songanddancegirl

LADY

NEXT FIRST LADY BLUES

Cue card with poet’s words lifted by a bitter wind  cutting into

fashionably bare cankles    fuck offfffff    growls poet   who has

also slapped an albino squirrel   Hard   Gnarly April chill  breeds

aggression   Won’t you join the: Please Stop Lena Dunham From

Moving To Canada  (if the Donald becomes President)  Movement?

Lena is threatening  flaccid arm hoisted  in jiggly Panther salute

Last night she bared her privates  yet again  for your sins    Secretly

Lena wonders what she might have been   Queen of Shallow longs for

gravitas   Try keeping nasty bits in yer pants

Now a hipster lovely begins to circle closely    She raps about Moses in

the bullrushers   Post seder apocalypse is nigh   as chastened squirrel

limps by   +the Donald holds fast to his plan   He’ll build a wall between

America  +an ancient people  for whom life is a circle  not a line

He’s on the straight+narrow with Mammon as his guide  while Itzpapalotl

throws back her head  ready to devour   Yellow comb-over   notwithstanding

__

Aztec Goddess Itzpapalotl  when rendered as a blonde

looks alarmingly like Melania

Spring 2016

SANDWICHES

I DON’T LIKE THE CHICKEN SANDWICHES

said a friends’s brother when asked why he was checking

himself out of the Psych. Ward   This in the midst of a world

wide Happiness Revolution  according to Neil Pasricha: The

Book of Awesome   More Awesome   +Awesomer     Neil needs

some valium to regulate his moods   Isn’t too much happiness

also the definition of mania? 

And what really has Neil given the world?  Other than 1 more

reason for us to feel  less than  having squandered our happiness

behind the tasty freeze   Who among us truly lives by the George

Costanza mantra: LIVE DAMMIT!  other than under 13 yr. old

children   When the future begins looming  +one’s innocence fuses

with alcohol  +weed   +first hand jobs   growing into a jaded fatigue

So when our heroes begin to die  +trite clichés fly  who sells their shit

and moves to Tunis?  More likely there is reflection on the construction

of your fragile self  back in a suburban bedroom  When Neil +David +Joni

burned the midnight oil  constructing a fearless girl revolutionary   The you

who would go to California parties  +ride into the sunset beside Mick

Today’s shriven psyche  is misty   Inertia  tinged with occasional wonder at

the almost unrecognizable face emerging   Last night I met a fairly wasted  (in

every sense) man  at a party  who struck me as somewhat free  though unbearably

Narcissus   He looked like a corpulent Zappa  +asked me to run away in his Carrera

I ponder this in light of new information  His father shot himself close to the boy’s

6th b. day  (but he’s brilliant  brilliant!  my cousin said)  I am waiting on the corner

with a light bag  packed with neatly folded melancholy  READY  for those California

parties

__

Enjoy every sandwich!  Warren Zevon  dying of cancer at 56

Spring 2016

DIED

THE DAY THE PURPLE MUSIC DIED

Riding high   Eve of 59th  fetal position but

today Rickie Lee’s delta disc bringing bliss

Now stuck in traffic  Brother texts: Prince died

Live dammit!   A crushing sadness  first Lou

then David  now Prince

The soundtrack to your life is dying   Panic pricks

Breathe deeply  Pull over?  Is this more insidious

weed hangover?   Is this real ?   At 9:43 Prince was

alive lying prone in an elevator (!) at Paisley Park   10:07

dead

Later that night Spike Lee looks way too happy    He

organized a Prince party in Brooklyn   Can I please be

a narcissist for a day?   Anderson Cooper: I was at a Prince 

concert in a hotel room!    But do look a little deeper at all

of  the famewhoring  gentle reader

There for all to see are: tall tales  +ecstatic confessions of

touching the diminutive man’s robes   Just another brick in the

self denial wall    Here today    Gone    Don’t look for me   I’m running

as fast as I can   the 10,000 things mirage is getting ratty at the edges

___

Black day, stormy night
No love, no hope in sight
Don’t cry, he is coming

Prince  The Cross  Sign O’ The Times  1987

Spring 2016   RIP Prince Rogers Nelson   for David+our days on Lombard

FLOWERS

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?

40 yrs. ago I married a 22 yr. old  whose b.day is  today

Now he is in the youth of his old age?   I pass a worn out

mother+daughter on my way to the bus  Mother: Can I

get you lunch?   Daughter: NO    Mother: Then you’re shit

out of luck

Where has all the life-force gone?  Can you still find it in the

interstices of your psyche?   In the sparks+scents that even the

lowliest dog can follow as his nose makes a beeline for your

fingertips?  And where have those fingers been lately?  Drumming

a tune as you sit +watch the ravages of winter slouch on slow thighs

out of your park  forever?

