Bud Smith's Blog: Bud Smith , page 18

Two Poems Pubbed at Hobo Camp

I’m sipping green tea and nursing a hangover. Hooray. Here’s two poems that popped up at Hobo Camp Review. “Sideyard” and “Trix’s Marina”

New poems pubbed at Jmww and Mojave River Review

Ah fuck. I’ve been horrible at updating this site. But here’s a couple new poems at sites I dig: one at Jmww in Meg Tuite’s Exquisite Duet series were one line is given to two poets and each poet does their own unique take on the line, creating their own work from it. I was teamed up with Indigo Moore. Fun times. Here’s the poem, Hello Weekend Warrior

Also, Mojave River Review was cool enough to run my poem College Try There’s a lot of great poets and writers in that issue, I’m happy to be among them. Shout outs to Kevin Ridgeway especially. He always wires some great stuff, and if you haven’t checked it out yet, I recommend his book All The Rage out from Electric Windmill Press.

How to Make Your Own Paperback Book

Hey there,

I wrote a guest post at a website called Where The Buses Don’t Run, about how to make your own paperback book.

You can read it here

It’s Only July

have been standing under the waterfall

even a dog knows to stay out of the rain

been night swimming, been faithful

been stone carving your invincible name

I aim my rocks at the moon

till my rocks orbit down

back into my hand

god grant me the serenity

to whatever whatever

whatever, I cannot change

the calendar changes

a cat in gloves catches no mice

fuck it, I like mice

from time to time, I even leave

the waterfall cave


blue sword in hand

coupon-less, sideways

strange

there’s no more consequence

there’s no more wilderness

there no more negotiations

there’s no more gentle prayer

there’s no more invention

or doom or hiccups or dare

but plenty of life, eternal girl

it’s the forth of fucking July

and raining.

Three poems

I can’t teach this tour guide anything

but I know the way

there are

places not like this

lift both arms

float there

had my doubts

and fears folded

in a wallet I lost

worry too, fell out

passing through some door

for the dog to eat

for the birds to sip

I’ve failed hard, crashed bad

lost foot races against certain statues

and I may not be able to

teach this tour guide anything

but I do know the way.

Not Just a Mountain

the sky right now

all renegade clouds

fish eggs and ball peen wind

sparks on the ridge

never knew you well enough

never licked stamps for you

or lied regular-grade or super-grade

in a birthday card

get well card

X-mas card, farewell card

tonight I’ll lie on green grass

soggy in the moonlight

and sing what I can

before everything’s sucked

into the volcano.

The Way I Do The Dishes On Bad Nights

in the kitchen doing dishes

Wednesday night

and I was trying not to drink

we have no dog, no house plants

no fish or cat or lottery ticket

all is right in the laser’s path

when I come to a glass

I’d like to get drunk out of

I break it in the sink

then slowly extract all the glass

and by then, the feeling has passed.

Short Story Published at Smoke Long

Happy to see that my short story “Junior In The Tunnels” is running at Smoke Long Quarterly. I really like Smoke Long and was thrilled that they took this particular one.

You can check it out here

After the story there is an interview link about “Junior In The Tunnels” how it was written, the different interpretations of it, so and so forth.

Whatever Day This Is In June

My wife has her period, but she starts to play with me while I’m just waking up, spitting on her hand, jerking me off till I’m hard and smiling. “Good morning.”

It’s Sunday, we have no bacon, we have no coffee. We have no toast. There’s a problem with the plumbing, the toilet barely flushes. Her hand moves faster, I cum.

We brush our teeth. We get dressed. I soak my head in the sink. Then we’re out the door. The sun is big. The air is a miracle. We cut through the park, over-bloomed with flowers and people laying out with their shirts off, leaving shades of pale and pink, entering summer sun-kissed brown. From an upper window, I hear a Spanish troubadour. “Anybody who sings like that has to be singing about getting screwed.”

“Oh, 100%.”

“Literally screwed or some version of it otherwise.”

We take the wheelchair ramp up between two brick building and the handball courts. There’s a 32oz. plastic bottle of urine sitting in the middle of Cabrini Boulevard. It’s of no use to us, we let it be.

The Italian place on 181st has seat available in the garden. We drink coffee. I get eggs and procutto, she orders meatballs and pasta, a virgin Bloody Mary, toast with olives, garlic and salt. The sky get bluer. She’s wearing a romper, a one piece jump suit with short sleeves and her legs sticking out just right. I’m still hung over from last night.

