songanddancegirl

TORONTO

TORONTO IS A BEAST LEFT IN OUR CARE

+ ONE DAY THERE WILL BE NO CALIFORNIA

Miserable Toronto hordes out in force   One just

bit me   White +pink blossoms fill cherry trees   1st

real day of Spring 2017   Denizens used to sneering

Sore jaws by 4pm   All smiles+guffaws  +being stung

by 1st bees    All standing too close to me

 

One crushing a bee  +then crushing it some more   Green

juices ooze out   One guy with his shirt off  pigpink    Poet

huddled in corner trying to make sense of Spring rites in a

city where the glarestare was invented  +well honed

 

Once I fell on choppy ice in flowered tights  +tall Doc Martens

Knee bleeding profusely  2 women pretended not to see me

laughing giddily   It’s not a friendly place    But today amidst

selfie-sticks   +gnashing teeth  the cherry pollen casts a spell

It only intensifies my anomie   A woman has just tripped over

me  +lays at my feet

 

I pretend I don’t notice  as a heart shaped red stain seeps out of her

left elbow  It mixes with the green juice of our first fallen bee   In all

of this glorious urban insanity  we put aside for a while  the fact that

a pug-faced boy dictator  points a SUPERBIG nuclear warhead at

California

__

 

 

 

SPRING  2017

 

 

 

 

 

WHO

WHO WILL PUT IT BACK THE WAY IT WAS?

Morning rituals:  newspaper  sport’s section 1st   to see

Jewish obits   Did you ever notice that fewer Jews die on

holidays?   Take Passover for example  a mere 3   Then 2

days after final matzoh fried  10 Jews die   Maybe Yaweh

keeps them in a holding pattern  pulls the plug on plug

pulling day  quite randomly

 

Worship only impermanence  if you want to leave here with

a shred of sanity   Yesterday a 20 yr. old man in Thailand took

his 10 mth. old baby to an abandoned hotel   There he hung her

+jumped out a window   This  reported in those little sidebars in

the newspaper   The ones they use to jolt you out of your caffeine

induced preparedness to seize the day!

 

Why do they do this to us?   Carl Jung counselled against reading

the news   Ditto  flying    Both giving us the false sense that we have

risen above the fray  the war  the cancer   Depressed Thai dads are

faraway   You are untouchable up there in the clouds   Where in the

blink of an eye you can put it back the way it was    Then you land

with a thud  +your Ativan-daze fades

 

The people who are the most hopeless know  that even angels declare

bankruptcy  +if you want to avoid a plane crash sit beside one of these

folks   For stamped on their foreheads are the words: this one stays until

the bitter end    When  previously unbeknownst   all debts are forgiven!

(As long as you never land)

 

Up there  even the Thai dad is put back together again!   In this poem  a lyrical

thing   all false hope  +all false cheerfulness in the face of your fear  is a recording

Hang up +try your call again   Then punch the smug bastards in the nose    +run

Or better yet  flap

__

REDEMPTION

MY ROCK & ROLL REDEMPTION

One day  from 60  +then I stop counting  permanently

Our family Rabbi said  at the Atkins funerals I’ve

attended   Every year past 70  is an extra   70 sounded

ancient  now it doesn’t   It already has a tentacle around

a mottled ankle

 

Maybe age  is  just a number?   I used to think espousers of

this philosophy  shallow   But now that my number is up there

I care  less   +soon I will care  not at all   Ditto  petty bullshit

Do not wax poetic re: your cousin’s hernia surgery   My eyes in

permaglaze from 6 decades of nodding politely

 

These days I’m just as likely  to get my shotgun out  +send you

packing  light a fire under your greasy bonhomie   Approach me

carefully   Target practice yesterday   Shotgunned 1st beer Sunday

Husband+brothers: You don’t have to tilt your head all the way

back   Just tilt the beer!  Now they will feel buckshot  nibbling at

sagging butts   +wish they’d never messed with pretty little me

 

Do I sound angry?

 

It’s just that when you read  say  Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography

no matter how bad things get  you know who he will grow up to be

In my story is there no rock & roll redemption in sight?   Show a little

faith there’s magic in the night  I ain’t a beauty  but hey  I’m alright!

 

Go quietly   railing is for pussies  +face it  your story will never end with

you growing up to be  Bruce Springsteen   But these poems  full of darkness

at the edges +flights of baroque  are the antidote to believing  too much in

anything   So  jilt all saviours  +commit the 1st rule of immortality to memory:

This flesh is highly overrated   OMG!  Maybe I did grow up to be Bruce Springsteen

__

 

You can hide ‘neath your covers and study your pain

Make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain

Waste your summer praying in vain for a saviour to rise

from these streets.   Thunder Road   1975   The Boss 

 

 

Spring 2017   onedayto60

AWAY

GIVE IT AWAY

There’s a theatre company I frequent  The

audience is beady-eyed  +hungry  There in

the dark  teeth gnash  +a lung is coughed out

with regularity   Right now there is a play highly

recommending the virtues of life over decay in a

water filled grave

 

