songanddancegirl

EYELASHES

SHOES   EYELASHES    PROSTHETIC LIMBS

Suitcases  gold teeth  dolls  in piles on  platforms

Work Will Make You Free      Arbeit  Macht  Frei

No It Won’t   We will starve +torture you  especially if

you are a twin   We will incinerate you   because we can

Throw your babies into the air   +catch them on bayonets

You ain’t seen nothing yet  Juden

But wait!  A ray of light  William Glied  14  had already lost

his family  Now emaciated   with typhoid   he hears the cries

of newborns  & wonders if he is dead   Do angels cry in Nazi

death camps?  No    7babies born that Spring  7pregnant inmates

spared by rough beasts   As delirium of degradation slouches toward

it’s End  

70 yrs. ago yesterday Auschwitz liberated   Russian Jewish soldier

down on his knees  cradles 10 yr old twinless-twin   Sister tortured

beyond human recognition  Dr. Mengele  Chief Sadist  crouches on

slow thighs   Escapes to Brazil   Will he wear the yellow star on the

Styx crossing?

The extermination doesn’t seem that long ago  Atrocities unfathomable

until a new breed of Nazi beheads prisoners  orange suited   with small

carving knives   Well scripted executions  Jihad coming to malls +villages

everywhere?  A recent archeological find in the Levant region places Homo

Sapiens at the dawn of Civilization

But this must be oxymoronic  no?  Might it have been the interbreeding

with Neanderthals?  Or is it bred in the bone?  This uncivilized ape we

continue  to call Homo   Did you know that modern Sapiens lose short term

memory capacity yearly?   All that remains in the end are long held events

Like the train rides in cattle cars as children

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About 1.3 million were deported to Auschwitz from 1940-45

About 1.1 million Jews  The remainder: non-Jewish Poles  Roma

& Sinti (Gypsies)  Soviet prisoners  & others   Of these 1.1 million

people were exterminated there (Globe & Mail January 27, 2015)

Winter  2015

2043

WHERE  WILL  I  BE  IN  2043

when the BIG meteorite passes within inches of

the Earth?  Should it veer a few miles off course

I’ll be in the same place as you?  Starts with an O

ends with an N   (not oblivion)  You must work

much harder to insinuate yourself into this poem

..a long novel just like your life; you were going through

it without thinking and then one morning it ended: there

were bloodstains.   (James Salter  Last Night)

That home    An uncle shrieked: Turn some Goddamned 

lights off   it looks like a 3 ring circus over there   We did not

Same uncle to sleep over  Parents escaped  London 7 days 1978

Barred the door at 10 pm  Heard him banging+cursing for 16

minutes  freezing March night in Great White North   He never

came back for more

There is a longing for the past   so innately human  For your own

personal Eden   Even if much of it is  fantasy  playing in repertory

for the duration   For a time when you felt more  expected more  

knew less   Cervical spine not yet compressed by gravity  rear-enders 

bad feldenkrais teacher  from Arizona

Lifted+thrusted  lifted+thrusted   Called you at 11:30 one night to ask

about your perfume!  By then 36 revolutions of the earth ’round the sun

Knew enough to run from scum-bag guru  with moves   When the meteorite

comes you will wear your after-life face proudly  But who will recognize you?

No one who knew you when you were coltish   Whatever holds people together

will be gone

___

It is easier for a needle to pass through a camel  than for a poor man to

enter a woman of means   Just go to the graveyard  and ask around 

(Mark Strand  1998 Pulitzer Prize)

Winter  2015

                                         octogenarion

BIG

BIG  CIG

Just about every person  young  old  male

female  sane + insane   was sucking on a big

cig today   It even looked like they were

protecting said cigarettes   not from the

whipping wind   but from those of us who

wolflike crouched  on streetcorners  waiting

Even indoors where smoking is prohibited I

saw a mother with a croaking baby  light up

aggressively   The intake  a seeming last breath

Croak went the baby   croak    Coffee clatchers

looked confused   I dashed out and passed a sign

that said: Try to be one of the people on whom

nothing is lost  (Henry James)

Though likely better if I did miss some of the minutiae

The sordid ceremonies of  urban life in Winter   Ditto the

alleyways full of limping dogs  +yesterday’s spittle

__

DREAM

THIS DREAM OF FLESH

Pay Attention To Your Dreams!   (C.G. Jung)

