songanddancegirl

BOREHOLES

OF BOREHOLES

“reservoirs of ancient water that occasionally

come bubbling up out of boreholes in the rock”

See this water   cut off from the surface for 2.7

billion years  recently discovered in an Ontario

mine   Do you ever feel cut off from the surface?

Does migraine  vertigo   or cancer perhaps  interfere

with your libido?

When I was 17  after my mother’s diagnosis  I told my

father I’d write a book called: Cancer Colony   He did

not green light the project:   It’s about a world where

everyone has cancer Dad  even the animals!  

When later I arrived at university  +found Solzhenitsyn’s

Cancer Ward  on 2nd yr. Russian Lit syllabus  I rejoiced!

Now some 43 yrs. later  my book  yet unwritten  memories

of my father’s last days writ large in boreholes of memory

Bubbling to the surface on dark fall afternoons  decay in

sinus cavities

Maybe he was trying to protect me from diving into the

cancer machine  +could not foresee a life for me  as champion

of brutalized children +writer of festering poems   He wanted

a brighter path for: the greatest little filly of them all   His auto-

graph  Grade 6  August 16, 1969   20 yrs. to the day he died

Congestive heart failure   5 yrs. after a vein from his leg was

implanted in his heart   Incision from solar plexus to ankle

(They’re gonna cut me from stem to stern  he said)  Forfeiting

heaven for 5 more years of failing body  +mind ravaged by heart/

lung machine (we didn’t read the fine print)

My tough old father did not retreat   He stuck around for another

1,825  days  and 3 to his tattered last still said life is sweet

__

Fall 2016

RIP Lee

UN-SUNNY

CONFUCIUS SAY: UN-SUNNY WAYS

Almost Halloween  scent of decomposing poets

+general decay  Dia de Muertos several days away💀

Leonard Cohen is growling: I don’t need a lover the

wretched beast is tamed    82 +described as frail by

art critic who needs a colonic  He who felt that Dylan

was too Pop for the Nobel  But Bobby doesn’t need their

approbation  Visions of filthy lucre blowin’ in the late fall

breeze  along with what’s left of Canada’s dignity

Did you know that a 23 yr. old indigenous youth has been

held in a plexiglass cell  lit 24 hrs. a day?  In solitary 52 months

+still no trial   U.N. says 15 plus days in solitary is a form of torture

Perhaps a little too  Silence of The Lambs  for polite Canadians

Ladies to the right of me  speaking in platitudes   Hushed voice

says: Whatever fate sends our way  we must embrace

Gag me

Leonard!  Revivify the hoary beast you say is slain  +limp to

the nearest railway station when Lorca crouches in the laundry

room  spraying Shout on your soiled PJ’s   And do FREE  Adam Capay

Justin  as all of Tibet turns it’s lonely eyes to you   Lover of giant

Pandas   +all things Mao

__

Fall 2016

BUTTERFLY

DANCE LIKE A BUTTERFLY STING LIKE A WOMAN SCORNED

My inclination was to catch it   The last yellow

butterfly known to mankind   There in the park

mingling with hipsters +Jay fans rushing home

for the game   Glorious day  9º above normal for

late October  Sports fans will be trapped indoors

smelling each others pheromones  for hours

Will they take sex breaks?  Stats say most do   1.5

times per inning   Now the butterfly is tucked neatly

into my pocket  more alive than I   Sap-reversed  +

polymorphous perverse  attracted to the sentient +

non  + to last butterflies

Goal being to keep it alive until Spring  +release it in

a world where Hillary has jailed divorced Donald for

finding her too unattractive to grope   One where

Melania  after escaping from Trump Tower  lands a

job with the Clinton Foundation where Bill does not

find her too unattractive to grope

Now look at  crooked Hillary  so full of promise at 23    Why

did she excuse Bill’s debauchery?  Little Tammy Wynette

wife   friend to Melanias everywhere

__

“You know,  I’m not sitting here as some little woman standing by

my man, like Tammy Wynette.  I’m sitting here because I love him

and I respect him and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve

been through together.  And, you know, if that’s not enough for people,

then, heck, don’t vote for him.”  

