NOT MY FIRST RODEO
If the mammo-technician keels over
or ISIS attacks I will be stranded
here in the clutches of this giant
robot breast eater Women lined
up for hours to give offerings Silent
pacts with ugly machines Please don’t
find anything that will kill me Then spat
out onto -33 streets hair blowing in the
frigid breeze But free And freedom tastes
like warm milk
__
Mammo-garage
Mammo-machine
Winter 2015
THE NEW ROMANTICS
Today is the anniversary of John Keats’
death in Rome at 25 Shelley alive until 29
died at Sardinia drowned in a stormy sea
His elegy for Keats Adonias remains the
great lyric treatise of the Romantics
Lord Byron too died on a far shore Greece
at 36 from a cold +violent fever The last of
the great Romantics She walks in beauty
like the night of cloudless climes +starry skies
A far cry from the: New Romantics A group of
brits ex-patriots who walk in darkness The latest
recruits of ISIS 3 teenage girls 15-17 heading for
Istanbul Soon to be the wives of jihadis My little
sister is an A student To convince such young girls
who are vulnerable is really evil
Romantic notions of becoming jihadi-brides shattered
along old spice-routes leading to lives of servitude rape
+martyrdom Look at the girls in sneakers & colourful
clothes smiling as each walks alone through security at
Gatwick
On their way to Turkey now where youth grows pale and
spectre thin and dies where beauty cannot keep These
light winged dryads of East London
__
Come home. We miss you. We can’t stop crying.
Abase Hussen 47 father of Amira missing since Tuesday
Winter 2015
MONSIEUR BLACKSONAVITCH
He is black a 4th brother If he were a
Beatle he’d be the 5th Afro in pom poms
27 inches at the withers Smart as a whip (don’t ask)
Came from Buffalo on a crisp Spring day & stayed
for more than a decade
A good listener cool calm +collected friend mean
tobogganer same hiding spot for 13 years! Blackie Was
Here graffiti all over the hood
Here lies Blackie Blacksonavitch covered in brother’s
barfy blanket Making his way to canine heaven trailing
dog-shaped clouds Later baked him into holy wafers a
sacrament given at the side-door Father placed one under
each child’s tongue early one morning before Milkman’s run
__
Winter 2015 RIP Blacksonavitch & Lee
RAT ON !
A giant mouse has invaded my house
His eyelashes are pale+his breath reeks of
craft ale His favourite disc is War On Drugs
It’s trippy chords make him long for more & reflect
upon days in the fire-tower in Quetico
You see he travelled near+far to find my door ajar &
crept in ragged bandana +all I don’t know whether
to ice him or marry him or send him out for taxidermy
But I do know that come Spring he will pack his gear &
hightail it outta here for greener pastures +a plump Minnie
She who will listen to his mousey-lore especially re: the goals
he’s scored (five hole baby!) so much better than me
__
(how ’bout that top shelf wrister!)
Winter 2015 ..hanging on by a thread..
I AM A HUMAN RIGHT?
People often forget that says Justin Bieber
in an age when what it means to be human is
in a state of ill-repute A horrifying litany of
daily statistics: Sunni ISIS militants consider
200 million Shiites apostates in need of slaughter
Or North Darfur in October 200 women+daughters
raped in 36 hrs. Then there is the Democratic Republic
of Congo where 400,000 women were violated in one
year (2006-2007)
A new term has been coined to describe the mayhem in
the Levant: Islamo-facism And this is just the tip In Halifax
3 youths enamoured of serial killers+school shooters plan a
mass-murder on Valentine’s Day In his treatise on human love
(+Lies) Clancy Martin philosopher U of Missouri notes: A great
deal of how well we love has to do with how well we lie both to
ourselves & to each other
He goes on to argue that a well honed ability to bend the truth is a
necessity the glue if you will of human love An exercise in Hope
versus Honesty It is also true that the current wave of death-cult
debauchery must be addressed this slow+casual atrophy of the
human soul no less
Are you brave enough to ask your partner staring off into space:
What are you thinking? What creative manipulations evasions
misrepresentations lurk in the average human soul? Think of the
apple Think of life in our apocalyptic-eden We higher beings have
perfected damnation We are not animals We are Man
__
Winter 2015
DOG DAYS
Nothing prepared me for what I
discovered behind Robards Library
Chinese cherry trees blooming in
