songanddancegirl

SON

here comes the son

watching football with the boyz  a silly girl

banished from the inner sanctum  grab my

barbie case  beautiful +round with barbie’s

pic and lipsticks on cover  i own 263 shades

as of today  a lifetime of silly girl attracting the

big boys  ran away many a sunday  from house

on ravine where father +boys screamed for their

team  a man in a fedora and trenchcoat who looked

an awful lot like daddy  the coach  tom landry   how

do i even know this name  5 decades later and i would

vote for him  for prez   the boys of purdon in my blood

like holy wine  thankfully joni and leonard (allavashulim)

were there to wrest me from those wolves  and return me

to the land of girlcool  in my room  disco-set blaring to drown

out their malebonding  but i’d still rather be one of em  +though

my girlsoul flies with the departed ones on cold canadian nights

the boys remain skeptical + testosterone

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Winter  2018  ..for the boys+men of purdon.. RIP  lee  marty   leonard

moan

ain’t gonna moan no mo

isn’t it time to be happy?  but how happy can i be

when a huge piano labelled  DEATH  is eventually

going to fall   not only on me   but on you too  wonders

george saunders   whose lincoln in the bardo gives you

the inside scoop  as nothing else in the canon can  read

it  if you dare  for there you will find a chronicle of human

sensation  a sensual dismemberment  of what it is to be alive

and dead   is it the hoarfrost on december windows?  etchings

on glass  see through to melting tributaries come april   +may

when birthdays of departed will bite you   and in the shade  toads

+lily of the valley wait to enchant  and bewart you  should you be

fortunate enough to move out of the hurtling piano’s way for another  day

and do try not to be bitter while you wait  especially about the shrinking

of tumours in people other than your brother’s livers

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Winter 2018  ..come spring  poems galore about sunshine +daffodils.. i will melt you with maudlin joys..

spirit

spiritbaby

my new baby brother is on the bed  and i lay my head

next to him  he is beautiful  smells like powder +life   last

time i lay my head next to a brother  he was dead  brainmeld

with the big C   but in the wee hours of morning  right beside

me  a sturdy new boy  let’s call him martine   we rub noses

like the innuit  who have 3,2001 words for love  brotherly love

trumps hate   it takes the cake  is the cake   okay   i’ll stop

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FALL 2018  ..in this dream u get a redo! resurrected on a mangerbed..brand new…run with it martine..

electric

body

electric

there’s something very undignified about dying

and i have instructed my sister-in-law to have socks

on my deformed feet   as well  not to allow any deathbed

tourists into the crucible   when i tell her these things

she says: check!  and i know that she will make sure that

i have dignitas to spare   that’s how she rolls

and in the aftermath  before the afterlife  no doubt i will

be reunited with my brother  and we will decide how we’d

like to spend eternity  (not in mexico bro)  we will likely hang

around to play spirited games with those who remain  how about

calling them  from our cell phones  deader than we

not funny martine!  as well  we will torment them in their showers

a place humans blissfully sing   unless you are gutwrenched  with

grief   then you dread getting in    the shower  a chamber  where

electricity melds with soap  melds with ions of departed souls

so that you no longer know  where they begin   and you end

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stout as a horse  affectionate  haughty  electrical  I and this mystery 

 here we stand  i sing the body electric  has anyone supposed it lucky

to be born? i hasten to inform him or her  it is just as lucky to die  the

smallest sprout shows  there is really no death

(Walt Whitman  Leaves of Grass  1855)

Fall 2018  .. Martine! please don’t call me from heaven  when i’m driving..

mexico

oh mexico!  the sun’s so hot i forgot to go home

they re-assign numbers  he said   trying to

reassure me this won’t happen   forever

forever  a time frame incomprehensible  to

this grieving sister  whose dead brother called

her this afternoon

i called him back  +his voicemail picked up

MARTINE!   it chimed   his mexico name   i wanna

be re-assigned to the place my dead bro’s phone

is calling me from   because in that mexico he is

stirring risotto  +waiting for the cab from guadalajara

carrying me   home

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FALL 2018 ..still out here begging for a re-do..or 2..

man

a man needs a maid

curled up between my now dead father (at 68)