After breakfast, we decide to walk farther north, all uphill. The bodegas on the sides of the street are all selling watermelon. It’s as if spring is a big watermelon contest. It takes all the power I have to resist buying a watermelon from any and all of them. Dogs trot by on leashes. The community book case on 181st street has nothing I’m interested in. Just some Stephen King, and a Ray Bradbury I would take, but I don’t feel like carrying it. A girl walks by in a spandex bike suit. Her nipples are fully erect. I like those spandex bike suits. It makes everything look futuristic and better. I haven’t rode a bicycle since I lost my virginity. The two things might be related.

A poster ten blocks up says that the Scandinavian orchestra is performing a concert at 2pm in the park by the world famous medieval castle museum that I’ve lived a ten minute walk away from for ten years and have never visited.

“What do you think a Scandanavian orchestra sounds like?”

“I have no idea.”

“Flutes and shit?”

“Probably, yes, flutes and shit.”

We’re sweating a bit now, sipping an ice coffee that we buy from a small shop that seems to specialize in charging 2 times what iced coffee should cost. I just go with it though because she found $16 in her romper from god knows when (our nearest estimate is three years ago: San Diego.)

The ice cream truck is parked outside the famous medieval park and we walk right past it because we’re in no mood for ice cream from that particular truck. It’s sub-standard ice cream.

The park is all swooping hills, fat flowers, beautiful bees, women breast feeding, joggers, hippes asleep on benches. I’m looking forward to Game of Thrones. It’s Sunday, 2pm. We finish the coffee, I kiss my wife and she tastes like coffee. We keep walking, now it’s downhill. There’s more green grass. The Scandanavian orchestra is setting up in the middle of the field. We don’t stop or wait to see how it’ll sound. I crane my neck, I spot a flutist. That’s good enough for me.

Our stroll is a wide lap, culminating in a trot on a city street just on the tip of the Bronx. We duck back into the greenery and loop back towards Manhattan. The orchestra can be heard in the far distance. We laugh. There’s a basketball game on 190th street and a sweaty guy doing pull-ups on a basketball hoop that’s not being used. At the market, I grab some stir fry sauce, cottage cheese, a pound of smoked turkey, she pulls some ground Guatemalan coffee off the shelf. And then it’s back home. The long walk back to the apartment.

The bottle of piss is still there. The Spanish troubadour is still singing full lunged about getting fucked. Back at our place, I put the bath water on, and fall down into the cool water, washing nothing, writing you this on my iphone in the tub.

“You’re getting slim again,” she says.

I wash up good.

Junior in the Tunnels

1.

She’s distressed, I hear a glass break in the sink. Then another. She’s crying a little when I walk into the kitchen.

“I can’t marry you,” she says.

Soap suds float in the air, small bubbles. I shut off the hot water.

“It’s okay,” I say. “So we don’t get married. There are billions of people who don’t get married.”

“Like who?” she says, head down, wiping her wet hands on my chest.

“Like the newscaster on channel three and the lady who stocks the cat food at the grocery store. They’re not married.”

“They don’t even know each other, I know you.”

“Okay then, another example. Like, I dunno, the woman who walks that orange dog and the guy hanging off the back of the garbage truck–not to mention, the garbage truck guy sings to her from the back of the truck, that’s love.”

She laughs, “Don’t try to make me laugh.” The ring is sitting on the washing machine next to the sink. I pick it up, I put it in my pocket.

“No harm no foul.”

1.5

Dee was engaged once. Seventeen years ago—which sounds like a lifetime ago—but I guess that’s all how you look at things. What’s a lifetime?

His name was Junior. He died in the tunnels beneath the (now abandoned) Mayweather Home. The tunnels connect one wing of the facility to another.

That’s where the kids in this town always partied. It’s hard to find how to get in, but once you can figure out how to access the tunnels, there’s no better place to drink underage, to smoke up, to …

I’m a grown ass man, I don’t have a need for secret haunted tunnels.

Haunted, yes. That’s the other thing.

2.

Dee woke me, heavy rain out the window, slopping in on the floor. The room was semi-dark, but should have been all the way dark, there was some unexplainable ethereal light.

“I promised myself to someone,” she said.

“I get that,” I said, “I promised myself to Nadine Fincher in the eight grade. She had the curliest hair on the east coast.”

“What happened with you and Nadine?”

“When she hit the ninth grade, she got a hair straightener for her birthday. That was that.”

“Well, I don’t have curly hair.”