Is your soul alive?  they cry  (audience member:

I’m cancelling my subscription they don’t project) 

Once again save me from my demographic  I heard

them LOUD+CLEAR  though only 40% hearing left

in my right ear

 

If you’re not as alive as you might be  you sorely need to

hang around the cemetery  or think about the 20 yr. old girl

who hung herself in my niece’s dormitory  The latches to her

sadness/madness  ennui on a good day  not secured tightly

Now all the girls will need an extra dose of Ativan to sleep

 

Those who found her will find no peace  +wander through life

with a deep seated fear of thresholds  +getting too close  +besties

who are in excruciating pain   I had one once  +her recurring dream

was: being in room filled with water  water that meets the walls

I will never know the outcome of her story

 

She gave me the finger in an Indian restaurant  when I said: Your

ennui is drowning me  And I see now that this was one of the best

things that ever happened to me   Finally free of her membranes

of sorrow+want   +a well pruned borderline personality  masquerading

as creativity    I was left free  +forever weary of hiding malignant narcissists

from psychiatrists   +giving it away for FREE

__

 

 

 

SPRING 2017    7daysto60

PSYCHIC

PSYCHIC SPIES FROM CHINA TRY

TO STEAL YOUR MIND’S ELATION

The woman at my drug mart is cryptic  in an

East European way   One might take it for hard

heartedness   Today my new spontaneous laugh

burst forth  +bits of protein bar sprayed her face

Lips a sublime MAC GASHPINK  moved back+forth   back+forth

A quick mimed: Stick it where the sun don’t shine

 

Most of my epithets involve buttocks’  as I approach the

penultimate week of my 59th year   She’d told her sister:

Just stop it!   At 50 stop the clock!  It’s downhill  In faded jeans

+push up bras you’ll look like a funky old lady  Does she wanna 

kiss my ass too?    This time not mimed    Never funky  only iceycool

 

I’m sick+tired of: moored in one’s bullshit diatribes   Dogs+older

boys followed you down quite regularly   +push up bras  +ripped

jeans clung like Dani California’s (think Red Hot Chili Pepper’s young ho)

Why Anthony Kiedis himself once fell to his knees at your feet (+not viceversa)

WHO YOU CALLING FUNKY?

 

Later  when you took him home  dreams of Californication dancing like

sugarplums  you fell asleep on his piratical shoulder   Nowadays you reflect

on how soon you will be going   Billie left at 44  cirrhosis of the liver  Voice of

a drunken angel     God bless the child who has his own    

 

Yes  do   Soon a bitter niece will want you to de-clutter  Downsize  Fuck you  little

darling  With the grace of the last hawk  you will resist stasis  Spread funky old wings

Never abandon poetry    Find old Anthony +his son Yogi  (Bear)   Seriously!

And light out for new territory

_

 

 

 

SPRING 2017  13daysto60

 

 

REASON

EVERYBODY DIES  WHETHER OR NOT YOU EAT

6 ALMONDS A DAY  SMOKE 2 PACKS A DAY   OR

BELIEVE IN GOD   AND EVERYTHING DOES NOT

HAPPEN FOR A REASON

Take the Cochrans   A Utah couple walking on the London

bridge last week   Last day of 25th anniversary trip   Melissa

now a widow  is  getting stronger  according to brother

Clint Payne   Broken leg  +rib  cuts to head   When I recounted

this to my husband of 25 yrs. he said:  Well what are the chances

of that happening?  i.e., the world is pretty safe    My point: No

it ain’t

 

We did not meet terrorists on our 25th    Just a snotty hostess:

We never take reservations  (except they did)   +2 Scottish toughs

cursing in a booming burr  at the bar  where we ended up snivelling

into comped champagne   Hotel owner: Come back later! Renew your

vows!   Fuck Off  George Freedman   Bollocks to you +yours

 

Yesterday on a freakishly warm Aprill Fool’s day   a still little girl  with

electric blue eyes  +dark circles  took my hand  +began  to stroke the fur

of my vest   I had never seen her before  I suggested to my paramour that

this was strange   Not really   he noted    Contrary + Scottish  to the core

 

But I maintain  when unknown children follow you in the park   They see

what you see   Smell that smell  of sewage+spring  +old dog shit exposed in

melting snow   They know  that you have crossed over the great divide   Ready

to face Hill 70 at Vimy   Let go of all expectations of immortality  of being granted

immunity  mostly from telling those you never did   to kiss your skinny white ass

Your face no longer covering your disguise

 

Today again  the ever so faintest scent of sewage   Wait  it cannot be dog excrement

in yellow snow  No  It is you  learning what it means to help make God conscious of

what he did to Job  that wretched stand-in for EVERYMAN   And as your flesh ripens

in the Putrefacto  innocence is transformed into throwing babies onto bayonets

Warsaw ghetto 1942   And the certain knowledge that you  are finally brave enough to

stop caring who rattles your cage

__

(Is that spittle running down the chin of the chortling man you just passed?)

 

He can kiss my ass.

 

 

SPRING  2017