songanddancegirl

HURT

DIGGING IN THE DIRT TO FIND THE PLACES WE GOT HURT

Yesterday a friendly +handsome roofer  leaned in close

He said: Are you afraid to get your hands dirty?  Now

handing me a..  (would this be brothers un-pc joke  ie.,

You’d pet anything ?)  No!  He handed me a moist bundle

Twigs  foam  caulking    No one has ever given such a gift

to me

 

Yes Corey  roofer of my dreams  my hands are dirty   Quite

sullied   from my years spent in the trenches of humanity  With

the suffering   Digging in the dirt  as husband #3’s analyst  in a

Brixton accent  said of Psychotherapy  He also regularly chimed

re my biting wit: She said that!?    Yes    I did

 

Now I sit with this early nest  discarded  as Peregrines ate the

first chicks of house wrens  Corey also said: I want you to feel the

moisture my dear    Such a gentle roofer  And feel it I did   Perhaps

a little birdy-blood on fingertips   Wash as I might  this stigmata is

permanent   Reminding me of fledgling parts of Self   They never saw

the light of day   Couldashouldawoulda  Actor  Dancer  Rodeo Queen

 

As Corey left  he said: Now pet this   Stiff  upper lip  fancy lady   This

here leak may never reappear   That’s the thing about water  + beauty

One is wily and the other indifferent    I sit back +marvel at my roofer’s

dialectic   and wish I had met him years ago    Before exile set in

__

 

Homo Sapiens is the only species 

to suffer psychological exile.

E.O. Wilson

 

 

 

Spring  2018

 

PASSIVE

THIS WILL NOT BE A PASSIVE EXPERIENCE

Hot tub a phantom now  + so too Pleiades   The 7 sisters I

watched cross the sky  blinking archaic codes  to those in

the know   Immortality is free!   they said   It’s not a perk!

If you were all told this  the powers that be  would never have

been able to tithe you so lavishly   The body  a carpetbagger of

the soul   Rented  +rent   they blinked   You there filthy squatter

Don’t get too comfortable

 

Now having dismantled the hot tub up on the 5th floor rooftop

where water continues to pour in until this day   The past 4 have

brought the ice storm of the century  Rivulets run from surround

sound ports in ceiling   Onto me   As I toss on the night sea journey

Medical pot  induces blank spaces  where crooked sailors used to wink

There is no REM  on THC

 

I miss those sailors more than life itself   The force of which diminishes

in the 2nd 1/2 of life   Soon the jettisoning of an Ego   One who worked in

the salt mines of consciousness for some 61 yrs.  It may be a relief to not

have to be   To rest on laurels of head-banging   Sit quietly   Not being smart

or pretty  (bitter psychiatrist to beautiful mother: I’m not here to be pretty)

 

No clearly not   Nor to gaze into the recesses of a human soul  +see beyond

what stares you in the withered face   The whole of a life   One that cannot

be reduced to fit that tiny corner of your reductivist brain  Where pat answers

sit beside antiquated revelations  bullshit  +deep vicarious pleasure  As your

own pleasure centres enfeebled by years of looking  but not seeing   No cataract

surgery invented for this malady

 

How does this happen to one who wanted to vanquish suffering?  Your skills

at observation are rusty   That sine qua non of all sorcerers  +pedophiles    All

night now the patient wails in the mother tongue of her ancestors  And I too have

begun to sing in Russian  This at 4 a.m.   When the Ego  we will soon ditch  hears

knocking  +bells tolling  in these endless numbered days +nights   Except  they are

not     Yet  not here to be pretty  wasn’t slipped the wisdom of the Pleiades   Does

not see  the poet  in the rare beauty   The Ego railing against its jettisoning

__

 

When I clamour for God  he sends me back to time.

I want to sin, to be free. It’s as if God’s smacking me around,

pushing me away –  

(Adélia Prado – 1987 –  Griffin Lifetime Achievement Award Poetry  2014)

 

 

 

Spring 2018

..Ms. F. Marlieb 94.. was published in the Montreal Gazette at 10..