Your park  which has transformed overnight into a blanket ridden

skunky-pot-smoke infested haven for hipsters  who Do Not Work in

daylight   A little too Vampire?   Yesterday I witnessed one dapper

hip  beard clipped to perfection  walking down West Queen West  at

dusk  carrying a gutted pig  blood dripping  on his way to some

invitation only  Rite of Spring

True story   Disturbing?   Gory?  Had you been sitting in a windowless

room of gutted children for 3 decades  LIFEFORCE  as a concept or a

thing would become highly heretical    So get out there  +enjoy the

Spring  who died for you   so you can be born  again

__

Spring 2016  ..one more once.. (April In Paris  Count Basie)

RESTLESS

IN RESTLESS WALKS SHE’LL PROWL THE NIGHT

In 6 inch heels I clomp by    April     World coming alive

Are you starving or just empty inside?  he asked   with am I

ever brilliant eyes    The body does not lie   or at least that’s

the theory   But is it able to pick up on nuance?   Hunger vs.

emptiness of the spiritual kind?

Those pangs were trying to tell you something all winter   +

each time you just stuffed your face  with profiteroles   Now it

seems your jeans are 2 sizes small  +you’re likely pregnant with

the Messiah   Or a pregnant pause  before they take you kicking +

screaming  +buddha-bodied  into your 6th decade

Where you will madly dash toward your maker   who has a gold tooth

+ a glass eye   +smells like curdled milk    They will think you so brave

Little will they know that you are running from  not toward   And at your

heels are the hellhounds sniffing the fecund air   as April come she will

cleaves into May

__

April  The Cruellest Month

SPIDERS

I DON’T MIND SPIDERS AND SNAKES

The raggedy one who looked like my brother’s

girlfriend of 30 yrs. ago   sassy-feminist-college-girl

Each sentence included the words  patriarchy +misogyny

Pretty  wealthy  +15 yrs. younger than we    These diatribes

induced vomiting  +steely monosyllabic un-pleasantries

I digress

Ratty hair  +neo-hippie valley speak   Salesgirl at Bellwoods Weed

Dispensary said: don’t worry (granny)  if you get too high  suck

on a lemon   Well suck on this: Poet so high on megadoses of THC

full blown psychotic haze  for 8 days   Spiders  snakes  +lizards at the

periphery   Entire life flashed before me   glossing over the fun parts

Were there any?

Front door  +windows a thin veneer    Ditto Ego    Little protection from

marauding haikus of suffering    Danced through said life with theatrical

alchemy   Stops in:  Big Sur   Zurich   Keswick   Big Easy    Please excuse me

while I kiss the water of the great Mississippi   +light out for territories beyond

the Pale   Like Russian Bubbie    You can take the witch doctor out of the shetl

but you can’t take the shetl out   Ever

Allan Ginsberg’s rant on LSD won a Pullitzer    So I  Howl  at the mediocre muse

who inhabited me that eve   +know with even greater certainty : within this crucible

every single shred of order you see  was carved out of a terror so vast it prevents

seeing what is in front of your nose   You are no more real than the heliotrope of

the Sufis     So slow the fuck down

Smell the past evaporating   The future a mirage of desperation  (You can’t handle

the truth!)  Jack Nicholson  A Few Good Men     The trash heap of the present

moment is the pinnacle of glory    Transmuted into gold by mediocre muses   +pot

called: Transcendence is For Pussies

__

Spring 2016

WALL

BUILD A WALL AROUND WESTERN CIVILIZATION  & GET A JOB

YOU FAT PIG  (2 signs at a Trump rally today)

Munk School of Global Affairs  writing here for 9 yrs.

Garden with fountain  solid ice  Dec thru March   Cement

pond   International coterie of hipster students smoke weed

Skunky haze wafts

I sit reading poetry  this year’s Governor General’s winner

She’s using all CAP titles  like me   +1st person confessionals

a la Anne Sexton  +me    And even though it is the 1st day warm

enough to be bare chested  *(see hipster Tarzan quoting Descartes)

All I can think of   as heart pounds in cage:   What if someone opens

fire?   Yesterday a lovely man bought me lunch   He said: The terrorists won

__

*(2nd anniversary of the disappearance of 291 Chibok girls from their

school  near a forest)

Spring 2016

PIG

DANCE PIG!

