songanddancegirl

meet u on the dark side of the moon

if you watched the lift-off of Artemis II today  you will have

seen the lawn chair crowd lolling about  drinking shasta

sucking on chilidogs  at least they were not watching the

portable electric chair spectacles in days of yore

Mississippi Delta until 1994   children would be present   the

streetlights would dim   Gruesome Gertie  all a crackle + hum

she often failed to deliver enough voltage  i will leave y’all to use

your imaginations here

in childhood i had wanted to be an astronaut  an old brother recently

said: there’s still hope Ape!  John Glenn was older than you on his last

mission   i actually witnessed  a shuttle launch  the one that exploded

just after lift-off    there were several astronauts on board

one with a daughter watching   Christa McAuliffe   a young teacher

fulfilling her dream   my mother is in space too  apparently she will

never return

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Spring 2026

..the lunatic is  in the hall  in the White House..hey we the people ..leave that moon alone..

the moon wades a creek
Like an albino with a blade
Fixed to a stick.

Now the moon was a fifty-cent piece
It was a belly I wanted to cut open

the moon in the woods flashing
Like a girl running in her panties.

(Lunar Phases  Frank Stanford  Poet  Mississippi Delta 1948-1978)

free falling

the fortunate fall? now don’t get all biblical about your

trip-up  sister  so you missed a stair  bigfuckingdeal  so

you bounced like a 69 yr old: rubbery-bones  gristle +squirt  

a ton of ancient jew bricks  oldlady rumpled bruised putrifacto

gobsmacked   too late  yer in it   animal-flailing inside   oh

the horror  caught  trapped  now gnaw yer leg off old sport!

but no  you the ninja-meditator  gladiator  in mindful ecstasy

you realize that you have exactly three seconds  to reclaim your

dignity    dig it?

shitstreaks

mitre cracks

you sit a bit

choose not to cry    (for me  Argentina)

breathe deep the scents

of terror  +humiliate

loss of control  of limbs

crepey skin  triple-chin

flaccid bottleneck

rattle+hum    ok i’ll stop

instead you shove  a jagged bone-fragment  back into its socket

straighten up  un-gimp  a once magnificent renaissance foot  now

bunioned  +freakishly bent  you rise up  fly high above your mouldy

yellow house

things get really small  especially your husband  who is portly

+bakedgood   he promised you a second moon   the stars!  ✨

when all you really wanted    was his money

__

Spring Exinox in 2 days  …bye bye winter bye bye

..show me the money..

eyes wide shut

did you read about the Extremely Large Telescope in the news today?

(it’s really called that!) sits on a Chilean mountain top  capable of gathering

100 million times more light than the human eye  took 15 yrs to build  cost

2 billion bucks   Expensive Avoidance Mechanism  for humans too terrified

to look inside

recently i did just that  first stop a forest of chia seeds  an old bro + i  took

the Chia Challenge  he blew up like the Pillsbury doughboy  while i  like the

Goodyear blimp  we nearly died from knife like stabs  to the spastic colon

both spastic from an early age   he more so

but i must describe the smells wafting:

old brisket

rotting King Crab

brainstem putrifacto

afterbirth

foreskin    (don’t ask)

then quite close to the heart  the soul’s longings:

freedom

peace

a pink Fiat 500    (feel free to send me one from Amazon)

mother

father                      (hey your dead reside inside!  duh)

Big Bro Martino

your fave dead poet  who crooks a finger    Come here girl ..    

he is covered in caked-blood + leeches  suicided at 29

i’ll give you cosmic orgasm!  (perhaps TMI?)  i think you can see

genteel reader  why most  DO NOT  look inward  EVER   therapy likely

the devil’s work    therapist the devil’s concubine

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Winter 2026  ..it’s been a lonnnnng winter..

who by slow decay? who by her own hand?

the drama of suicide  do they all have that crazed look in their eyes?

i mean it’s pretty brazen  no?

Anna Karenina

Virginia Woolf

Frankie Stanford

Jules Renard’s mother (jumped into a well)+father (shotgun to belly)

Candy

David’s bro off a tall building  spitting image of Jesus

Jeff G from high school

Elliot A  ditto

Anne Sexton

Marilyn

Cobain

Rothko

Plath with a new born+3yr old in bedrooms   sleeping

Icarus flew  too   Nathan Schwarz Salant  my Jungian mentor said: there is

no such thing as attempted suicide  attempts are attempts  period   but what

about Anna Karenina  Nathan?  she changed her mind as the train was upon her

there is no hiding from a train  Aprill

how about the lemmings throwing themselves off of cliffs? is that even true?

Hitler+Braun do theirs count?  more cowardice + escape   so not tortured

+ raped

hari kari

hari krishna

hari hari

no one can know  but definitely brazen    yes

__

Death is no artist..  

