The Lost Poems...

Beer, wine, cigarettes, cigars, pain killers, excessive prescription meds, red meat, French fries, potato chips, ice cream, any other fatty foods, soda, vaping (smoking "kool-aid" with nicotine), and in my personal case, cheap pepperoni pizza.  Yep, pizza grease is my essential oil.  Every one of us has some vice that we take a little time for most everyday, that helps us get through each day, but that is detrimental over the course of our life.  That is the idea of this meme.  Yes, many people pretend these vices are not that harmful, and some people are self-aware enough to say, "Yep, this pizza is going to help kill me over the course of my life, but I need it to get through the week."  Or whatever the vice is.  This meme above is one of four I made from this single line, which was a line in one of my Lost Poems.

If you ask most people, "Are you into poetry?"  The general answer will probably be, "Not really."  But if you ask the same person what their favorite song is, or who their favorite rapper is, nearly everyone has an answer.  Song lyrics are a form of poetry, set to music.  Rappers make a living "writin' rhymes."  Raps are poetry.  Sparked by the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" in 1979, and a few others in big afros and tight pants, rapping began to spread into the tough neighborhoods of New York City, and throughout the U.S. Black community soon after.  

A year later, the New York City group Blondie, led by Debbie Harry, introduced white kids across the U.S. to rap music with the song "Rapture."  I remember where I was when I heard an airplane flew into the first of the Twin Towers on 9/11.  I remember where I was when I first met BMX freestyle pros Eddie Fiola, Martin Aparijo, and Josh White, in an airport in 1986.  I remember where I was when president Ronald Reagan got shot in 1981.  And I remember exactly where I was when I first heard the song "Rapture" in 1980.  I'm not a big rap fan,  I was 13 then.  It would be a few more years before we really heard of rap as a thing, in rural America, but "Rapture" in 1980 gave us a taste of things to come.

Kids on street corners in the hoods of America, in the early 1980's, did what decades of English teachers couldn't do, they made poetry cool... first in New York and L.A., and later worldwide.  

So while I think most rap sucks today, there is definitely some great rap out there, old and new, and poetry is a lot cooler than it was when I was a kid.  I was hanging out at my friend, Tom Conway, at his house, in the country, outside of the small town of Willard, Ohio.  We were in his family room, listening to radio station G-98 out of Cleveland.  As soon as the song "Rapture" was over, Tom and I looked at each other, "What was THAT?" we asked.  Hearing the song for the first time made that much of an impression.  It was something different than any music we'd heard before.  

When poetry does have an effect on someone, it is often a really profound effect.  If you're still not sure that songs can be great poetry, even without the music, listen closely, or read the words to one of these songs: "Because the Night" - Patti Smith/Bruce Springsteen.  "Madman across the Water"- Bernie Taupin/Elton John.  "American Pie" - Don McClean.  "Bat Out of Hell" - Jim Steinman/Meatloaf.  "Jungleland" - Bruce Springsteen/The E Street Band.  "Gimme the Sweet and Lowdown" - Mike Ness/Social Distortion.  "Hi Ren" - Ren.  That's poetry motherfuckers.  Damn good poetry.  It may not be your taste in poetry, but these are good stuff.  By the way, that last song got me starting to write poetry again, after not writing hardly any poetry, for over 15 years.  Thanks Ren.

Creation emanates, light from the sun

In every group that beholds there's one

-excerpt from one of my Lost Poems

In the big Substack post linked at the end of this blog post, you can read about how I started writing poetry in 1987-1988, sparked by my girlfriend at the time.  I kept writing "song lyrics" after we broke up.  Eventually I had 5 or 6 notebooks full of "lyrics," and knew I didn't intend to start a band.  That's when I realized I had become a poet.  That was in 1990 or 1991.  In 1992, inspired by a book of Henry Rollins' poetry a roommate showed me, I published my first poetry zine.  It had 80 or 100 of my poems in it, and the zine was so thick I had to bind each one with duct tape.  For real.  The zine was called, We're on the Same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing.  The first poem was called, "Journey of The White Bear," written the night that girlfriend who inspired me to try and write songs dumped me.  When I published that poetry zine, I got tagged with the nickname, "The White Bear."  I eventually took that as my penname for my poetry.  I published two more, smaller, zines of poetry, Mush in 1996, and The Poet in 1997.  Both of those had 30 or 35 poems each in them.  Between the three zines, I self-published about 130-160 of the poems I wrote between 1988 and 1997.  