(Hillary Clinton 2015  in response to Bill’s “bimbo eruptions”. )

Fall 2016   20 days to U.S. election

MONSTERS

WHERE MONSTERS DO LIVE

..then rising up again like funhouse figures,

and stripping the clothes from the dead and

seizing them up by the hair and passing their

blades about the skulls and snatching aloft

the bloody wigs, gutting the strange white torsos

and holding up great handfuls of viscera, and

genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with

gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some

fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud

cries to their fellows.  

(Blood Meridian  Cormac McCarthy  1985)

__

The only other place such atrocities have been witnessed

has been in the play  of children   Extraordinary acts of

sadism  beheadings  burnings in baths  +rapes    Sex me

therapist   I won’t tell anybody   Too often  mass executions

in the sandtray    Tissue paper blood  splattered on ponies

kittens  +Pokemon

So much to do   So little time  the boy who loved Pikachu

sang   Welcome to my nightmare  the girl with greying teeth

+biker father  said    Thrown against the wall at 3  by Mom’s

new boyfriend named  Cookie

Yesterday in  American Honey  a band of misplaced kids

led by Elvis Presley’s granddaughter  Riley  hopelessly make

their way across Donald’s kingdom  Lord of the Flies-esque

except  in urban wastelands   Youthquake bacchanalia   Post-

millennial debauchery

One cherubic neo-hippie  baptizes herself in a river  +though

we are told she cannot swim  up she rises  Dreadlocked Queen

of abject poverty   Hopelessness crackles through the screen  but

not louder than popcorn man behind us  or some deviant in front

on the phone   Too afraid to confront him  lest he rear up on hind

legs

Baseball cap does not mask tips of red leathery ears   Please allow 

me to introduce myself    We hunker down in plush seats   My seat

mate determined to prove that we have witnessed  an epiphany!  But

then he takes the message of Christ quite literally

One cheek often bruised + bloodied   Hope is God  he has been known

to say  as I cower  waiting for the other shoe to drop    If God is hope

temperament is destiny   +all the children in therapy will live happily

ever after

__

Muta Abana, the father of a released Chibok girl said: Some of them

came back with babies, but think about it, are we going to kill the

children?   (Globe & Mail  October 17  2016)

Fall 2016   22 days until Donald rules the land

FREE

BUSTED FLAT IN BATON ROUGE WAITIN FOR A TRAIN

NOTHIN’ DON’T MEAN NOTHIN’ HON  IF IT AINT FREE

Jack hammers jacking   Off my rocker with dogs

barking until 3 a.m.   Unholy Urban Quarter

Even the skunks have been displaced by hipster’s

skunky weed   I’m taking my neighbour to court  +

if I become Prez  I’ll send her to jail   Mark me

Last time I saw her  clouds of skunky-smoke wafted

around her hair extensions   They’ll never take my dogs

away    Today  wedged between a stinking squirrel  + a

dead chickadee  I write these words to insulate myself

from the meek

Now wrathful over Gordie’s impending leave taking

You will not steal the silence  nor wrest the last pink

macaroon from me    Citydweller!  I implore you:

Do not dwell on being free

__

(Peter Mansbridge to Gord Downie re: his terminal brain cancer)

Peter: Does it hurt?

Gord: No

__

How is it that we mortals get bright eyed

because a dress is blue and has a bow?

I take a sip and the water is bitter,

and I think: Sex is frail,

even the sex of men.