“I know, but you dance really fantastic and you tell the best racist jokes I’ve heard. That’s solid gold.”

“I’m going to poison you.”

“Bring it on.”

“What if you died one day, would you want me to be with someone else?”

“I’d want you to be with someone else right now, while I’m very much alive if it’d make you happy,” I said.

“Wouldn’t that kill you?” she said. “Something you should know, every year on his birthday I go and visit him.”

“Junior,” I say.

She pulled away in the bed.

“You know his name?”

“Guy I work with told me the story.”

“I’d rather you not retell the story to me. Tomorrow’s his birthday.”

“Tell you what, I’ll come with you.”

“You don’t want to go where I’m going.”

“I’ll even get the cake.”

3.

It’s a lemon cake with vanilla icing and strawberries. As I carry it, I feel more and more foolish to have not brought forks and a knife of some sort. He’d have been 36. I think my lighter works.

4.

The easiest way to get into the Mayweather is to climb in through a broken window around the side, near the laundry. Dee climbs up on a pile of stumps and slips into the darkened window. Her hands appear, I pass her the birthday cake.

Most of the tiles are smashed. The floor is a nest of clothes, blankets, empty bottles and toys: baby dolls, dominoes, playing cards. Graffiti obscures most everything, as if it was practice for the outside world.

We walk down a long hallway and I don’t look in rooms as I pass, because I may not exactly be superstitious, mind you, but I don’t want to see anything that invades my dreams if you get my drift.

“Here’s the room,” she says.

It’s a storage room, with a closet wide open. She hands me the cake, momentarily. In the closet, she moves a rack of clothes out and opens a hidden door.

Now we walk in total darkness. I feel with both hands on a sweaty concrete wall.

“Did you bring a flashlight?”

“They don’t work down here,” Dee says.

“Well then how do we go?”

“Candle light,” she says.

“Well, did you bring any candles, I didn’t bring any candles.” She flicks a lighter, and begins to light the cake.

I laugh, “Well, except for the 36 in the goddamn cake.”

5.

It’s a short walk. Five minutes or so. Dee stops. There’s initials spray painted on the wall.  A date too.

“I did that,” she said. “This is where he passed.”

She sits Indian-style on the concrete floor. The darkness licks in and pushes out as the candles on the cake flicker.

I sit too.

“Happy Birthday, Junior,” she said. “This is my friend, Larry. He has a question to ask you abut me. I hope you’re here and I hope your listening. be brutal, Junior. Be honest. be severe.”

“First,” Dee said, “Make a wish.”

I open my mouth, confused, is it my wish or his? Then, mouth still agape, I start to ask Junior if it’s okay if I marry his fiancé.

The candles snuff out.

Sidewalk Table

The other night, I walked in the apartment and didn’t feel like I was going to die. This was a new development. I’d been sick all winter.

But, it seemed, while working in the sunshine, my health had returned. The flowers were bursting apart again beside the sidewalks with little signs that said ‘NO DOGS ON OUR FLOWERS PLEASE!’, and the ice cream man could be heard again making his cruel rounds up and down the other blocks besides ours.

It was a warm night even. The first warm night in 100,000 years.

I took a seat in the red chair by the window, enjoying the warm breeze coming in off the river. The sky was just a little yellow at sunset and I wondered if it would turn into a thunderstorm. Instead of checking the weather, I sent my wife a text.

“You want to meet for dinner?”

“Owwww, on a weeknight?” she wrote back.

“Yeah, feeling good,” I wrote.

She was on the way to a doctor’s appointment, I still had to shower. We’d meet on 81st street, at a Thai restaurant on the corner.  Forty five minutes. That was the plan.

***

And look at me—motherfucking-on-time! I came up out of the subway and the streets were slick with rain. While I was underground there’d been a downpour that I’d missed. Praise the gods. But up there was the purple sky, the clouds were moving fast, almost gone and I couldn’t see the stars anyway but, there it was, the slutty moon.

I took my wrinkled poka dot shirt off, so I was just in a black t-shirt. I carried the shirt in hand like it was a weird weapon. A paperback book was tucked under my other arm.

There’s a bar next door to the Thai restaurant with walls lined with verse, the place is called fittingly, The Dead Poet. I peeked in and considered a beer while I waited for Spout. But I was happy to see the Thai place had tables set up on the sidewalk.

It was nice enough to sit outside and eat? Yes! It was! That was like a concept I’d completely forgotten. Winter dumped continuous snow on New York City, I was still getting reacquainted with what spring could be.