The Key

I met a man with a golden key

He said, "Coincidence isn't

As you will see"

He plunged the key into a stream

And I realized all things flow from dreams

He held the key up to the sky

And I realized energy doesn't die...

Excerpt, all I can remember, from "The Key," one of my Lost Poems

I didn't stop writing poetry in 1997.  I kept writing it through the years until late 2008.  I wrote fewer poems, but they were better quality, overall.  Most of them had something to do with trying to make sense with the trials and tribulations of life, and what we're all doing here on this crazy planet.  My poems got longer, averaging 20 to 40 lines, I'd say, instead of maybe 10 to 20 lines, like many of the earlier poems.  

In 2005, while working as a taxi driver, I got an offer to move into an actual indie art gallery, and live there during the week.  The gallery, AAA Electra 99, was in an industrial unit in Anaheim at the time, and the owner was another taxi driver, who owned his cab.  I lived in the gallery with a mama cat and six kittens, Monday morning through Friday afternoon, and drove his taxi on the weekends.  After a couple of years of working seven days a week, 12-18 hours a day, in the taxi, it was a welcome break.  I was totally burned out when I moved into the gallery.  I hadn't done anything creative in two or three years.  At all.  I was completely focused on making money, as the taxi industry went into a downward spiral.  Suddenly, in the gallery all week, I had a lot of time on my hands.  I started drawing pictures with Sharpies after a few days, and my Sharpie Scribble Style drawing technique was born there in the gallery.  

But I did something else as well.  I had a Mac Powerbook laptop, and I started trying to teach myself Final Cut video editing software, so I could get up-to-date, and start making videos again.  That didn't pan out.  What I also did in the gallery was to go through all my notebooks, my personal journals, and to look through all the poems I had written from late 1997 through 2005.  Out of over 200 poems, I had about 165 that I thought were solid poems.  I typed them all into the hard drive of my computer, not sure what I was going to do with them.  So I had the original, handwritten poems in all my journals, and digital copies in my Powerbook.  

Mirror, Mirror

Mirror, mirror, on the wall

Why do you show the worst of all

Why can't you show who I could be

I look at you, but I see me

-The White Bear, excerpt from on of the Lost Poems

Since I was 19, I've published a lot of zines, written or had photos in 8 BMX magazines, wrote a newsletter for the AFA, worked on several TV show crews, made a bunch of BMX, skate and snowboard videos, and written over 2,800 blog posts.  The highest quality creative work I've ever done was in the poems I wrote between 1997 and 2008.  In 2007, because of health issues and lack of business, I walked away from taxi driving, and became fully homeless, in Orange County, California.  I spent a year homeless in SoCal, and eventually took my family's offer to fly me to North Carolina.  They thought I might be able to get going again there.  My parents moved to NC 3 or 4 years after I moved out of their house, in San Jose, in 1986.  My sister followed them east a couple of years later, and finished college there.  She ended up meeting her future husband, and they married and settled down there.  We're all from Ohio originally, so I had absolutely no connection to North Carolina, other than family members living there, and I didn't want to move there.  

But the pressure that gets put on homeless people at times forced me out of California, much to my dismay.  My family flew me to NC in the middle of November of 2008.  Remember 2008?  Yeah, not a good time to find a job, particularly in a place where you have no connections.  The Great Recession (aka GFC or Global Financial Crisis) was in full collapse mode then.  