(Adelia Prado 1978  Poet Laureate  Brazil)

Fall 2016  smell that smell the smell of snow surrounds you

NOBEL

BLOWIN’ IN THE NOBEL LAUREATE BREEZE

Idiot Wind

Blowing through the buttons of our coats

Blowing through the letters that we wrote

Idiot Wind

Blowing through the dust upon our shelves

We’re idiots babe

It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

(Bob Dylan)

__

Idiot wind  Blowing through America

The lowest have gone high  +the highest

have gone low  Cover up the truth with lies

Idiot wind   One day he’ll be in a ditch   Flies

buzzing around his eyes   Idiot base   It’s a

wonder you still know how to breathe –

Aprill Atkins Cameron + Bobby Zimmerman

__

Dylan is not an entertainer. What he is, as the

Nobel committee just recognized, is the greatest

popular poet of the past 50 yrs. He is spoken of

in the same breath as Keats, Shakespeare, and

Milton.  (Globe & Mail October 14, 2016)

Fall 2016

Bravo! Robert Zimmerman the Jew from Hibbing

2016 Nobel Prize for Literature

‘PHOBING

‘PHOBING AT THE MOUTH

He loomed over Hillary like a monkey  in heat

Was this a grope-able moment?  What if he’d

grabbed her by the pussy?  “Grab them by the pussy.

You can do anything.”  (Donald Trump on women +

the perks of fame)  Jane Goodall  expert on chimp

behaviour   studied his non-verbals   the chimp-man

body language: naked aggression  loud squawking  throwing

feces   thrusting of chest + pelvic region

It seems that under the ill fitting suit +santa-red tie  there

resides an un-evolved iteration of humankind    Before

agriculture  +religion  +standing up on hind legs   This lowest

donald-denominator has always been lying in wait  Think  Il Duce

Think Idi   Think about America as sleazy reality tv  How will the land

of the free ever be taken seriously by the short men in the East?

One  baby faced +chubby  wielding missiles +Dennis Rodman    The

other beady eyed +perpetually flexing flaccid muscles  often wrestling

with a bear   Soon the echo of laughter from terrorists in caves  will

ricochet through Aleppo  which will cease to exist in another 90 days

(Globe+Mail October 2016)   And Hillary’s perma-smile will deepen as

a strapping young man in a blue suit crouches beneath her desk  –

O America  land of equal opportunity

__

Fall 2016    for big bro M.A.  who generously donated the title of this poem!

BEFORE

BEFORE THE FALL

to die of the beauty

of this light

of these reds + golds

of these flickering pods

of shadow

of these greens

oh the sound of this

autumn breeze

crinkling   swish

+ birdsong

__

October 21, 2000

FALL  2016

FARM

PARCHMAN FARM

the barbed wire

the smoke stacks

the chains on the gang

the railroad cars in line

the line of Humanity

the guitar wailing out

the cries of the lost ones

on Parchman Farm

on Parchman Farm

when we were young

__

September 24, 2000  

for Illinois

on his 42nd

*(Parchman Farm is the oldest prison, and the only

maximum security prison for men in the state of

Mississippi)

Fall 2016

PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE

PLEASE DO CONFUSE THE END

WITH THE BEGINNING

She is gorgeous +dark skinned  speaking

a singsong French   Pneumatic breasts ride

high +bounce  Mesopotamian goddess material

in urban jungle  devoid of horizons  +round

feminine hills   of magic +deep wells

When God was a woman thighs+bellies  buttocks

+breasts  were worshipped   The age of uroboros

No shortage of fecund   Great Round  now extinct

Numb citydwellers uncertain where end begins +

beginning ends   Not realizing  that they do not

The whole point of the uroboros is infinity  but if

you have been programmed to believe in straight

lines  +greying male sky Gods  poor you    Perhaps

the Rabbi who stopped at Gethsemane before being

nailed to a tree  knew  that: the vertical + horizontal

can be dangerous in the wrong hands  And that no one

has ever been  or ever will be  crucified  on a circle

__

October 6, 1998:  21 year old Matthew Shepard  a buoyant,

diminutive, openly gay Wyoming student, was found bloodied

and comatose in a field, strung up in a manner later described

as a crucifixion. 

Fall 2016   ere of Thanksgiving   RIP Matthew Shepard