songanddancegirl

CAKE

TOLD  THERE  WOULD  BE   CAKE

In a curated village by a dead lake   with a curated

husband  +2 *manservants    I contemplate & ruminate

 

*a new alternative to the greasy gyrating strippers of bachelorette

parties according to Canada’s national newspaper   Rent through: 

Manservants.com  offering bespoke semi-nude  platonic gigolos in

collar  cuffs  +apron  from $94.50-$250/hr  Plus a premium for guys

with special talents  like singing

 

Ruminations lead to bespoke abyss  as heart beats 4500 x  per minute

(unless manservants gyrating nearby)   Is life not a brief vision between

2 worlds of darkness?  Nabokov wondered why we view the pre-natal abyss

with more calm than the one we are heading to   The inventor of McFate must

have known that it all boils down to consciousness

 

As time slowly becomes a prison  & all of the 10,000 things cannot return you

to eternity   Not even 10 manservants with topknots + a partridge in a pear tree

You are here to stay for the duration

 

So who are these parents   these giants you wake up to?  Many of my child clients

called adults: the giants who sex you   But that truth is for another poem   Today we

focus on the existential crisis of  awakening

 

Do you remember when you woke up?  Where you woke up?  The day you were lost

forever to your inner-savage?   I knew a 4 yr. old boy  who on moving day   after the

BIG TRUCK rolled away  began to shriek: Please don’t leave me with these people

 

A small cold guy  wanting to be in another world   The star of a car commercial   or

something  The Hunchback of Notre Dame   Anyone   While all around the sparrows

laughed  The gulls too   ha ha  another flesh-coloured prisoner!

__

I went to elementary school overmedicated & exhausted  plagued by anxiety

germophobia  hypochondria  fear of sleep  & a syrupy terror that lasted for days

(Lena Dunham  spokesperson for a generation)

 

 

Fall  2014

 

 

DAY

TAKE BACK THE NIGHT   DAY

Here under canopy of hundred year old trees   sinewy-wolfman

now all I can see   People spit a lot in this particular park   I wonder

what this can possibly mean?

 

2 curly headed twins straight out of GAP climb on mangiver  like

young lemurs   Get a little too far afield & now like me  wary   Girl-twin

eyes me suspiciously  walks fast sideways  never taking eyes off of old

sinewy-poet

 

Mangiver has just let twins pee beside a tree   their nakedness startles

shrill citydwellers  One woman shrieks Lenny!  And pulls her child

away   Not a pink cherubim  Dozens of Fall wasps cruise me   & it is

clear to see that I am the only one flailing   aggressively

 

Perhaps time for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? Where a kindly woman

with long white hair will teach me to stifle monkeymind  now well out of

it’s infancy   But can she erase the image brought via satellite late lastnight:

Man+boy lay half nude on ambulance floor   Boy now fallen to ground

 

Commentator says: These Ebola victims cannot be clothed due to exploding

fluids & are too tired to move  All 17 beds in the hospital are taken   Man from

United Nations: Yes it’s disgraceful  I will look into it immediately   Commentator

doubts his sincerity    We switch OFF the tv

__

 

Welcome to my nightmare said my 5 yr. old client each Tuesday at 10 a.m.

Then smashed the golf club hard into my soft-tissues

 

The key to the security of the playroom is patrol ships, subs, a fleet of destroyers,

jets +missiles.   M.A.C. Farrant   The World Afloat    2014

 

 

 

 

 

Fall 2014

 

 

ROLL

HEADS  WILL    ROLL

We are learning a lot about beheading lately

A staple of the Crusades   still practised in some

parts of Europe during WW II    Preferred by the

most prolific execution state in the world    Saudi Arabia

currently beheads in all murder  sodomy  & witchcraft

cases

 

Why  humans even use it   as a method of trophy-gathering

often on a massive scale   We have also collected scalps +ears

But the head is best   leaving no uncertainty re: the victim’s

identity   Groups such as I.S. eliminate any semblance of the

quick+painless beheading  using a short knife requiring

prolonged sawing

 

This week police in Australia mounted a counterterrorist raid

foiling a plot to behead random members of the public  Mubin Shaikh

security officer   infiltrated the  Toronto 18   terrorist cell    He said:

You have the same types in Canada

 