I was promised a loan of about $150 to catch up my storage unit payments in Cali, and get my laptop out of the pawn shop, and have someone ship my stuff to me.  when I went to NC.  I flew there with a bookbag sized backpack, and that's it.  All my BMX stuff, a Dyno race bike I'd been riding, all the raw footage and master tapes of videos I'd produced, all my BMX magazines (including a full set of FREESTYLIN' magazines), my videos and DVD's, and all the notebooks with originals of my poems, were in my 5' X 5' storage unit.  That loan I'd been promised was quickly dismissed after getting to NC, and I had no way to come up with money there.  I lost everything I owned, my entire BMX history, except for my Haro brake lever key chain.  I went instantly into a deep depression.  

What surprised me was that, of everything I lost, the poems were what bothered me the most.  I stopped writing poetry.  I couldn't find a job, and I lived with my parents at age 42, in a small two bedroom apartment, for a year or two.  I couldn't get away from North Carolina for nearly ten years.  I never did find a "real job" there.  It was the spring of 2019 when I finally made it back home to California.  I've lived in a couple dozen cities and towns in six states, but Southern California is the only place that ever felt like home to me.  In 2008, in North Carolina, I stopped writing poetry.  The poems just didn't seem to come anymore.  

My sister had copies of two of my poem books, and she gave me those.  Those got lost in another move in NC.  That was totally my fault.  So I've managed to lose all copies of the 150 or so poems I've published in zines, and the 165, much better quality poems, I wrote between late 1997 and 2008.  I also lost well over 100 not-so-great poems that I wrote as well.  So these few poems in the previous posts, and the handful I linked in the last post, are the few remaining poems I have, out of 400 to 500 I've written.  So that's the story of my "Lost Poems."  

The lesson here, if you do any kind of creative work of any decent quality, GET IT OUT IN PEOPLE'S HANDS, even if you have to give it away.  It is possible to lose all your creative work.  It happened to me.  

Back in 2008, bored and severely depressed, and living in my parents' spare bedroom, in a tiny town in North Carolina, I had 24/7 access to a computer, and decent internet, for the first time in my life.  For a couple weeks, I "surfed the web" and watched a ton of porn.  Then I started blogging.  Somewhere around 1,500 to 1,700 of the blog posts I've written since are in this blog, and spread across more that 25 other blogs, sitting out there, on the web.  I've got over 200 original drawings and copies of drawings in many U.S. states, and over a dozen foreign countries.  I haven't made a living doing all this work.  I did it because I love doing, and this is what I do.  This is who I am.  I'll keep putting out the best work I can, for as long as I can, and hopefully make a living at it some day.  Either way, I'll keep doing the best creative work I can in whatever situation I'm in.  

I started spending my Pizza Hut pay to self-publish zines in 1985.  It took until 2008, but I finally got over my Luddite-ism, and figured out how fucking cool the internet is.  I've been using it the best I can to create pretty cool content ever since.  I've made some money selling drawings, selling over 100 original drawings in the last 8 years.  But what I've made is nowhere close to making a living.  I'll keep plugging along at this as long as I'm able to.  And I'll put out work for free, if that's the only way to get it out so some audience that may appreciate it.  I'll make money at this work when I'm able to.  That's what I learned by losing over 300 of the Lost Poems.  When you do decent creative work, get it out to people, whether you get paid or not.  

I recently wrote a big post on my Substack about poetry, and how I became a poet.  If that sounds interesting, check it out.  

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

 

"Is there a need for art?" - New poem in 2024

 Photo of one of my favorite graffiti pieces I saw in Hollywood, in 2021, I think.  Is it art?  Everyone has their opinion, but I dig this piece.  #steveemigphotos.

Is there a need for art?

The truth out there is plain to see

Yet humans continue to disagree

Sitting on a rock on a hill, enjoying the view

Of the city below, where humans do what they do

The good, the heroic, the evil and mean, 

The city is the place of human fears and dreams

Though we still can't place where cities got their start

I asked out loud, "Is there a need for art?"

Take away Roman columns, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Greek plays, 

Would it matter how humans spend their days?

Take away cave paintings, ivory etchings, and architecture grand

Would humans still see the guidance of a Creator's hand?

What if the music of a million years had never been heard?

