Sketchbook  Shanna Baldwin Moore, US and Sam Flavor, CA

 

A Dialogue Between Two Like Minded Souls I Was There Something In The Water? Shanna Baldwin Moore it all started in the killer summer when the bad boys from east LA brought drugs on the scene and hustled the ladies into all sort of scenes it changed everything forever sad it was to see all these wonderful poets dropping reds and slurring their once precise words.. soon after people dieing on the beach and in their rooms ... for a few short years it was the center of art music and verse.. but then they came with their handfulls of death and those that left lived to tell of it...

 

II a glass of create Was there something in the water of Venice that pawned so many of you juiced writers? So many Bukowski-related little semen fishies? Such life outside the beaker? Was it the sun? The west coast? The coast itself— ie. you can't go any further unless it's Japan so why not settle and be a poet? Sing (Shanna) or get it out whatever it takes even if it means: living fully, splayed I am one generation after you. Younger. I hear all the hospital, dialysis stuff and rejoice in it: you poets are aging, me too. I am undergoing tests this week for shot liver— cancer, everything: it's marvellous. How do we mix our dying physiologies with Art? With Venice? Simple. We defy physiology. DEFY PHYSIOLOGY. Years ago, drunk and home from the bars I scrawled on my wall, felt pen, the phrase: DEFY PHYSIOLOGY. It took 2 weeks to clean it off my wall. What I meant was that pain contains meaning more valuable than youth, the past— What we fuckin' were before. Pain is a teacher which spawns revolution. I love the way my perceptions change in the face of pain (or, Karina, encroaching blindness). Fuck this raping of our senses! We must not yearn to go back to a former robustness but instead question the basic senses we depend upon for so-called awareness. There are 1000's more kinds of awareness than we even got a concept of. Kerouac and Cassady knew this. They played this knowledge. They slip-slided, wet with gift, thru the daily routines and necessities that piss us off. Just becuz we take longer to wipe our ass only means shit and the end and the beginning are exactly the same thing. None of us want to die. Or maybe some of us do. But when outlaw poets die, or dilapidate, they are not alone. Photo: William H Hooper III I don't feel alone when I look at that ice sculpture and see the ribcage of the angel and respect the bowed head of the firefighter. I don't feel alone when I read the contributors' biographies in Sketchbook and feel special just to know you guys. The point is we are not alone and as Shanna puts it "the internet is the biggest invention since the wheel". I have no respect for the wheel. But I do respect those who seek to bridge worlds: combine planes, physics— Stephen Hawking and the irrelevance of the wheelchair. Shanna, Karina, John, Fred—you are all gems with whom, via the stars, I have been gifted to contact. I sometimes think I am alien spawn. Now I just know I am Mark Twain's lost lover, once removed and unafraid of the wet-spot. sam flavor