Now in addition to standing against the wall in subway stations   I hunker

with fear   everywhere    Drawing-in my head   like a box-turtle   especially

when hulking men walk close     My throat still exposed   not yet in winter

turtlenecks

 

Yesterday I heard Ray Boisvert  former assistant head of  C.I.S.I.S. say:

You can’t really ensure that this won’t happen in Canada  it’s not a question

of hiring more police +getting more shiny toys  The advantage always goes to

the attackers

 

As I write this a navy blue squad car drives by   back seat filled with metal cage

I notice the tip of an automatic rifle poking through   I am now intimately

acquainted with automatic rifles since the manic replay of:  a 9 yr. old girl

killing her instructor at the rifle range   His 4 children in an open letter wrote:

We forgive you   It was an accident    We hope to meet you someday

__

 

We have time to grow old.  The air is full of our cries.  But habit is a great

deadener.  At me too  someone is looking, of me too  someone is saying, he

is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.  

Waiting For Godot   Samuel Beckett  1954

 

 

Fall  2014

 

 

ONE EYE

IT’S  BETTER  TO  CRY  WITH  ONLY   ONE  EYE

This is not a dream sequence  though the memory was

dredged up  by a dream about a now dead girlfriend  of

some 50 yrs. ago   Took me into an empty house  back in

the old neighbourhood   Her father’s brother + wife  had

lived there  Now the house was  For Sale   She said also that

her Aunt was in a mental hospital

 

small hand prints   in black charcoal  smear walls +floors

counter-top  especially near stove  has deep black hand+foot

prints   A child burned in effigy

 

Her Aunt left the daughter  then 3  alone on a Spring afternoon

Uncle returned at 6  to smell of burning flesh  The friend tells me

her Aunt  was pretty  & now no one in the family will speak to her

& no one wants to buy the house  either

 

The other children are in the  Children’s Aid     So  there is a place

children can go  to escape mad mothers & hot stoves?

 

It never occurred to me to tell anybody   & it didn’t seem all that strange

I had heard too of parents  on many of these streets  screaming in the night

with dreams of those  other ovens  across the sea     It was the year  1963

 

Much later  somewhere around 2003  my client  a 7 yr. old boy  began to unplug

the stove when his family was asleep   He also begged for a St. John’s Ambulance

course    So happy to be returned home in the  Family Reunification Program    

 

Just  a few years before   baby brother was burned   almost beyond recognition

as mother slept soundly on the couch    It’s better to cry with only one eye   and

with the other  I watch the stove    (Pete  7yrs. old   2003)

__ 

 

 

Fall  2014

 

MESSGAGE

THE  MEDIUM   IS  THE  MESSAGE

When Sarah Boston  veterinarian  was being treated

for cancer   the receptionist at the radiation clinic refused

to look up at her   With head down she grunted:  Put your

card  in the box

 

Seems that we’re treating humans like animals  & animals with

dignity   Sarah thinks that her dog+cat patients get better health

care  than humans do   It’s faster  with a focus on quality of life     Imagine

 

Yesterday a young man told me that: Monkeys with Ebola  isolate

themselves from the tribe   They sacrifice themselves   They walk

into the jungle to die   There seems to be a naked wisdom here   sorely

lacking among clothed apes

 

I posit that  the clothed ape has grown profoundly depressed

through exposure to repeated violence + atrocity   particularly

in the late 20th century   One may only hope that somewhere

not where we are   the  truelife  is being lived   This is likely a  crapshoot 

Ditto the treatment for depression

 

Take the 24 yr. old rapper  Abdel Bary   He tweeted a selfie with

a severed head   The comment read: Chillin with my homie   He had

simply picked up & posed with one of hundreds of heads left on the

roadside  after a mass beheading by ISIS

 

It may be a no-brainer  that we desperately need a 3rd arm of psychiatry

Not meds +not therapy   Surgery too was tried via lobotomy  and it failed

miserably   It doesn’t cost money to look up with kind eyes  and say: Yes you

are in the right place  We can help   just   TURN OFF YOUR SCREENS

 

And in the distance the sea falls endlessly as humanlife imitates the worst of

our technology:  Comprehensive analysis of violent interactive video game

research suggests such exposure increases aggressive  behaviour   thoughts

angry feelings   physiological arousal   & decreases helpful behaviour   Armies

now use violent video games to desensitize soldiers  to killing

 

Peter Neumann  director of  The Centre for Radicalization  London   said:

Detectives should use basic techniques to find the beheaders    Read their

tweets  they will give away clues   Just because they are terrorists who behead

people  doesn’t mean they don’t talk about football clubs   Many are in their teens

& 20’s   they will let their guard down

__

 

 

Fall  2014

 

 

 

RED

SOMEDAY  THIS  WAR  WILL  END   RED

Honestly   she is so frail I can sling her over my

shoulder   Blunt cut  red hair  skin so white  almost

purple  Trying to get her teacher’s attention  Used to

being invisible

 

Hint of a smile   From a mile away  you can see  that she

will always be  on the periphery   One day she will have to

overcome the sudden desire to die   And who will say: Let’s

run away   Marry me    

 

Last night Barak said he would save the world’s children  But

her immediate concern is not the butchers of the Islamic State

Her immediate concern is trying to get someone’s attention  anyone’s

attention  She drifts to the back of the line as a cherubic boy slings an

arm  around the teacher

 

This week Robert Hansen 75   the  Butcher Baker  died in prison  He was

convicted of raping + killing 17 women   Strippers & prostitutes  no one would

notice went missing   drifters  peripheral sisters  end of liners   He drove them

into the Alaskan wilderness   set them free    & then hunted them  with his rifle

 

I wonder if some funding might be diverted to the HOMELAND  for mental health

& gun control   please

__

 

Hansen owned a bakery in a mini-mall in Anchorage  lived across town with his wife 

+ children  He was serving a 461 yr. sentence  at the time of his death

 

 

 

Fall   2014

 

 

 

DEMONS

I  LAY  DOWN  WITH  MY   DEMONS

PastPresentFuture exist as one   You know this

though the calendar has been invented to prevent it

You are ever so eager to have a past  until you don’t

In fact you’ll take anything they give you  won’t you?

 

Before 9  nothing can make you mortal    For a brief season

it is all yours   you may even be bored    You don’t know enough

to take the genuine thing in your teeth  & hold it fast  makeitlast

 

What if life’s not a river  but a fatted calf?   What if  it’s an oath?

What if the first voice  will be the last voice  you will hear?

What if you are secretly in love with everyone who you grew up with?

FUHCK

__

 

POSTSCRIPT

Now that you are cured   you have a life  and somuchmore

Someday they will harvest this madness and sell it in bottles

stamped:     Kosher   

__

 

God looks on me and I am terrified  He makes the incubus

descend on me  Before he knows it  there I am in his lap   I

pull on his white beard  He throws me the ball of the world  

I throw it back        Adelia Prado  Baggage   1976  

 

 

Late Summer  2014

 

 

 

 

SOON

I  MAY  HAVE  TO  LEAVE  YOU   SOON

Today in front of me at U of T  I saw a sight

my brain fights to glean   Pretty young girl

tall + rail-slim  walking at a strange angle

Her shoes on close inspection hopelessly too big

& on her t-shirt in black chunky letters:

Hansel & Gretel Never Made It Out

 

She loped along making the day feel like the last

A girl like this could only appear pre-apocalypse

on the very day that Barak will tell us how he proposes

to deal with I.S.I.S.  *now hacking heads off of American

journalists

 

We live in a world where wars are called Peace Keeping

Missions  & both sides declare victory after 40 days + 40

nights  of blowing each other to bits     At a Futurological

Conference in the 70’s  Stanislaw Lem proposed  a world

happily drugged into hallucinogenic oblivion     BRING IT

 

The slim girl with a certain quiet beauty to her brand of

insanity reminds me that:  It is not Summer anymore  +

there are madmen gathering in Caliphates  knocking at the door

__

 

 

 

Fall 2014

 

 

 

ANGST

AVOID  ANGST   IN  THE  EVENING

In our 2nd home  they bought the boy next door

a basketball he spent the next 10 yrs. bouncing

We un-gallantly accepted the mad metronome

counting aloud the seconds of our waning youth

Our diminished senses   The flies in the ointment

of our dribbledondreams   Go straight to hell Basketball Jones!

 

His father  a kindly man  waddled home each night

His sister easily the man’s doppelgänger   The mother

wore beige polyester pants  had a mannish profile  &

survived a brush with an early Reaper   At a certain point

all stories  are true   Where now young B. Ball Jones   of

the sweet face and bulbous nose?

 

 

Fall  2014