.. she is also a rare beauty..

 

 

 

 

 

SOLUTION

YOU SAY YOU GOT A REAL SOLUTION

I say to the BIG BURLY MAN at Metro: You going in here?  Now gesturing

to the cashier I am approaching   BBM at Metro: Darling  I don’t know

where I’m going   We commiserate   There is nothing vivid about today

Dark  grey  hulking April   He takes my comrade in arms chitchat  for

something else  +follows me to my car making soft mewing sounds

 

A lot of men call me pet names: darling  honey  sweetheart   The ones I know

have reserved others: Frosty  a.k.a. strong forthright woman  though this is not

what they mean  It rhymes with  witch   Also: Little Aprill Loo   Red   Munia (!)

Sister Christian   3rd husband: Buzzkill  due to penchant for moaning about

anarchy quite endlessly  +Buttercup  as in  suck it up   These might be heard

as somewhat endearing

 

Perhaps it is time to reign it in?   Effervescence   can be bloody tiring   for all

Do not confuse humanitarianism with people person   which I am decidedly

not   Last night well into the wee hours  I tried to convince a young interlocutor

that my real interest is in the  microcosm   +he suggested I may even be a

Republican!   Sans the gun lust   But it became a little tricky when I waxed

romantic  on Leon Trotsky  (Lev Davidovich Bronstein)   Trotsky is not the

answer to anything!    And he left in a huff

 

But Trotsky did more than dream revolutionary dreams  even though he ended

up ice-picked in Mexico   And his revolution  ok  a hammer + sickle fuck you

to the masses   A gateway to the Gulag  that swallowed up the poet Akhmatova’s

son  Lev   + later Osip Mandelstam   The great poet Anna A.  stood in line with

bread for Lev  for up to 16 hrs each day  while he languished in prison  One surefire

way to bring her to her knees   You cannot suck and blow at once   Tow the party line

or never be published again in your lifetime

 

Today there is much talk of  Revolution   And so many different movements afoot

But none feels terribly Trotsky   Yet in the face of another chemical attack on Syrian

children  it may be time for anarchy+apocalypse  a la  Cormac McCarthy’s: The Road

Mere Revolution will not do   Without despots herding + opiating us  we run amok

And after the Fall  deep in a glade  the one un-butchered family who remain  wonder

how they will steal the fire   Gnash pointy incisors +howl at the moon   Utopias are for

innocents     Suck it up

__

 

Once there were brook trout in streams. On their backs were vermiculate

patterns that were maps of the world.  Maps and mazes.  Of a thing which

could not be put back.  Not be made right again.  In the deep glens where

they lived  all things were older than man  and they hummed of mystery.  

(Cormac McCarthy  The Road  2006)

 

 

 

 

Spring  2018   btw  Zara has a Spring shoe  lucite heel  with a goldfish in it   U in?

 

 

VAN HULST

MEET JOHAN WILHELM VAN HULST

(January 28, 1911 – March 22, 2018)

There is a knock at your ornate Forest Hill door  +all

over Toronto  sadistic soldiers  are banging down  more

doors  (..and you thought the Handmaid’s Tale was bleak..

Please do remember  it’s FICTION  people!)   From these

homes they extract babies  Some bayoneted on the spot  some

saved for  other sport

 

Parents are pistol whipped  +worse   Rounded up into flat bed

trucks   The shrieking right out of Bedlam   Now the parents are

put on trains  to camps where  work will set them free   Can you

imagine this?   I want you to   So do  2,000 plus Jewish children

600 of whom Van Hulst saved  in Amsterdam 1943   They need you

to  IMAGINE this    Only 75 years ago!