Or DON’T!   Probably the bratwurst from IKEA  turning on you

in the wee wee hours when your flesh cannot quite hold you

Why look for more?  Collaborate with less  & you will be free

__

Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is my friends
Then let’s keep dancing
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball
If that’s all there is

Peggy Lee/Dan Daniels

Winter  2015

DAWN

AND THE DARKEST HOUR IS JUST BEFORE DAWN

I can see the sky   cartoon blue  +the light chiaroscuro

After 10 days of flat gunmetal greys   Sea of BLAH is

January   Yesterday at least 2 people told me they were

going crazy    I think this is a Mid-life crisis said one   well

past the apogee

Don’t worry you will be set free in approximately 85 days

But until then remember you are not an alien  though an

alien nation has commandeered your soul    bringing all

manner of  Winter bugs   heart rot   + brain fag

Google Spring  like I did on Sunday (after tick bites/Mayo Clinic)

Behold God’s acid trip   Go know! Such a plethora of pinks  And on

your way home today  just pray  you don’t see  a dog with 2 legs

__

SPRING BREAKERS  2012

Winter  2015

HEAVEN

THE  BOY  WHO  CRIED  HEAVEN

Alex Malarkey’s book was  it  in the growing canon

of  Heaven Tourism Lit   until he recanted his trip

to Heaven   Alex had spent 2 months in a coma after

a car crash  & his best seller detailed encounters with

miracles  angels   +life beyond   Alex was 6

I did not die  I did not go to Heaven  I just wanted attention

Alex has confessed   His book is being taken out of print by his

publisher  who had billed it as:  A True Story

We live in a world where bizarre is the new normal  +it seems

Heaven is much in demand   Ditto  rapture  bliss   buzz   +garden

variety beatitude   We are after all combing Mars for microbial

life  festering in ancient lake-beds since  the wet-period   3.5 billion

years ago

Gail Crator of NASA  thinks the discovery of carbon based life is in the

offing  though it is hard to know why finding Martian relations is a good

thing   Do we really need more humanoids to subjugate?

Yet it does seem that 36 yr. old Marie G.  & her 2 sons  Cole (3)  +Devon

(1 month) are in need of an augury  of Heaven   a home for wraiths

transcendence   There is no way to analgize their story   On Monday a small

jet staggered out of an azure sky   & slammed into their house in Gaithersburg

It is thought that Angels cannot tell the difference between the dead  + the living

So in the end why not just change the name of Alex Malarkey’s book to something

like:  The Boy Who May Or May Not Have Been To Heaven   & sell it anyway?

__

It is truly strange to no longer inhabit the earth

Every Angel is terror

Duino Elegies  Rainer Maria Rilke

Winter  2015

GOATHERD

SON  OF  A  BEDOUIN  GOATHERD

Moammar Gadafi seized power at 27  & was known for

his giant bedouin tents   bevy of female bodyguards

+his ruthlessness    Hanna Rosin  The End of Men  says:

There’s a lot of normalizing pretty bad behavior    And

though she is speaking about fratboys  Moammar pitched

his tent in some pretty  lofty places   think United Nations!

So how is it that would-be dentists at Dalhousie are being

tarred+feathered over fratboy trash-talk  albeit of a vulgar

+violent vein   Shouldn’t they be allowed to graduate late  &

give a percentage of their income to charity  after scrubbing

floors +toilets in their local women’s shelter  Say 1,095 hrs of

community service?  Would this suffice  or do some of them

need to take their lives?

As reported by the University’s President  some of the young

men are in a fragile state induced by shame  which in+of itself

can be a corrective natural consequence   And is it not also price

enough that their names are now MUD?   Perhaps not

Charlie Glickman   Sexuality+Masculinity educator argues:

Much locker-room talk is performance bravado  men playing

at macho  like boys play wrestling  It’s the escalation effect

that’s toxic   guys competing to show who is the most manly

(a.k.a.  whose is bigger)   We live in a world where men take

courses in masculinity from Charlie   where civility +chivalry

went the way of the nuclear family

The good news: It is empirically true that in most locker-rooms

men do not sit around naked  +talk about raping women  

Michael Kimmel   Guyland    The not so good news:  Kimmel

heard the same disturbing phrase on every American college campus

he visited: Bros before Hos

Maybe we haven’t come such a long way   baby?   Even though women

now outnumber men on campus    & are entering previously male

dominated fields   including  Dentistry   Or perhaps these are the last

gasps of a dying breed   like the last seed crop of dying trees

__

Dude   Stop The Spread Please 

Poster in NYC subways discouraging   Manspreading:

Guys taking up too much space so as to give their manly

parts plenty of air   a.k.a.  micro-aggression

Globe+Mail  January 2015

Winter  2015

ELVIS

THUS  SPRACH  ELVIS

On January 14  1973  Elvis Presley in a

bejewelled white pantsuit strutted+sneered

his way through the 1st concert via satellite

in history   He was 38  newly bloated  & deep

into Demerol+Dilaudid    His image  jolts the

mind: a caged tiger  a stuck bull   Fallen secular

God  of America     Simpler times?