+bro (at 72)  but for a virulent cancer  one would

have expected my brother to live well into his 90’s

long livers on our mother’s side  but his liver a

metastatic miasma  just recently

in this photo   circa 1973   handsome brother in a

straw cowboy hat  beads around his neck  ‘stache

+hair down to there   a football hero hippie    just

returned from nassau   father in his 50’s   football

glory days return in dreams  on freezing suburban

nights   when arteries whisper dark songs

but this day  jazz plays  daddy smokes a cigar   +

14 yr. old girl  jewfro in a can atop her head  curled

comfortably between her first 2 men   both cocky

charismatics   but in different ways   both old world

patriarchs  in the same way  re: a woman’s place

what respect she wrested  rested upon her spunk

brains  +unwavering belief that she was one of them

the one who walked slowly toward their deathbeds

encouraging them to be unafraid

a fearlessness she learned in the arena   mother’s

mastectomy  when she was 17  and the steely will of

real men alchemically seeping into veins

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FALL  2018

alive

staying alive

i was emphatic in my plea to gene  my uber driver

that faith+meaning are one +the same  i.e., finding

meaning   making meaning  of everything   gene nodded

solemnly as he drove me away from death bedding  and

palm trees

cormac mccarthy said: the dead would take the living

with them if they could   and we would certainly hold

them fast    a tug of war for fisher kings  finding meaning

not for sissies  think jack nicholson bellowing YOU CAN’T

HANDLE THE TRUTH    or picture me

but with hook firmly planted in cheek   a cheeky final

pronouncement: i’m outta here bitches   no more family

gatherings  where heathen circle the promised land  those

shining bottles of casked whiskies  staying alive anesthesiology

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..we spoke easily and I was humbly honored to walk with him

deep in that world where he was a man..

..i saw how all things false fall from the dead..

(Cormac McCarthy  Suttree  1979)

FALL 2018

FAITH

SHOW A LITTLE FAITH

most people don’t know that i wanted to be

an astronaut  i told someone that recently over

borscht  +he got a faraway look in his eye  he was

telling me that the earth is flat  and i suggested that

he look at some footage from space

i imagine the view of earth: absafuckingspectacular

little blue planet 3rd from the son   the one who is out

there now  trying to get back in   though my sources tell

me  i.e.., the tibetan book of the dead + google  that things

begin to calm down for the wrenchedaways

but for those who stay  it is a difficult time  of trying to reconcile

the why didn’t i’s   with the  i know full bloody well why i didn’t

but none of it helps   i may need the mother of all therapists  or

the therapist of my mother  to recommend warm milk +lobotomies

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Fall 2018  ..for M.A. ..now casing the Promised Land..

moon

to the moon alice!  to the moon!

your pain is your rocket fuel! said someone in the

film I saw today  about the first man walking on the

moon  the 2^ndwas my father  1989  on the night of his

mission  a full moon in eclipse  watched it from parent’s

balcony  next to perry weinstein   and drank out a bottle

of courvoisier  as my mother was want to say

the 3^rdman on the moon was my 72 yr. old bro  also died

on a full moon  ditto a balcony  this time sans weinstein  and

tequila flowed not courvoisier  my pain does not feel like rocket

fuel  but like a weight  still finding its way to the bottom of the sea

have u hit bottom yet?  they like to ask addicts  and desperados

like me

as if we can possibly know  for it is only in retrospect  that place

of 20/20  where one knows how low she can go  and just how

much she loved her angry bro   come the spring a ladder will

appear  along with a new mission  leave no stone unturned until

u find him

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Dr. Patricia Valcke, a palliative care physician at St. Pauls hospital in

Saskatchewan , said more people seem to die during full moons, and

also noted odd behaviour among dogs, daughters, and sisters. No one

wants to be on call.  (Teen Vogue  February 1, 2018)         

Fall 2018  ..august 16, 1989 …. october 21, 2018.. the moon missions of lee+marty..

baptisms

baptisms of fire

did u know that the rusty blackbird has already

lost about 90 % of its numbers  +there are a billion

fewer blackpoll warblers than there were in the seventies??

there has also been a sharp decline in the brother population

a world without songbirds is a world without brothers  and i

know too that all of u are growing weary of this poet’s madness

grief the stuff of tragedy  all greek to me  a baptism of silence if

i ever heard one  hey does anyone out there have a voicemail of

his voice?  please send it to me asap  the silence is deafening

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Fall 2018  ..5 weeks today..a protracted grief they say..