 

A scene that played out all over Europe   Notable for the numbers

of children scooped  is Paris  Where the children languished in an

empty  (of their parents)  apartment complex  until more trains were

found   In Amsterdam  as the Nazis approached  many of the children

were abandoned in a makeshift nursery  Van Hulst had to choose  +took

12    Later he said: Why not 13?

 

It was never about who he saved  but always about who he did not   Now

across Toronto denizens watch as children are marched  +dragged through

manicured streets    Most people do nothing   But 4,326 rise up!  (5,595

Dutch rose too)   And they begin  in the shrill chaos of wrenching+screaming

to take the hands of single children   Remember  there are a few thousand   so

stragglers  are saved

 

These Righteous Torontonians take the children home   A few semi-charred babies

are placed in trunks  +ferried to Sick Kids where Doctors Without Borders  graft +

mend   Who are these heroes  +heroines?  Your friends?  Your neighbours?   I mean

I want to believe they are mine  as much as you want to believe they are yours   Now

fish darting among bones  shovels full  into Lake Ontario

__

 

All I really think about are the things I couldn’t do – the few thousand

children I couldn’t save..  Johan Wilhem Van Hulst)

 

When Germany invaded the Netherlands there were 140,000 Jews, and

by 1944, more than 100,000 of them had been sent to concentration camps.

 

SPRING  2018    ..Toronto the Good..

HARRY

I WHO USED TO CARE HOW LOVE HAS CHANGED PRINCE HARRY

Just picked up daytime Medical Pot   It only has traces of THC  

said the young spacey assistant  You can even drive!   But will

I thrive  +come to care more about Megan Markle’s looming

princess-hood?   I’m actually hoping not to be such a buzzkill  by

constantly drawing attention to my long suffering family  (*12

consumptives among us)   Or go on+on about my degenerat ..

BUZZKILL!

 

Let us start anew   On a recent night I stood pressed against hard

bodies   Mod Club  Trucker’s show  Hyperventilation seconds away

A good 200º fahrenheit   Sweat trickling into waistband of  Mom Jeans

A  body odored melancholy about the hipster crowd  Facebook about to

go down  Boomers not dying off  +leaving plumb jobs fast enough

(Yes  Buzzkill..)

 

One magnificent girl  all Stormy Daniels blonde+buxom+swaying  sidled

up to me   She edged my husband out of the way  +planted a THC tasting

kiss upon my lower lip  (not a BUZZKILL)   She said: Baby  you taste like

tequila  +smell so pleasant   Do you ever dream queer dreams?   Yes!   Just

recently my car careened wildly  +turned into a surfboard as I hit Lake Ontario

Run away with me?  

 

Last night we huddled under an awning at Billy Bishop Airstrip   April snow

turning to purple rain  Her white t-shirt wet +clinging   The scent of baby powder

wafting   Lighting out for new territories   Taos  and later San Miguel de Allende

 

This kind of queer dream?

__

 

I wish I were a girl again. Half savage and hardy. And free.

 

Nelly, do you ever dream queer dreams?  Yes, now and then.

 

(Wuthering Heights  Emily Bronte  1847)

 

 

 

 

Spring 2018

BIRDS

THE SMALL AND ANONYMOUS BIRDS OF WINTER

Day 5   Weedy + anathema   Now a script for every bodily +

disembodied  function   You will have REM   You just won’t 

remember them  said be-zitted young man  at the Med Pot

clinic   He spoke slowly  eyes furtive +darting    He doesn’t

even know what dreams are for

 

C.G. Jung is rolling in his grave   Dreams  the portal to the

oldest language before language   Will you sell your soul for

a night’s sleep?  You must give up birdsong too   They will

sing but you won’t hear them   But your pinball skills will be

greatly enhanced 

 

And the past 4 mornings  your face  recently emaciate  +worry

ridden  is silky of cheek  +25!   Once a lineless  unpancaked  young

woman   About to leave your young husband  Embark on an odyssey

out of  Purdontory  (*home address from 4 -19)  where your marriage

was arranged   His grandparents lived on your great great aunt’s street

In the ghetto  Palmerston Blvd.   Circa 1938

 

Some think you should return to brunette   But blood coloured hair makes

a statement   Now an old  1/2 crazed sister  with the face you deserve  walking

snowy April streets (*some guy in Oregon blames the Jews for snow!)  Yesterday

you explained the blood libel to husband #3   As you listened intently for the birds

you can no longer hear   Generally they have brought word of father  133 birds sat

at his knee on his last day    Now 29 yrs  +counting    Yesterday you saw him  but

don’t tell the  doctor..