No books, no movies, no poems spoken, only everyday words

What if every spark of inspiration had just fizzled dead?

Would civilization have happened, if all the great ideas had been left unsaid?

The answer is obvious, a definite, "No!"

Without arts of all kinds, there would be nowhere to go

So despite all the pain, all the hate, all the war

Perhaps there's a reason that we're all here for

Perhaps there's a reason actors act and singers sing

There's a reason novelists and poets are seeking something

It's why designers design and movies get made

Why directors direct, and put on their plays

Perhaps it's all part, of a story grand and strong

Playing out over the eons, a span longer than long

Is there a purpose to Art?  An enthusiastic "Yes!" I declare

Music, dance, and stories are always found there

This truth came to me, on a rock on a hill

The grand story of humankind... creativity, drama, and free will

-The White Bear

I just wrote this one, in January 2024, while laid up in a sketchy-ass homeless recuperative center, where I couldn't access social media, write on my blog, and was listening to other people's music and chatter for over a week.  There's such a strong surge of censorship being pushed onto social media and online platforms these days, by certain groups who hate books, art, and most of makes life interesting, that's it's like this continuous under current of hate and negativity.  I've written very few poems in the last 16 years, and this one came out pretty messy, when it came time to write it down.  But it captures a lot of what I feel these days, being creative in my own unique ways, in a world where there's so many forces coming down on arts of many different kinds, because they don't conform to certain ideologies.  

I recently wrote a big post on my Substack about poetry, writing poems, and becoming a poets decades ago.  If that sounds interesting, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

Mystery Machine- a poem about that van we all watched as a kid

 Scooby-Doo was my  favorite cartoon as a kid, and I come from Generation X.  We were the kids who spent every Saturday morning in the 1970's as a kid, lying on our stomachs, four feet from the TV, eating our cereal, watching 3 or 4 hours of cartoons, and weird live action kids' shows (like this one).  

Many years ago I was talking to some friends, as adults now, we were trying to figure out just what was going on in that van back then, for the whole week between shows.  They had to be smoking some weed.  It was the 1960's and 1970's, and Shaggy and Scooby were always hungry.  That conversation led to me writing this poem, speculating on what happened back then, in the back of this van.  Here's what I came up with.  

Mystery Machine

Here's a ghost, there's a witch, Scooby's looking for a bitch, 

Shaggy's hiding in the kitchen with a big sandwich

Spooky green, it's a crazy scene

In the back of the Mystery Machine

The van's slower than molasses, Velma lost her glasses

Shaggy's in the back seat, checking out their asses

Spooky green , it's a crazy scene

In the back of the Mystery Machine

It's a van dogpile doing Daphne doggy-style

Velma's got a mouthful of Fred, all the while

Spooky green, it's a crazy scene

In the back of, the Mystery Machine

-The White Bear

I just wrote a big post on my Substack about poems, and my thoughts on writing poetry.  Check it out:

Steve Emig the White Bear's Substack

New poem: Freaks, Geeks, Dorks, and Weirdos

 Freaks, Geeks, Dorks, and Weirdos

I am the Jester, the Joker, the one outside the pack

I am made up of... all the things that I lack

I am the refuse, the rubbish, one of the many cast aside

I am the roaming lion, driven out of the pride

I put the ooze in Loser, I put the ash in White Trash

I am the beggar that you laugh at, I am the weak one that you smash

I lived through years of terror, I became a creature of the streets

I roam among the vampires and zombies, I know the junkies, the thugs, and the cheats

You've spent years trying to squash me, I've been beaten black and blue

I've been threatened, scorned, accosted, you spread stories about me that aren't true

