songanddancegirl

KILL

DR. PALMER  WHY DID YOU KILL CECIL ?

Parks confuse people   Free open green places  where the

personal-space rules  are hazy    A man has just tripped

over my crossed leg    Blue suede 70’s inspired boot  akimbo

That’s how close he crept!    My glare boring into his citified

soul-hole   Empty now   Pan Am hell left too many glassy-eyed

Many more stupefied over $50,000,000 Olympic bid    Over there

the pervy park auteur  is making a documentary about a comely hipster’s

crotch    Seriously    Now 3 more city-dwellers on my tail    One woman so

close I smell last night’s sausages    Oh give me a home where the buffalo

roam  +parks with corrals+queues    And a world with one less dentist from

Minneapolis  who hates lions+tigers+bears

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Summer  2015

WHERE

WHERE IS EVERYBODY?

Think of the famous Fermi Paradox:

1) humans are the only intelligent life in the universe

2) advanced civilizations destroy themselves

3) we are in a galactic zoo

4) aliens hide in plain site

I bet you forget that we are but a speck in the vastness

beyond the sheltering sky   Most days thinking this is all

there is   But have no fear!  There is a new telescopic camera

One that will measure: abundance+vegetation growth  +ozone

All for 100 million U.S.   provided by a Russian   Yuri Milner

When the abundance numbers come in  +they are expected to be

staggering   will anxiety+depression  plummet?   Will we revel in our

abundance?   Perhaps we will embrace the  Sapient  become the wise

Homo   And realize that: sloth+greed  wrath+pride  lust+envy+gluttony

hide in plain sight    The aliens within us?

Or  the sine qua non of what it means to be HUMAN?

Except for Hermann Meuter   Whale researcher  Not he a petri-dish

in which aliens might flourish   Stroked  +whispered to a stranded Orca

for 36 hrs   though thousands of seals made sounds like laughter   I have

never heard a seal vocalize  said Hermann   

And somewhere out there  beyond the 5000 exoplanets discovered to date

by the Kepler telescope  laughter is building +picking up steam   It will take

at least 3 billion light years to reach the Blue Planet  where a deep and twisted