__

 

SPRING 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

SEDATED

I WANNA BE SEDATED

Fire on the subway   Angry man not un-handsome  in the 7/11

BUY ME THIS!    He screams   +shoves cold dosas in my face

I know then that Kansas is just a metaphor   Then stumble onto

Yonge St.   Bright sun  + a brisk wind ricochet  Wishing my clothes

weren’t so breezy +synthetic  A little wool would go a long way today

As would a sharp pair of shears to cut the umbilical cord

 

#ufigureitout

 

I take a $14 cab 7 blocks  +arrive at  CANNABO-LAND  where I enter a

seedy room with 23 chairs  a Jumbotron  +a wan man with confusing

eye contact   Kill me?  Kiss me?  Do me?   I scrunch against the wall  +

wait for my name to be called   There is green matter all over the Brita

 

Offering greying water to Cannabis seekers

 

IF YOU HAVE EVER HAD ONE EPISODE OF PSYCHOSIS  LEAVE NOW

the stained sign says   Oh  one episode  I guess I’m good!   You see  I believe

my entire family  +current husband  to be figments   As C.G. Jung once said:

There is as much chance of your dreams being real

 

As the person beside you

 

These days I contemplate the  deep state  on many a night at 4 a.m.  as I lay

awake in a late life fugue    Stormy is a  deep state  operative   And this gracious

porn star will bring down the baboon ruler of the free world  More power to her

By 5:12 a.m. I chase fears of a mountainous city  6,402 miles above sea level   My

latest escape fantasy   But will I need an oxygen mask?

 

I have always been high maintenance

 

Finally my name is called  +a man who looks like a NARC  takes me to a room

away from the bad Hip Hop + light erotica on the Jumbotron  I will need more

than Cannabis to recover from this experience  Perhaps he is from the deep state 

Eyes red-rimmed +mystic   I am so scared that I neglect to mention the narcotic I

used for sleep   My urine sample does not lie    Maybe you forgot? 

 

He winks

 

I prostrate myself before these ghouls  One a young doctor (?)  wearing a

stethoscope + Fred Perry tee  He tells me not to worry about paranoia  as he

speaks in hushed tones   Eyes riveted to the door   I was once a girl upon whom

butterflies landed   Now the magic will be kept alive by a plant   I leave with a

urine stained script   Doctor’s hands a tad shaky   Old warhorse back on city

streets  Unhinged  Corporeality tattered

 

Come Get Me Fertile Spring!

__

 

 

 

Spring  2018  …the Resurrection close at hand..so too the Exodus…

 

 

 

 

 

 

BELIEVE

REASON TO BELIEVE

He was 5 when I met him   8 when he said: If I killed

somebody would you still be my friend?  He was named

after the prophet Elijah  The one we open the door for  at the

end of the Passover seder   The one who stumbles drunkenly

from house to house drinking Manischewitz  for free  which is

likely the only way it should be drunk

 

Eli I replied: Yes  No matter what you do  I will be your friend

+try to understand   Even if I’m in prison?   Yes even then   He

was already shackled to a narrative of woe  Mother schizophrenic

Eli beaten +abused by various Dads  Lost hearing in right ear from

a boxing gone wrong

 

One day he accidentally (?) hit me  quite brutally with a plastic

golf club  Still his friend  I encouraged using words instead of fists

I who hail from the tribe of a vengeful God   He of the big 3  Tormented

Job  +demanded human sacrifice on occasion   Let my people go!