I am an artist, writer, creator, I do what you can't do

I catch thoughts and escort them, into the three dimensional world

I see the dark things lurking in the night

Yet I burn like a flame, I create my own light

I am the artist, musician, builder, I craft and forge all that's new

I am the freaks, geeks, dorks, and weirdos, I am here on Earth to do

Your words no longer harm me, your attacks prove that you're weak

I am a ranger of the wild side, though I once was shy and meek

Your attacks have beaten and forged me, like a samurai swordsman's blade

I am a warrior wordsmith, I leave my blood on every page

From the garbage heaps and ghettos, visionaries crawl and fight

We are born in the children, who survive terrors in the night

We ask better questions, we go deeper than others dare

We bring new ideas to life... lost in a blank stare

No army can stop great ideas, no navy can sink a song

We are the creators of great beauty, and you keep telling us we're wrong

In the times of great upheaval, when your might empires fail

We are the ones who rebuild, only then you tell our tales

We are the freaks, geeks, dorks, and weirdos, we tell the stories, we make the art

The ones you mocked as children, the pain of yesteryear gave us our start

When you're sad, you listen to us, when you're depressed, our work lifts you up

We are the fountains of creation, when you thirst, you drink from our cup

I am the Jester and the Joker, I live outside the deck

I am the force of the Creator, I keep the world in check

I am the freak, geek, dork and weirdo, I'm the one you mock and scoff

And I've got a lot of work to do, so why don't you go fuck off!

-The White Bear

(Steve Emig- The White Bear- February 2023)

Poem: Ode to the word Fuck

I actually wrote this in the Fall of 2007.  The idea came to me the night Evel Knievel died, which was November 30, 2007.  I had just given up driving a taxi, and was fully homeless for the first time in about 5 years.  I was doing my laundry on a rainy night in Garden Grove of Cypress or somewhere in that area, I saw a laundromat from the bus stop.  There was a TV on at the laundromat, and that's where I heard Evel died.  

The truck splash thing actually did happen, but not quite as dramatic as I describe it in the poem.  I wrote most of the first half of the poem while doing my laundry that night, and the rest the next night.  I later memorized it, and actually worked it out to do it as a comedy bit.  I've performed it for a handful of people over the years, and can still do it live.  I performed it on video for a one hour comedy video I wrote, shot, and produced while homeless 2007-08.  I did the whole video, segment by segment, in order, one take each, on my Sony Digital8 video camera.  I lost the camera in a pawn shop, and all my video footage, including that homeless comedy master tape, when I moved to North Carolina in November 2008.  I'll have to re-record it one of these days...  

 Fuck

 I was homeless,

I was broke,

I was down  on my luck.

My future seemed hopeless,

so I just said the word, fuuuuuuuuuuck!

I hung my head low, 

at that bus stop in the rain,

when I heard a great sound,

like and oncoming train.

I snapped my head up,

And I said, "What the fuck?"

Into the puddle before me...

drove a big truck.

The splashing wave was a revelation.

For I realized me luck,

I was born on the planet,

That invented the word "fuck."

I wasn't born on fucking Mercury,

Fucking Venus, or Fucking Mars,

I was born here on Earth,

Where we drive big fucking cars.

I wasn't born on fucking Jupiter,

Fucking Saturn, or fucking Neptune.

I was born here on Earth, 

where the lovers like to fucking spoon.

Now I realize my profanity

Will provoke some complainers.

Hey, if you don't like this fucking planet,

try fucking Uranus.

And I won't leave out fucking Pluto,

our littlest planet, now demoted.

For if it had lots of gas,

Like Jupiter... or my grandpa...

It'd be big, and fucking bloated.

The night suddenly felt glorious,

though still wet from the truck.

And I started to ponder 

all the uses of the word "Fuck."

To my backstabbing boss, 

Who never says a word true, 

I life high my middle finger, 

and say, 'Hey, fuck you!"  

And about 3 am

I stumble with glee, 

up to some chick at the bar, 

and say, "Hey, fuck me."  

And if I should do 

Shakespeare on stage,

and my lines suddenly fail me, 

I will simply say "fuck,"

Though the critics will assail me.

And if a man beds a young woman, 

and then her mother, a trucker, 

he earns the dubious distinction

of being a true motherfucker.

Yes... four innocent little letters,

Together, often banned.

Yet the word is so useful, 

so much in demand.

Why is it that

This word's so maligned?

Why some times the word "fuck"

seems almost divine.