One of the most depraved characters in all American Lit

has to be Judge Holden  Blood Meridian  Little girls disappear

whenever he is near  Little boys kept as pets  shot in head

when playtime over  splayed  upon his lap  In the final 1/4 of

the tome  the idiot   brother of a carnival man  becomes the Judge’s

property

Now on a leash  raped with regularity   Judge often naked  Huge+

pale  +hairless  with small eyes   Giant pigman   Enormous infant

Says he’ll never die  Debauched God of America  Land of the free

Judge says that a man seeks his destiny  but no matter the detours

will always come to the selfsame reckoning

All of us bears in a collar  +frilly tutu  +chains   bears that dance  

bears that don’t   Yesterday a near crucified comrade wrote: And all

the sinners saints   Carrying his cross across the Americas  to get to

the very same place   The crucible where Lucifer  lays his soul to waste

Yet it was he who mailed me regularly small talismans  a crown  a scarred

heart  the hebrew symbol Chai    Life    Small inducements to keep on  going

After all it’s a great thing  the dance   Dance dog!  Dance Pig!   Stop searching

+save your last dance for me   And rail  rail against the tethered destiny prophecy

*Research has shown that those who do  experience: shortness of breath  blurred

vision  heart palpitations  erections   +hallucinations   After which the leather strap

springs open

__

“ESTRAGON: I can’t go on like this.

VLADIMIR: That’s what you think.”

“POZZO: I don’t seem to be able…(long hesitation) to depart.

ESTRAGON: Such is life.”

Samuel Beckett  Waiting For Godot 

SPRING  2016

REPTILE

REPTILE WISDOM  ZOMBIES ON THE LAWN

Barry Hurts  film critic  calls Sleeping Giant a visceral

portrait of the ugliness that is growing up  Think about it

untold tragedies dot the horizon   Or don’t  think about it

that is   because they do   4 recent deaths by their own hands

5 by slow decay  in our small circle alone

Legendary author  Jim Harrison  warned us: Nobody can be

helped by anybody   He of death by no determined cause at 78

just last week   Jim had a great  been passed the secret   face   While

Barry Hurts may have had a childhood of unquiet desperation  ugly

+perhaps dank

But there are still those among us who can conjure scenes sans

lysergic acid diethylamide  of: whistling cardshark uncles   a man

named after The Stork  who brings popcorn+Mars bars to unruly

children  +vomiting dogs  +1 rabbit who escaped the idyll  not

unscathed  Rarebit for fatfoxy in backyard

Children kept from vicissitudes except for the internecine warfare

of groundhogs who nearly ate smallest brother  Father took him to a

psychiatrist   Truth will not set you free  Childhood memories tainted

dreamscapes   Cardshark uncle  molester of the pretty   +un-pretty

Still there was a horse named Tex  +a giant’s cabin in the Laurentian

Mountains by a Precambrian lake!  (how does water not fall off a

mountain?)    Cardshark uncle sat near wood stove    Lake was a moss

gunked marsh    Water too obscene+green to fall off of mountain

But no drive UP  has ever been filled with such naked lust  for life

We large apes are creatures who lie down on pallets of all shapes +

sizes  Lock our doors +windows  +leave our bodies through small ego-

cides for 6-8hrs. nightly   There we live  with ardent abandon   Uncles

morph into duckbilled platy-pie with longish ropes  for wrangling

Last night my husband’s water broke  +the skeleton of a 1.1 metre

tall individual would be found the next day in the Liang Bua cave

Homo floresiensis  the Hobbit of apes    And there under your own

bed   under the loose floorboard  rests the bones of the child you

never were

__

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness

And they live by what they hear    Such people become crazy

or they become legend.     Jim Harrison  RIP

Spring 2016

GHETTO

IN THE GHETTO

Why make it plain as day Mr. Curator?   Louis Jacob

/OUTSIDERS  A.G.O.  asks us: Do you recognize yourselves

in the monkey’s otherness?  He tells us: dividing lines

conjoin what they separate    A Jazz riff plays  somewhere

down the hall    A white woman  +a negro man hold a chimp

in NYC   it is 1967

Gary Winograd the artist tells us: the monkey is the product of 

miscegenation   The woman beside me says: a bit too long for

scrabble   Dividing lines have never conjoined slave +master  only

rape  aka misegenationdegredation  also too long for scrabble

This week the old white Jew who is running for President said:

White people don’t live in the ghetto   A word politically corrected

into oblivion   He was instantly excoriated   And though his language

is dated  the word ghetto  as in Warsaw Ghetto  never went away   Jews

by the 100,000’s  murdered there   1942

If a word grows up out of the dung heap of racism   why not keep it there?

Who is allowed to use the N word   Kyke   Ghetto?   Relics of a time when

schools were segregated  +washrooms at Toronto’s beaches had signs:

No dogs   Negros  or Jews  

What word would you choose to describe the huge tracts of tenement blocks

in every American city  where a disproportionate number of African Americans

live?   The Projects?   Whitewashing the truth   You cannot take the word Ghetto

out of the Ghetto   Why not call a spade a spade?   Who you saying lives in fear?

__

What I want  

What I am  

What you force me to be  

Is what you are

(Gordon Parks  1st African American Photographer  

Life Magazine  1967)

Gary Winograd American Photographer  1928-1984

Spring 2016