 

And here I stand  yet again  on the precipice of freedom   Every decade

we take stock of the prisons we live in   Dig in deeper  or tear it all down

+start over again   Exile is always the price  from: home  5000 CDs

4300 books  2 tvs   friends   family  And your father’s grave filled with

Pagan miniatures

 

Vengeful God  we are outta here!   Some leave on a day much like today

Sky berserk blue   Exodus the territory of:  cancer ridden  the broken hearted

+the down on their luck   Me + You?   Freedom and it’s brother  exile  generally

not for top of gamers   But maybe they are just blinded by the light of lucre

+success   And never stop to think   that in the blink of an eye  the rungs up  may

become   the rungs down

__

 

 

 

Spring  2018  ..in 1 day

Jacob’s Ladder

TIME

THIS IS NO TIME TO NOT KNOW WHO U ARE

March madness upon us  gnashing teeth  Lone demented woman

ringing my old mother’s doorbell  4 a.m. each morning this week

The centre will not hold   The world has become sick reality tv

Bad art  imitating bad life  imitating bad art   Fake news  Putin

blaming Jews  for election tampering    What else is new?

 

A nascent Spring hanging in the balance   What no one remembers:

It does not come  in times of extreme brutality    There wasn’t any

Spring whatsoever  from 1935 – 1939    We always thought it would be

an apocalyptic event to rent us from the garden  permanently    The

environment?  Nuclear holocaust?  We never suspected it would be a

buffoon with an orange tan   + a psychiatric diagnosis    His hour come

round at last

 

And now we’re on a collision course with pure  unadulterated  evil:  A

squat boy-man  with his finger on the smaller button  being courted

(sounds sexual  no?)  A marriage made in thugheaven   The beady-eyed

man with big muscles who likes to wrestle with bears  perhaps sharing

porn stars with Donald Duck   The trashing of NATO   The shitting on the

UN   The lying a total of 3,678 times in his first 13 months in office (see the

Fact Checkers report this week)

 

Spring  we will mourn you   Botticelli is rolling in his grave  He of  Primavera

+Venus rising from the ethers in a clamshell   Fertile earth   Fecund sea    A

cherub orgy    Today’s Botticelli: A naked pear shaped man  too orange tan

Dic-tator in a golf cart  with Stormy  Kim  +Vlad  unclad    What rough beast

indeed?

__

 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(William Bultler Yeats  The Second Coming)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SPRING  2018

Birth of Stormy    Sandro Botticelli  1480   ..and 2018

LIPS

YOUR LIPS MOVE BUT I CAN’T HEAR WHAT U SAY

He spoke to me of epiphanies  +shamanic parties in the jungle

(a.k.a. findthegodwithintourism)   Apparently the use of the

drug  distilled from the Ayahuasca plant  is the new-ish panacea

for monied desperados   A Canadian doctor taking groups into

the jungle ($$$)  is lending credibility to what is otherwise known

as a weeklong vomitfest  of festering psychic terrors

 

In ancient traditions this was reserved for Shamans earning their

wounded healer stripes   Walking the (vomitous) walk   Personally

I am ready to try micro-dosing LSD  the latest transformation party

out of California   Another:  turn on  tune in  drop out  epiphany?

Why not just grab hold of the nearest signpost   +save some money

 

The one pointing toward a repetition compulsion so finessed   so well

oiled  that you actually believe yourself to be experiencing something

new! (very close to the definition of insanity)  Particularly when there

is not a scintilla of hope that this is true  i.e..,  the quality of bitterness

the antecedents of despair hidden in the many zippers of that shiny new

moto jacket  the pallor of Anderson Cooper’s thinning face  All brand new

 

(..wait wasn’t he always so hopelessly white?..)

 

And do hold onto this signpost  as you power up the nth degree of autopilot

The one where:  If it walks like you  +talks like you  +breaks just like a

woman   It is you   Or a reasonable facsimile    No one will notice   except

the most recent escapee   The one who is  so   HAPPY     (grrrrrrrrrr)

 

Truthfully you do not need a shamanic joyride in Machu Picchu   One person

I know said she felt absolutely no flavour of the sacred there  Not for a second

I sat in shocked silence  as she had just recently lost her soul to the food at

Balthazar   NYC

 

But the real lesson in the dirt of this nasty diatribe: It is epiphanic in + of itself

that you awaken in the same casing each +every day   Eyes open  comfortably numb

With or without a hard on   seeing an untethered foot at the end of your leg   until

you don’t

__