You take a hit of a joint, "fuuuuck."

You step in dog crap, "fuck!"

You swerve to miss a car that almost hits you, "FUCK!"

So in times of anger, 

of excitement or fear, 

just take heart and know,

This little word is near.

And of all of the cosmos,

And all the planets that suck, 

you were lucky enough

to be born on the planet, 

That invented the word, "Fuck."

-The White Bear

Mary Oliver: A great American poet has passed back into the realm where poems come from

Poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, Mary Oliver, who grew up in Ohio, died yesterday at age 83.  Here's the first few lines from her poem "Wild Geese."

"You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles in the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

Love what it loves..."

When Rachel White, of Designs, Vines, and Wines, asked me to draw something for Black History month, just about this time last year (2017), I decided to draw memoirist, longtime Winston-Salem resident, and America's Poet Laureate, Dr. Maya Angelou.  As a poet myself, it just seemed like the obvious choice to draw.  The drawing came out well, and that drawing made the rounds and a print ended up in the collection of Maya Angelou's niece and archivist. 

One of the things that happened later, as a response to the Maya Angelou drawing, is that Rachel got a request for me to draw another poet, Mary Oliver.  It was a commission by a high school English teacher, as I recall.  I'd never heard of Ms. Oliver, so I dug into her story and searched for a good photo to work from.  There were very few photos of her, and none that really worked well with my style of drawing.  Technically, this was never one of my favorite drawings.  But I really liked her work.  I was stoked to hear that she grew up in northern Ohio, like I did.  Her poems took me right back to the countless hours I spent wandering the woods, creeks, and lake shores of Ohio as a kid.  Even more interesting, on a personal level, is that Mary grew up in Maple Heights, only a few miles from where my grandma grew up. My grandma, as a young woman, easily could have met Mary as a young girl. 

As I read several of her poems, I really liked the way Mary looked at the world, and I wound up doing the drawing.  To the best of my knowledge, the drawing above is hanging in a classroom in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  I imagine the classes in that room will spend some time going over her poems Monday, while looking up at the drawing now and then.  As a longtime wordsmith, it's cool to think a drawing of mine may help draw some young people a into the world of poetry for an hour, and maybe even for a lifetime. 

For those of you reading this, you now have a brief idea who Mary Oliver was.  If you have any interest in poems at all, I advise you to take a few minutes and check out her work.  You might find a gem of an idea that really strikes you, like the last line of "Wild Geese" I quoted above, did to me. 

R.I.P. Mary Oliver.  Let the soft essence of your soul love what it loves and fly where it flies...

Become poem

This is a poem I wrote way back in the P.O.W. House days, around '92 0r '93, that you old and mid school BMXers remember.  I didn't lose it in 2008 like all my other poems and creative work, because it's the one poem I memorized.

Become

You must risk

If you're to succeed

For when you grow

Sometimes you bleed

Each must climb 

Over the fence

For the only cage

Is ignorance

Each Jedi Knight 

And Shaolin monk

Evolved from a lowly punk

Don't get caught 

In the world's throws

We must become

Our own heroes

-The White Bear

New poem- Life: What Will You Do?

Life: What Will You Do?

Chances are

You won't fossilize

Your skull will last a while

After your meat puppet dies

The flesh ain't you

It never was

The bones aren't either

They're just borrowed dust

You're a piece 

Of God's big bang

Not the cosmic one

That's another thing

The Great One splintered

Into billions of shards

One is your soul

That let down its guard

In a cosmic backwater

Near a minor star

You swooped down

Free will to explore

Among the creatures

You ducked and wove

Then, with a leap of faith

You dove

Two legged creatures

Scrambling 'round

Turned into humans

As we dove down

Splinter of light 

In human flesh

What will you do

While you're Earth's guest?

-The White Bear

Written early last June, directly from my head onto a big, freehand drawing of a skull colored with all kinds of colors.  I wrote this after getting into a lot of talks about Edgar Cayce's readings, the late "Sleeping Prophet," and the most documented psychic in history.