silence will have reigned for millennia  +the last laugh+the first laugh will

be united

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Summer 2015

RAT

RAT RACE BLUES

Bell Canada lady asks: No work today?   Big Sister

1984    This call is being monitored  for your sanity

Yes home today   a writer  so lots of time for Bell+Rogers

And a dip into call centre dystopia  where there never

was an Arab Spring   +GiGi Gryce streams endlessly

Dizzy  Thelonius +Max  banned    Photos of Louis prohibited

The man’s smile could start a revolution   Instead drones monitor

us endlessly   Our phone centre whisperings  muted cries for HELP

Today it is a blistering 34 celsius  hottest day in local history   Barack

is in Addis Ababa   +will move his worn smile to Chicago come 2017

Bell Canada lady: Save Us From Mike Huckabee   whose oven-rhetoric

(there is a boldness +clarity to it  Mike protests)   is an affront to common

decency   It brings to mind  Hellboy:  Regaliceratops peterhewsi   a species

of dinosaur with a large mouth + tiny horns

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Summer 2015

CREEP

NO SOUL LEFT TO SEE THE RUTHLESS JUNGLE CREEP IN

How is it possible for your history to disappear so absolutely

Your home to be devoured  by desperation    +indifference

Meaninglessness the new religion  With all information at your

fingertips  no need for study  for rigour   or  imagination

Mortis the order of the day

But wait!  You still have the doll with one ear in a Van Gough yellow

dress  +Blue Period eyes   Take her to the doll hospital on a crisp Fall

day  +they will make her you new again   With burnished cheeks  +ears

galore  she will sit on the shelf of your great-great niece who heard you

were alive once

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INFAMY

GIRLS OF SUBURBAN INFAMY

We were spirited girls with minds of our own

Our parents hesitated to leave us alone  at Caribbean

hotels+Huron cottages    Young Nassau bellhops  chasing

us down carpeted corridors   Local toughs smoking beneath

cottage windows   Inhaling 2nd hand Camels+countryboy

dares   Obscenities wafting through humid air    We were

fearless-sunburned   +immortal    Portal to bargirl days opens

wider   Crawl through  and keep on going

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Summer 2015   for dena

HE

HE WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED

He has the face of an angel   perfect symmetry

heart-shaped   +symmetry archetypally catalyzes

humanlove   Just gaze into the face of a baby   for

some  a puppy

Hate is asymmetrical  think: Hitler   Osama   Pol Pot

Yet this pretty-boy at 24 rampaged through Chattanooga

with weapons of  minor (?) destruction     Guns are

asymmetrical too   they blow holes in the glue that holds

human civilization together

Home grown terror is hatred in the bedrock    Face of

an angel   black heart   on his way to the Styx    His gaze

fixed on the faces of his oarsman   older Tsarnaev brother  +

Robert Oppenheimer

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There are children playing in the street who could solve some of

my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory

perception that I lost long ago. The optimist thinks this is the best of

all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true. (J. R. Oppenheimer)

Summer 2015   Oppenheimer received 3 Nobel nominations 

BEGGARED

IT IS THE BEAST WE ARE RELUCTANT TO CONFRONT

& WE ARE BEGGARED BY IT

1976  demure bride   Now cool hipstergirls

in lace shorts+tie dye offer me their seats on

the ttc   Statistically they are unlikely to marry

Time unglues us   Brain-tricks us    Confuses

You get to do this once  or do you?  Multiversers

would stop the poem right here +tell you:  that

Other Life   the one with the 22 yr. old husband

is being lived by you on  the Other Earth

Here  rot-skin   bone-pain    & a planet with a rough

heart-shaped mass is blinking at us   The true nature

of this feature  is not yet known  says NASA    Such a

romantic rorschach result  for a species enamoured of

the abyss

So is the Other Earth like this?   Or do the young couple

stay young   have 3 children   in a world where no child

is a prized sex-slave?   Rot-skin  Brain-tricked   Look away

from the un-bearable   & smile

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Summer 2015

WHO

WHO AMONG US DOES NOT NEED RE-BUILDING EACH +EVERY MORNING?

Barack says: It’s not a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public 

as he grapples with an onslaught of racial enmity    Why now?     Instead of

answers we get theories   Prescription for Harmony: When you awaken  linger

in that in-between  before death   +white supremacy   Before slavery   Before a

reality that eats its young

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When you open up a piano, you see freedom. Nobody can play the white keys

and don’t play the black keys. You got to mix all these keys together to make

harmony.  And that’s what the whole world needs: Harmony.  

(Champion Jack Dupree   American blues pianist)

Summer  of Un-Love  2015

CRAVING

THIS CRAVING IS   PALPABLE

On my street there is a rickety rickety man  inexplicably

tying string to the pickets of his rotting fence   without

evidence of epiphany   Somewhat like me  (+you?)  after

last night’s episode of True D  on cable tv

Beyond smouldering stares+zombie glares  there is a

cacophony of post-apocalyptic caricature   Not that there’s

anything wrong with that    Imagine a gangster +his mono-

syllabic wife   perhaps A.I.   discussing fertility treatments in

their  Neutra home   A scene straight out of the Twilight Zone

The one where in the reveal  giants appear over the heads of said

couple   And you know what happens next    I won’t candy-coat it

Though I am beginning to wish that time was in fact a flat circle 

Hands up all who miss Rust Cohle  philosopher king

It is my sincere hope that Nic Pizzolatto gets some therapy    I no

longer suspect he has PTSD  just a serious case of Rod Serling envy

The rickety old man has an emaciated wife  who stands on the stoop

croaking: Run for your life     Sadly unlikely for me   with a startle

reflex stuck on ON   + a bulldog given to the mailman  back in 1963

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Summer  2015

PONY

WILD PONY RACE

up on a horse at 4  long before a bike

no saddle  father’s cowboy boots gleaming

annie oakley-girl screaming her chuckwagon

heart out

fearless up there  horses like mountains   make

sure your hand is FLAT  for sugar cube after

Big Yellow Teeth graze her fingers   August sixteen

approaching  day they took Elvis  +cowboy father

girl left to wander at the pony races  her phone #

fades  drops things on the floor  forgets to lock the

door   but she will tell you with certainty: NEVER

WALK BEHIND YOUR HORSE!  

And please: DO NOT RESUSCITATE

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Summer 2015  RIP cowboys+crooners