Top Five: Michael Dwayne Smith

FIVE THINGS in CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

Soul On Ice: O glorious first book to shatter a child’s world. O precious first book to challenge a child’s family. O book banned and demonized and become like tattered robe for the new adolescent king.
Jazz: Memorize heart-rending music, destroy it, reinvent.
Frida Kahlo: Pain is the soul of the prison. Politics, the condition of humanity. Passion is the blood of the true heart. Any medium I choose, be it paint or language or sex, any medium, becomes pathway into eternal mind, where suffering gives birth to freedom from suffering.
Larry Levis: Beautiful reverie of nihilism, beautiful no mind of pure sight.
Life After Death: Thank you, mortality, for keeping me awake. Thank you for surviving the crush of death to those most dear, for out-living my marriage’s death rattle, and preparing my sentences for the blissful oblivion of return.