songanddancegirl

MATERIAL

NEW  MATERIAL     S’IL  VOUS  PLAIT

Today walking by a gaggle of  constructionguys

I hear one of them say to another:  Who will she choose?

I’m   the before     You’re   the after     Men can be oblique

The amuse bouche    + the dessert?   Is he proposing a menage?

I run real fast  as the aftermath  chases afterme  all along West Queen St.

Yesterday I consulted with a Podiatrist from Yonkers  who charges

$4000 per foot for:  structural re-alignment     I tell jokes  he said

Do you want tame  or racy?   A little racy is okay    A woman had the

map of Canada tattooed on her ass    + every time she bent over  we

lost Quebec

Tomorrow my husband will say:  Today is my 38th wedding anniversary

& BTW  I’m having lunch with her  next Thursday   With this  I will lose what

might have been called  my poise   She’s still hanging around?  What’s she like?

Allgood  + nogood  too   I like her   he will also say   (instead of falling to his knees)

And much later   tomorrow eve   the night weasels will come

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End of Summer  2014

ROSE

THE  ROSE  OF  JERICHO

The only sounds in the abandoned Liberian

village  were the cries of  Fatu Sherrif   12

locked away with her mother’s body    Starving

& thirsty   After more than one week Fatu fell

silent   Ebola was 1st detected in the family on

July 20th   When health workers arrived Fatu’s

father had been dead 5 days    brother Barnie  15

still roams the village  alone   scrounging for food

He said: No one wants to come near me  & they know

I don’t have Ebola    The shunning villagers are on the run

themselves  shunned   by neighbouring towns   Only Mamoh Wile

septuagenarian chief + Barnie   remain

So  how would this play out in our town?    Our city’s children

cared for  unaware    Afternoon women at lunch    as worlds have

disappeared   What mayhem would ensue?   The city you were meant

to triumph in   a spent horse   And in January ice will cover everything

Whatever you have known is  lost   Belongings lay abandoned   the doors

of houses left open    And in the morning it snows  some more   as packs of

pedigree dogs roam the core  fighting over scraps of last night’s dinner

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End of Summer  2014

SEDUCTION

SEDUCTION + DEATH     ATOP  T.O.  TOWNHOUSE

A Fall wasp is rubbing himself on me   before I know it

sweet stinger will be under the skin of my left knee   Usually

no innocent bystander  I cannot say that I seduced Mr. Wasp

today   Here I lay sprawled under skybluesky  He sniffs me  & I

remind him of decomposing honeybun  he landed on   at noon

What will he get other than certain death   from stinging me?

A chance to ride a poet for a moment   + provoke ecstatic confessions

Now loud cursing from the rooftop  where sticky with honeygarlicsauce

I lay    All is strangely quiet  as blue turns to reddish purple    Summer

ebbing away     My 90 yr. old mother says: I think he has eyes for you

I’ll arm-wrestle you for him   I tell her   as I slap Mr. Wasp in an urban

girlfrenzy   now a yellow mush on the floor    In the city  aggression builds

as snow threatens    +  aging Canadians sing songs around campfires

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End of Summer   2014

BLEED

PRICK ME    & I  BLEED

In a play yesterday   the onstage

lovers caught in their own  feedbackloop

of:  lovehatelovehatelovehate    I pate you

said my 3 yr. old client   That’s okay said I

You can pate me + like me    I pate you + I

hate you  said she

Let us extrapolate to the  Global stage   Take the

Levant for example   Ancient hatreds + loves (?)

spring up   in the midst of  an aborted  Arab Spring 

There will never be peace  the pundits say

And what of the  Jewish Question?    3 Yeshiva boys

kidnapped & murdered   1 Arab youth immolated   Late at

night we hear the wail of  the Mothers  floating over Galilee

Grief has no creed   it is democratic  +free

So  are Jews measured by a different moral yardstick?   Are we

not human too?  Are not  self-preservation  revenge  + hatred  the

sine qua non of humanity?    They never stood up for themselves  

fought back    Why did they walk in single file to the oven doors?     

In my world it is the year  5774   and these questions are not rhetorical

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I am not an animal. I am a woman.

The Elephant Man

Summer  2014

POCAHONTAS

MARLON BRANDO   POCAHONTAS    & ME

Then there are the recurring déjà vu’s   Part dream

part psychotic-snapshot    A cousin described these

to a tee   more daymare actually   Sometimes my father

throws back his head + laughs    He won’t squander his

happiness if given a  second lease

Today a civilian plane is blown from the sky   298 die

Metaphor is the mother of reality   & reality is the shit-abyss

this Summer

38 yrs. ago   another steamy Summer day    19   pristine

Like a dream   In chiffon cream  confection    $1200

way back then     People say your dress cost thousands!

bourgeois neighbor bellowed    On the day I sold the dress

I came within inches of being cancelled  by a streetcar named:

The Last Chance Texaco

My young groom twice married  (3^rd bride makes the man)

Father at my side  gone now 25   A jittery bride    Grooms sister

cried (gone at 45)  Hated me for marrying up    But none of that

matters anymore   In the end we leave nameless + poor   Lingering

now on the shore   still part pristine    mostly grizzled  Fisher-Queen

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Stella!   Stella!  