Today is also one of historical note  3 million copies

of Charlie Hebdo with the Prophet Mohammed on it’s

cover (He is Charlie too)   The caption reads: All is

forgiven  While in Germany (where Elvis was stationed

in WWII)  thousands march against Muslim immigrants

It seems that we are heading into  familiar territory

Is Joe Muslim the new whipping boy?

Does the weight of the past teach us nothing?

How much do we love this 21st Century?

It’s fortunate that the guillotine is no longer in effect.

(Globe & Mail editorial  January 15, 2015)

__

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally

discover everybody’s face but their own.

Jonathan Swift  18th C

Winter  2015

RITES

OF SPRING

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring  sparked

a riot on May 29 1913   100 yrs. ago or so

the score was considered too primal  percussive

herky-jerky   The depiction of a violent pagan past

sent Paris into chaos: hissing  heckling  fist-fights

A notorious preamble to the brutality of the coming

century     Pagan past   we might ask?

In Spring 2014  on May 29th  a group of 20 including

fathers+brothers  stoned a 25 yr. old pregnant woman

to death  It was noon  next to the courthouse in Lahore

Her husband said: We were in love   Her father expressed

no regrets  

Lata  the husband  was found to have killed his first wife   The

case was later dropped when his 5 children forgave him  I strangled

her  he said  In Pakistan 839 women were murdered in honour killings

in 2013

While across the sea in the latest shooting spree  the gunman’s father

had directed  The Hunger Games  where youth are caged  hunted+

killed by one another in a survival-game  The young shooter a self

professed virgin  hated women  +wanted revenge on  everyone

It appears that Spring continues to catalyze acts of violence  as humanity

plays out the age old battle of  Eros vs. Thanatos     And as Barak has

cautioned:  Hammers just seem to gravitate toward nails

__

Sandro Botticelli Primavera 1482

Jan Balet  Rites of Spring  1984

SPRING 2014

I AM

I  AM    THE SUICIDE BOMBER GIRL*

Did you know that there is a biological imperative

for love?  The glue that holds the human-tribe together

Without it we are doomed should natural selection choose

social media connections    over old fashioned love for reasons

of say  disease control   Hate might reign supreme  It too is in our

ancient DNA  just another form of self preservation

Not opposites really   more flip sides of the same coin  that make us

the beautiful+cruel conundrum of the higher primates   In Canada’s

aboriginal language there are 736 words for love  & only 1  for hate

It does not require much complexity  just a thick skull+hairy palm

Today we contemplate the aftermath of the bloodbath  in France

Islamist militants have killed  cartoonists  journalists  + 1 psycho-

analyst  at Charlie Hebdo   Also police officers +4 Jewish patrons

of a kosher grocery store

Of course we are all  Charlie  & now thankfully all  Juif   But are we

all the brothers Kouachi? Or just some of us?  Were we all cheering

at the Bastille when heads rolled in 1789  Or just some of us?  Were

we all looking the other way when trains packed with human-cargo

traversed Europe just yesterday?

Are we all thick of skull +hairy of hand?  Under what circumstances

will the few become the many?  In 1642 Galileo was hauled before the

Inquisition   With his pen he endorsed the Earth’s orbit  of the Sun

The Church threatened torture  & locked him away until the day  he died

For many the pen has always been as dangerous as the sword  To quote a

fallen comrade of the pen Stéphane Charbonnier:  I’d rather die standing

up, than live on my knees  And die he did last Wednesday  when the Kouachi’s

entered Charlie Hebdo  & called out his name

__

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.. We’ve got to

live no matter how many times the sky has fallen.  

DH Lawrence   Lady Chatterly’s Lover

Live Damn it!  Live!  

George Costanza   Seinfeld

Winter  2015    *on January 11 2015   a 10 yr. old girl was detonated in a busy

marketplace by Boko Harem militants hiding nearby