Instead of getting the beer at Dead Poet, I parted the sea of people on the sidewalk. All the outside tables were full, people (usually grouped together in four or more) stood waiting for available tables inside or outside—I knew from experience, it was a half hour+ wait. My watch said that I was fifteen minutes early. I stepped through the door. The hostess took my name.

“Table for two.”

“No problem. You both here?”

“Yes,” I said automatically.

“Outside or in?”

“Outside.” Of course!

“No problem.” She grabbed two menus, and together we headed back out into the throngs of peeps waiting to sit.

She pointed at a table that’d gotten soaked by the surprise storm. “You want to sit  there? I’ll get it all cleared and set up nice.”

It was on the edge of the sitting area, nearest the sidewalk. I love sitting out there. Seldom do I actually get to.

“Yup, perfect.”

“Where’s your other party?” she asked. They usually don’t wanna sit you until everyone is there.

“My wife is over there …” I pointed across the street at a bar on the corner, “she’s using the ATM. Be just a minute.”

The hostess nodded. I stood patiently and waited while a bus boy came and fixed the table all nice. Wiping everything down.

As I sat, the phone buzzed.

The text said, “Running late, be there in … 15?”

I took off my dress shirt and put it on the back of what would be her chair. I’d been editing my own novel on the subway, I placed that where her plate would be.

Then I sat there, doing nothing. I didn’t even fuck around with my cellphone. I’d look at the people on the sidewalk, then I’d look at the moon, then I’d look at a bunch of balloons stuck in the trees. My fingers didn’t even tap the top of the table. My hands were perfectly still. The first warm night and a table on the street will do that to you.

The waitress was concerned though.

“You alone?” She regarded my shirt on the chair. “Waiting for someone?”

“My wife is at the ATM.” I pointed off in the vague distance.

I knew the menu already. I knew the drinks they made there, the cocktails anyway. I said,

“Tell you what, I’ll order drinks now. I’d like a bourbon. And for her,” I pointed to my invisible date, “she’ll take two shots of tequila on ice with  lemon and ginger, please.”

She nodded and was gone. I stole an umbrella from the table next to me because they weren’t using it. I’d spied the clouds coming back, they figured rain would never happen again.

Things that happened while I waited for my drink: a couple started arguing in front of the bar next door, the guy had pretty severe armpit sweat, the girl was holding a glass of beer that wasn’t supposed to be out on the sidewalk (there’s important invisible lines, ya know?); also, a long haired man zoomed by on a bicycle, an elderly woman stepped out to try and hail a cab, but the cab already had fare so wasn’t stopping anyway, the guy on the bicycle yelled at the woman, “OUT OF THE WAY, ASSHOLE!” He narrowly missed colliding with her. She stepped back onto the sidewalk full of shock/rage. I enjoyed that, it’s cool to me when some stranger calls a stranger an asshole; then, it started to rain again for about a minute, but I didn’t care because I was under the small umbrella.

“Hey, can we get our umbrella back?”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’m not supposed to get wet, I multiply. Also, I can’t eat chicken after midnight.”

The drinks came. The waitress dumped them off quick and then ducked for cover back in the restaurant.

I drank my bourbon pretty quick. Before the rain stopped even. Ha! Look at that, all these wet people eating nice food on a beautiful night. It’s enough to make a man sing. I was intending on waiting for Spout, but I failed, I began to sip her drink. That’s life. Halfway through the glass, people on the street were complaining to the hostess, “Is our table ready yet?”

I saw the hostess glare out at me.

“Where is your wife?” she said.

“Had to go to another ATM,” I said, “They were all out of hundred dollar bills.”

I finished my wife’s drink. The waitress got my signal through the plate glass window. Two, I pantomimed, two fingers up like a peace sign.

I folded the umbrella up,. There was the moon, all impossible and shit. I could fuck it, I really could.

Two Summer Poems

Sunny Day

beautiful weather here

you won’t find me

dead today

I’d eat a thousand bullets

to no ill-effect

tomorrow they say

it’ll rain

we’ll see, then

Couple Hours Before Memorial Day

doves cooed

at twilight

that’s all over

now

I’m

sitting still

somewhere in

the outside dark

little bit of moonlight

falling through

some black trees

frogs, bugs, buzz

black powder

new summer bombs

the roll of cars

as waves

crashing

on the two

lane highway

I’m drinking bourbon

and lemon

slouched here

content

music-less

couple of those

tall saint

candles

burning.

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