daily

avalanche; plain life, ordinary fire.

“Friends may know you better than you know”

Flip a doctor’s desk.

Sip sap from a falling tree, domino’n the rest of the forest.

Circle a lost love with a chalk line on the sperm bank sidewalk.

“Friends may know better than you”

Check out of abandoned hospital.

Eat a million marshmallows, not a single soggy Cheerio.

Avoid tears any smaller than a soft ball.

Dump paint thinner on car; wolf out in red moonlight,
lurking…

View original 142 more words

Hope You Have a Scrap Folder

Dropbox says it’s almost full and I was just looking through it seeing what I could delete. There’s a folder I have called SCRAPS. In it is Poetry Scraps and Short Story Scraps.

Just wanted to give a shout to all the people making stuff.

The stuff you make doesn’t make itself.

And you don’t have to like what you make. You don’t have to let it be seen by anybody. It’s for you.

It’s for you until you get it published, or you publish it like a DIY punk touring weird America in a smelly white white van covered in beautiful graffiti.

Maybe then it’s no longer for you.

I’ll take it.

The Short Story Scraps folder has a file in it with 78,000 words worth of short stories that I don’t like.

I’m not gonna delete them. They’ll just sit in dropbox.

I’ll delete pictures of a cat sitting on the fire escape across the street. I’ll delete a jpg I made to send to somebody on their birthday. I’ll delete the video in here of somebody talking in their sleep while passed out on a couch at a party.

But the SCRAPS folders can stay.

The Poetry Scraps folder has poems that didn’t make it into the working draft of Everything Neon that I sent out to initial people who looked it over. That same folder has poems that were cut after I sent it to readers. Even more that got cut by the editor. Some of those scrap poems I tried to put in a different manuscript I’m sending around, called High July, but … there they are back in the folder.

Scraps.

It’s fine.

MAKE STUFF.

I WANT TO SEE IT.

But also, keep fucking with the things you make. And don’t let it bother you that only 10% of what you make are things you like and want to share.

Had to write four novels before I liked one.

Writing or painting or singing or dancing or running from the cops takes practice.

I’m happy I have a folder with stuff that didn’t make it into the projects.

I want more and more folders like that.

I want you to have them too.

Dropbox: I just deleted ten photos of a glass of water that is half empty.

I hope you’re happy.