"Love Lies Bleeding" and a the few other surviving poems of mine

 Poet and donut connoisseur.  Me with a light snack from Randy's Donut's in Hollywood, 2019.  

After writing the big Substack post about how I became a poet (linked below), I got a nasty leg infection, and couldn't get online for a while.  I've been getting to the library to get online for a while the last few days, from the recuperative place I'm in for the time being.  As I said in the Substack post, I've written somewhere around 400 to 500 poems in my life.  I published about 150 of them, total, in three zines, which came out in 1992, 1996, and 1997.  But I lost all of my copies of those zines, and all the handwritten originals, and other copies.  I lost ten years worth of my unpublished poetry in a move to North Carolina in 2008.  More on that in the next post.  

I've written some really stupid poems, some funny poems, some sarcastic poems, a bunch of mushy love poems (in the late 80's, and early 90's), and a lot of pretty decent, philosophical, "what's life all about?" type poems.  I don't memorize my poems, in most cases.  So most of those 400 to 500 are lost, unless one or more of my poetry zines show up somewhere.  There's a few still out there, in a box in a closet or attic, somewhere.  

In addition to the few poems in the last several posts, here are links to a few more of the better poems I've written since 2008, when I pretty much stopped writing poetry.  These 10 or 15 poems, here and in the previous posts, are all I have left, at this point.  

"Love Lies Bleeding" - 2018

"Life: What will you do?" - 2018

"The Douchebag's War Cry"- 2023

"Freaks, Geeks, Dorks, and Weirdos" - 2023

"Ode to the word FUCK" - 2007  

(This one is a comedy bit/poem, and I do have it memorized, but have only performed it for a handful of people)

I recently wrote a big post about writing poetry and how I became a poet on my Substack.  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

"AirFireEarthWater" and "Quotes"- Two of my poems from the early 1990's

 This is me as a cameraman for Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear video company, back in 1989.  This photo was taken 3-5 years before this poem was written, but I don't have any photos handy of myself in the early or mid 1990's.

AirFireEarthWater

A FEW there that find the path

A FEW there be that hear the call

A FEW there be that wake up to

The mystery and wonder of it all

-The White Bear

This poem above was written somewhere between 1993-1997, when I was reading and digging into religion, spirituality, mysticism, the Rosicrucians, Pythagoras, the mystical meaning of the 3-4-5 right triangle, and other weird shit like that.  This poem was in either my 2nd or 3rd poetry zine, Mush (1996) or The Poet (1997), I'm not sure which.  Around the same time I also came up with this little poem/saying.

Quotes

I read the businessmen's quotes

And they quoted the philosophers

 I read the philosophers' quotes

And they quoted the mystics

I read  the mystics' quotes

And they quoted Nature

So I walked out into the woods

And found that everything quotes God

-The White Bear

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

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

"Play" - poem from the early 1990's-

 

If the world's a stage, show it what you got.  Street performing dance team, The Damn Team, who used to perform right next to where I would sell artwork on Hollywood Boulevard.  2019.  #steveemigphotos

Play

The world's a stage

Just grand in scale

Drama erupts

From our travails

It's one Great Play

Go find your part

Some day you'll realize

The world is Art

-The White Bear

written somewhere between 1992-1996

I just wrote a bunch of my ideas on poetry and becoming a poet on my Substack.  If that sounds interesting, check it out:

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

Jezebel- a poem about a weird punker chick I dated in 1989

 This is me carving a line in the Nude Bowl, in the spring of 1990, a few months after writing this poem.  The Nude Bowl is an abandoned swimming pool out in the middle of the desert, legendary in the BMX and skateboard worlds, in the Palm Springs area.  It's a relic from a 1970's era nudist colony.  I have very few pics of myself from that era, so this will have to do.  Video still from The Ultimate Weekend, my 1990 BMX video.

In late 1989, I dated this weird punker chick who used to hang out at the Huntington Beach Pier on the weekends, where a handful of us BMX freestylers would hang out and session.  It wasn't a serious relationship, I think she dated me mostly for the food, I took her out to Denny's almost every night.  

She was really weird, and told us a different name nearly every time we saw her, for the first several weeks she started hanging out.  We took to calling her Jezebel, I'm not sure why.  We listened to The Cure a lot while hanging out, and she liked to watch horror flicks.  The one thing I will say about her, this weird punker chick had an amazing rapport with animals.  She had a rat that would drink off of her (or my) tongue.  The thing that really freaked me out, though, is that she would cuddle with my roommate's 25 pound, mean as hell cat.  I never even petted the cat, in two years of living in that apartment.  I still managed to get bit by it once.  But, within five minutes of walking in the living room, Silus the furry, mean, basketball of a cat was on his back, in her lap, and she was rubbing its belly.  My roommate, who owned the cat, could rub its belly maybe once a month, without getting bit.  So she was a really weird, kind of interesting, very crazy punker chick.  But she had an incredible way with animals.  Near the end of of our short relationship, I wrote this poem.  I was probably kind of drunk, I can't remember.  I wanted to break it up, but was kind of worried since she was kind of suicidal at times.  I wrote this poem when I was thinking about how to break up with her.