(Stanley Kowalski   Vieux Carre 1947)

Summer 2014

ARCHANGELS

PEOPLE    HELL     & SMALL ARCHANGELS

Look around the edges of any group   Which strange

kids are off to the side   hiding from the mainstream?

They will be the  dogwalkers  poets  docents   of tomorrow

6 yr. old boy + 10 yr. old girl   He tries to keep a giant blue

beach-ball airborne  otherwise forlorn   digging in the dirt

She occasionally allows him onto her lap    A strange sight even

for me   dark café dweller  parkbench denizen  mainstreameject

Counsellor in shades takes the ball away from boy in crevasse

Old stone building U of T    What will they BE?    As other campers

flee   + beat each other senseless    Girl: mother of 3  Brittany  Starlight

& Alba     Boy:  will disappear  July 22^nd  2023

Counsellors now playing murderball   whipping colorful orbs at

campers heads   One falls to the ground does not get up   As parents

in business towers   nervously search the horizon for rescue planes

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*(today Globe & Mail pundit suggests: Soon they will harvest the madness

of poets + comics + dogwalkers)

Summer 2014

SAVE ME

POETRY  WILL  NOT  SAVE  ME

They may break all of my krystal  when yellow stars

twinkle in the longdarknight    They may covet my

teeth  though none are gold    Or maybe settle for my

Great Grandmother’s candelabra   Az meer shmeert   fortmin

If you grease it   it slides   

Truth is  no one has built an oven for me  but they are taking tallies

in parts of Europe   And though poetry will not save me   I am comforted

by the certainty that Barak  will rescue my people too   Those we left behind

were not just numbers  They were the vessel itself    Hopefully they will send

my brothers and I   to the same place

The lines waiting for the boatmen are long   Do not wait in resignation   eternity

requires hope   Choose a few sacred possessions  & pretend they will let you keep

them   It was highly likely the train ploy  would not work a 2nd time    Do not be

fooled by the boats  A band will play  & a singer’s voice will sweeten the afternoon

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*(please commit this poem to memory    & then burn it)

Summer  2014

WAYFARERS

HAIR  SLICKED  BACK    WAYFARERS  ON

I remember the boys of summer  beautiful & pristine

I remember the boys of summer  one sweaty   breathing

heavy  in a darkened ravine    long hair   banana bikes

wheelies    one went insane  bouffant  elvis redux  by grade 13

years later another moved to my cousin’s street  drove a red Cadillac

& swore he named his dog after me

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Summer  2014

DOG

HAIR  OF  THE  DOG

I know someone who has been OFF of life support  for

11 days   The doctors say this is not even possible  but

some human-egos are rock solid survival machines

Others cave  and flee  with regularity    Or resort to

substances  with names like  Mary Jane + Skag

Dull the ache    take the peak out of peak experiences

Then there are those who say:  I am gonna save this

place   this ship of fools   this quintessence of dust   this

blackness world   this Ebola    I am also in touch with a

man   father of 1,211 children   The 1/2 sibs found each

other on Facebook    Sperm daddy  Sperm daddy  i will

find you   and when i do  we will get acquainted  compare

moles  Sperm daddy  Sperm daddy  i love you

I find that I have been speaking aloud   Stanza-chanting at

the crowd  But today there is a meanness amidst the muffled

muzak  The woman beside me leans in: Bitch if you keep

singing I’m gonna murder you   I know inside we likely won’t

survive   with our deep nostalgia + hopeless longing    Our

irrational pursuit of the cure    Some of us have crossed the line

we’re just not that fine   anymore

There was a brief time when I had a magnificent dog + no cares

In a recent dream we baked him into holy wafers & gave them

out at the sidedoor   I read that whatever you believe will happen

in the end   will happen   It just makes so much sense   When you

cross the marshlands in the bluish light  the dog will be there  with

all of your music   + your father burning burgers on the bbq

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Summer 2014

MOUTH

MOUTHING OFF   AT SUMMER POETRY INTENSIVE

Write about your mouth I said to him   Just look in the mirror

He stared unblinkingly into my Atom Egoyan eyes *(recently

became my doppelgånger)

So the least I can do is put my moneywheremymouthis

My mouth on a good day is full of scintillating things to say:

quips  hyperbole  curses   + snide sotto voce asides

Truthfully it becomes more & more difficult to spit words out

Not mouth’s fault   It is the braindrain   Wordfind is in a permanent

state of thesaurus

Lately I have begun to wonder about Atom’s brain/mouth co-ordination

& whether or not he considers me to be  his doppelgånger   We did bump

into him at the Opera last Fall    where my husband grabbed Atom’s ass

& dragged him screaming from the hall

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Summer 2014