Jules Renard  The Journal  1909

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Winter 2026  ..the sun will come out tomorrow.. bet your bottom dollar..

what i did on my summer vacation circa 1965

they took me to the mountains  to a cottage on a lake pond

marsh  green algae globs  smell of death’s door mild sewage

+slop  how can a man with a badly burned hand drive a car?

son from 1st wife who died in a car crash  turned the stove on

Eli sank his hand into the foodcaked coil  flesh stink+incinerate

he was left with a blackish red  snake stigmata

he married our simple cousin whose father drove the getaway car

Canada’s youngest bank robber  pardoned by the King  10 yrs in

prison  molested many of the girls+boys in the family  interestingly

not me  i had a father named Lee  who would have disembowelled him

George had puffy cheeks + a garbled voice  he’d sucked on a loaded

rifle  sometime in his youth  he always seemed really nice

__

Winter 2026  ..your family reads like a broadway play..

how does water not slide off a mountain?

how could they send me there  with him?

power to the people right on!

marauding gangs  el mencho murdered today in Mexico

bro’s friend trapped in an apartment complex there  his

parents trapped in a ghetto in Warsaw not so long ago

is fighting back allowed? is it sanctioned by the state?

in America you can be shot in the face for being a person

going home to your children  from work

ladybugs ladybugs fly away home 

your house is on fire  and your

children are alone

today the man with yellow hair + orange skin  will address

the nation  stand up  spew  rave + say: THE UNION IS STRONG

strong arm dictators with gold toilets always talk might  right?

el mencho el chapo el hitler el donald  we know you lie thru your

pearly whites

but they  the people  gave away their power  (power to the people right on!)

and now  they  are ground down  to ashes  to dust  to manure  also used to

make fertile  to grow  a new civilization?  without haters   how is that

even possible   given what we are?

i write about death + cancer a lot

i write about life too

don’t i?

(not a rhetorical question )

__

Winter 2026  ..for freedom fighters everywhere..

his father was a classics scholar fluent in greek

for David Donnell

Poet

St. Mary’s  Ontario

when i first met him he was teaching Poetry 101

older but still puckish  his babyface still present

not roly-poly sweet   sharp edges  Scottish mischief

no cherub he  he wrote like the God of Poetry  won a GG

lived alone in a walk-up  on social security

t-shirts yellow-torn  fingers yellow-worn  cigs flicked

into gutters with elan  so how does a man  fall from a

balcony  without knowing it   waking up  smashed to

smithereens  laying for 2 yrs not terribly forlorn  reading

Cormac McCarthy’s hillbilly bible  Suttree  a personal fave

my mother asked if DD was trying to get next to me  he’d said

he found me   easy on the eyes   +that my life read   like a

broadway play   it does  his laugh was grizzly-slow  building

to crescendo   not an ornate man nor an ornate poet

DD said: put the ice cream on your tongue + let it sit there

he worshipped  the word  the book  he wiped a table clean of

every speck every droplet  before a book was placed  sacred-space

for editing  my poems

no glasses  couldn’t see  he mostly inhaled them  growling

well you sure can bust a rhyme  and you don’t bore me!  

then he died  just missing the pandemic  oh my sweet petunia 

i’d like to have given him  some money   or something   more

DD once told me: Aprill  most people are moored in their own

bullshit    ya  i know what you mean

__

..i enjoyed the seafood chowder at the Gladstone with pretty Aprill

but i had to go back to the kitchen with my wide bowl & say: more

broth for God’s sake, more baguette, how about some fucking butter?

(Watermelon Kindness  dedicated to  Sydney Crosby  2010)

Winter 2026  ..for David Donnell..a.k.a. Krispin..a fine mentor..

..of his poetry it was said  David Donnell  is generally acknowledged

as a master of  the conversational intellectual poem..  

RIP  1939 – 2020

by God is that God looking down on me?

what does she/he want from me?

am i being given a mission?   impossible?

why me?   why not me?

am i the chosen one or just a random sucker?

Can they give me superpowers?   suckkkkkkkkker

strength  i already have that  immortality  they can

keep it  invisibility cloak  yes please!  how bout a ride home?

but then i’d have to give directions  and i only have a trail of

breadcrumbs  surgical instruments:

clamps

catheters

drainage-tubes  with yellowy fluid   filling

red + black + blonde  clumps of hair

can they take me to their leader?   to my lost people?

is anyone home up there?!  i mean what are they good for?    absolutely nothing?

turns out they want me to write a  how to cure cancer  poem   stat

I give them a blank page  they hand it back   i write the poem:

Laurice

Fanny

Sarah

Cookie

Marty

__

(*pictured above: the breast

of  another saint  

Saint Agatha  

231-251  Catania Italy ; 

AGO  Jesse Mockrin  2026)

__

Winter 2026  ..dedicated to my fallen..🧚‍♀️🧚

a short talk on: frank stanford & aprill atkins cameron & william faulkner

Frankie as he was known  was a southern swamprat

of a poet  he made up words like his hero Billy Faulkner

who taught me the phrase  mammalian ludicrosities

in  As I Lay Dying  mine + Frankie’s favourite  where

Dewey Dell + Vardoman  wait for Addie Bundren to die

Vardoman confuses his mom with the fish he butchered

for dinner   My mother is a fish !   Frankie shot himself

3x in the heart at 29  he lay dying for seconds  +his eyes

turned from brown to green    Frankie is a Gar !

Winter 2026   …sleeping with the fishes…RIP Frankie & Billy..🐡🐡

oneface

how is it that my face is morphing everyday  more+more+more

into yorn  roundnose cheekboned identical smoking lines all slash

+crevace  so many parts of you reside in me  growing gut  instincts

irritation  a penchant for  kleenex  chocolate  ice cream bars at 1 am

James Bond men  +fine fine whiskey  your courvoisier bill could feed

a small nation  i tried to get you to drink  a more gutrot potion  and

godbless you  you tried  but VSOP always beckoned because that you

were  i’d let you shower in it if you were still kicking    or kicking me

which you did   frequently !

__

Winter 2026  ..RIP Freda..a.k.a. my Yiddishe Mummybird..🕊