Looking back, I think this is the oldest poem of mine that has survived, unless someone finds a copy of my first poetry zine, We're on the same Mental Plane... and it's Crashing.  This poem was in that zine, which I published in 1992.  But there were poems in it going back to 1988, when I really started writing a lot of poetry.  Obviously, it's not a great poem, but since I memorized this one, I still had it, when I lost nearly all of the 400-500 poems I've written, in a move in 2008.  In my head, the way I would read it, the rhythm of this poem goes to the tune of the song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."  Yeah, not the best relationship when that's the song that comes to mind while thinking about it.  

Jezebel

The words that I want, well they just aren't around

And I can't look into your eyes

What we once felt, I don't see anymore

Like a ship when the fog fills the skies

The moments they come, and the moments they go

But the right moment just won't come 'round

I can't go on feeling just how I do, and I can't risk leaving you down

You're all that I wanted, before I knew what I had

And without you I'd never have known it

You captured what little love I had inside, even though I may not have shown it

But here we are now, in the dark and the gray, two rowboats adrift in the mist

And maybe our paths, they will cross once again, if not this world than in the next

-The White Bear

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

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack

"California Bitch" and the other "punk songs" I wrote lyrics for in the late 1980's

The Ultimate Weekend, my first self-produced BMX video.  In 1990, after working for 2 1/2 years at Unreel Productions, the Vision Skateboards video company, I wanted to make a  BMX freestyle video that showed "real riding."  Only a handful of BMX freestyle videos had come out, up until that point.  But the wave of early prosumer video equipment made producing my own BMX video possible.  For the first time, average people could produce their own videos.  Armed with my $1,100 S-VHS video camera, I spent about 8 months shooting footage on weekends, and $5,000 of my own money to produce The Ultimate Weekend.  At the time, it was a pretty good rider-made video, the best edited of the bunch at the time.  In the process, I hada punk band called The Stain, from Ohio, produce and record two "punk songs" of lyrics I had written.  Thanks to Jon Stainbrook, Mark Mickel, and Jeff Kollman, John from Government Issue, and friends, for humoring me, and making these highly questionable songs happen.

"Cottage Cheese Disease" - 10:39 (in video above)- In 1988, 1989 and beyond, I wrote lyrics to a bunch of "punk songs."  My friend Mike, a Huntington Beach Pier local, Mike, started taking me to punk rock shows, and properly introducing me to punk music.  I was already writing poems at the time, after dating a woman who was the lead singer in a local band. I didn't tell anyone about the poetry slowly filling notebooks in my closet.  

The punk songs were just other ideas that I'd get, and write down, funny, sarcastic little ideas.  I never really wanted to start a band, I just liked making up fucked up, funny songs.  At one point, I started writing a series of short stories that included a fictional punk band called U.I., Unpardonably Ignorant, a line from the book Think and Grow Rich. In those stories, the characters would reference the band, and my songs were the band's songs.  But those stories never got finished.  

"Cottage Cheese Disease" was what a former roommate of mine called women's cellulite.  We were riding at the the H.B. Pier one weekend, and some large woman walked by in a smaller than necessary swimsuit, and I made a joke "Whoa, she got the cottage cheese disease."  Over the next hour or so it turned into a song.  I thought of it as a song, not a rap.  But when The Stain took it, they turned it into a rap.  Now, 35 years later, I'm fat from my years working as a taxi driver, and have my own cottage cheese disease.  Karma got the last laugh.  

"Mom's Imagination" -  44:07 (in the video above)- For this song, I was thinking back to high school in Boise, when I was just getting into freestyle.  My mom had a pretty good imagination when it came to what I was up to.  I was a shy dork getting shot down by pretty much every girl I talked to at parties, yet my mom always seemed to think that when I came home on the weekends, I'd been to a full blown drunken orgy or something.  My best friend in high school, Darrin, and I used to joke about this.  One day I laughed, "Man, I wish my life was half as great as my mom's imagination."  He laughed, "Yeah, no shit."  The line stuck in my head, and I turned it into these song lyrics.  The Stain, again, turned it into an actual song.  What I like about this song is that "Mom's Imagination" actually sounds like a song you might here in a show by a young punk band.  

"California Bitch" lyrics

Refrain

She's a... California bitch 

in her bleach blond hair

California bitch  

but I don't care

California bitch

in her Cabriolet

California bitch... No way!

Daddy pays the rent

She has a good time

Party with her friends

Maybe do a few lines

Find a new guy 

'cause she's got an itch

She's a California...

She's a California... BITCH!

Refrain 

There was another verse or two, I can't remember them now.  "California Bitch" was written about the hot, stuck-up, blond girls that we'd try to talk to at the beach, and who would either ignore us, or make fun of us.  A lot of them drove convertible Volkswagen Cabriolets then, that was the trendy, stuck-up, blond, rich girl car then.  Being a BMX freestyler was definitely not cool in the 1980's, and most of the hot girls walking by would totally blow us off.  So "California Bitch" was my "Fuck you bitch" song to all of the hot girls who waned nothing to do with me.

I've been doing a lot of writing lately about creativity, art, writing, Creative Scenes, and stuff like that on a platform designed for writers, called Substack.  Check it out.  You can even subscribe for free, and get each post sent to your email.  

Steve Emig The White Bear's Substack