February & a dog named Sue singing
a tune Put on your high heel sneakers
because we’re going out tonight Sue
crooned And somewhere an alien wind
blew what might have been to smithereens
Don’t wait for a tarnished Spring to discover
how false this life has been Start now
__
Winter 2015 minus 40
IT’S EVEN BETTER THAN MAKE-UP SEX
Ye ah Ye ah he keeps repeating the way pretty young
men with beards +woolcaps do He has been on a banter
barrage for the past 17minutes to a woman not seen since
2013 YaYaYa she responds Tweets start-ups blind-dial blog
He drones on+on Her life story withers on beard boy’s vine
But she does not go gently into narcissistic blight Voice grows
shrill Throws coffee at his hipster face +purse through plate
glass with DELICA in gold letters Upscale mayhem West Queen
West You just know the conjugal visit sex with a woman like this
will be explosive💣 Police cordon off the street as Torontonians
hunker home in minus19
__
GIRLS OF FEBRUARY WEST QUEEN WEST
Winter 2015 ❤︎Day
DRUNKEN LOVE
Have you seen Interstellar? The one where
Matthew McConaughey’s drawl screams Texas
though he’s a farmer deep in the West He plays
Cooper the astronaut still in love with his dead wife
Up in space the scientists debate the biological imperative
behind: loving the departed
Clearly love is the glue that holds the human tribe together
Without it there would be no civilization Without it there
would be no hate Not love’s opposite but a variant on the
continuum of human emotion The dead hold us in their thrall
Where are they after all? A place where our after-life family is
making a go of eternity while back on Earth we worship the dead
with a kind of idolatry
Yesterday someone asked me: Isn’t love the root of all enmity misery
treachery? One might even place acts of revenge in this same category
Just this week the head of Cairo’s thousand year old Al Azar Institute called
for those who burned a young pilot alive in a cage in a well staged media
circus to be: killed or crucified or have their hands +legs cut off
Why live for anything else? Our masterpiece is LOVE
In the early days of the 21st Century love grows tired Even Beyonce makes no
bones about the SM dimensions love can take whipping Jay Z into a near frenzy
in front of millions of Grammy viewers last night on tv
__
*Burning someone alive is prohibited as a punishment that belongs to God alone,
applied in hell, while beheadings on the other hand have a long history among
many of humanity’s religions. (Globe&Mail February 5, 2015)
Winter 2015 For Valentine’s Day ❤︎
WEDDING DRESS BLUES
I have had 3 wedding dresses to date The 1st an
ecru silk confection by Tiel Traina The 2nd on the
cover of Italian Vogue Model the wife of a Rolling Stone
Eventually the dress morphed into an aubergine suit (by
Price & Roman) I even have the shoes from marriage number 1
Gorgeous Thierry Muglers spider webbed and silver And whenever
I get a case of the wedding dress blues I moan on the shoulder of
old number 2
__
Double Portrait With Wineglass
Marc Chagall 1918
Fall 2013
HIS FATHER WAS A SWEDENBORGIAN
Need I say more? William James coined the term
multiverse Likely he needed a parallel reality to
the James house A mad sister Father heard voices
William too Perhaps bi-polar? or touched by the
Godhead this revered pioneer of the psyche
Later much later physicists hijacked the multiverse
+made it their own They posit a vast number of
parallel universes where we live out different versions
of our lives Every time you reach a crossroads two
daughter universes arise: 1 in which you turn right +1
in which you turn left
In each there is a copy of you living the outcome Thinking
incorrectly that it’s the only you It is also true that sometimes
these parallel lives are not out of reach Sometimes they slam
right into each other Take the days when deja vu is so strong
you cannot possibly belong to your own story
When you forget there is a husband #3 & husband #2 looks surprised
all the time It’s like he never really knew you existed One day you grow
a strange smell +laugh like a stranger When you speak your language
becomes oblique Paris France is heard as Aspen Colorado! Parallel worlds?
Or late middle-age when you no longer disrobe in the shower
__
Our universe is one of potentially numerous slabs floating in a higher
dimensional space, much like a slice of bread within a grander cosmic
loaf. Brian Greene Physicist The Hidden Reality 2011
Deep Winter 2015
songanddancegirl... at 4
songanddancegirl 