songanddancegirl

HAPPY

DON’T WORRY   BE HAPPY

I sat with a man yesterday who knows the difference between

the sound of wind in Aspens  +wind in Pines   Spent his youth at

Lakehead U  Forestry   Then a beeline for Jung  via Zarathustra

(I married him after his Gregory Bateson period  when he was want

to make circles with his hands  Not unlike Rainman)

 

Our dear friend from back then  now a Cantor  said 2 words: transitional

relationship  that was in 1988   I ask you: what is not transitory?  We 3

more recently  saw her husband buried on a sunny hillside   Now we want

for her  a lush baker  or opera singer    #voluptuouscantorbride    This life is

beautiful  +cruel

 

But back to yesterday: edge of Lake Ontario  giant rocks jut out   I sit with said

husband   Numero 3   Started marrying early  at a ripe 19   Through the sun-dapple

+duck-squawk  legs splayed  red frizz flung far+wide  spray of waves tickling hammer

toes   I thought I heard husband say  in low anthem baritone: If you keep throwing

rocks you’ll hurt the ducks   Do you really want that?

 

Always Socrates  drives one to distraction   My methodology: direct+Sartre  Hell is

other people   Touch the ducks + I kick your sadistic butts to Rochester   Kids were

6+10   They scuttered away like young vermin   Snapshot of a new generation?

Raised in the wake of Littleton’s  + Las Vegas  +that Batman movie turned terrorist

in Colorado   They snarled at us  pointy teeth glinting  in October sun

 

We had transitioned from  fall romp at lakeside  to: Why have we wasted our lives

saving the depraved conscious apes  from themselves?   Who  by these early years of

the 21st century  have made it their life’s work  to be  happy!  *(the happiest people

in the world spend 5 to 6 hrs. a day socializing.. Globe+Mail pg. L7 today)   Perhaps

this is why their kids are running wild  trying to kill mallards at Ontario Place

 

For Chrissakes  if the goal is to be happy  how will they know withering from

blossoming?  Fuckery from meaning?  Zimmerman sang of the  idiot wind   + it’s

blowing through our modern era  making thugs into Presidents   So  rise up  happy

sheep  Smell the smell of reality  of the vicissitudes preparing you to confront what

it means to live until 102   Because those of you who are happiest get 8 more years to

contemplate death!  *(Globe+Mail: the happiest people add 8 yrs to life expectancy)

 __

 

 

 

 

Fall  2017    for Rachel Tyler Atkins  

MOTHER

THE MOTHER & CHILD REUNION

IS ONLY A MOTION AWAY

Yesterday a picture  sent from a pre-menstrual niece:

It’s a godless world   said she  And I don’t know why

I can’t stop weeping   Post menses  she is sweet +upbeat

Can even recite  The Epic of Gilgamesh  at will   Did her

dissertation on it

 

The picture: from the land of innocence  40 yrs. since family

sliced+diced   Faces un-scarred  Bodies un-scalpeled   Dew

on the grass  (Yes! they even had dew in the 70’s..)    Alas

youngest child in the picture dead   Too many night sea

journeys   Other 2  now mothers of 4 children   Oldest woman

also dead   Lungs infected by filthy pigeon  Jackson Square

New Orleans

 

Niece wondered if we will meet again   Plaintive howl  via e-mail

Can there be a better place old frizzled auntie?  Not only is there

a better place  but  what we once have been   we shall be again

When skin+bones are highly theoretical  +we swim with the fishes

(not a mobster reference)

 

I answered: Love is immortality   Sounding like a cross between Jesus

and CSNY   No such positivity had left these lips since 1976   when I

had no knowledge of death   It too was theoretical   Just kiss a rock-like

brow in your parent’s condominium  +that horse has left the barn   But

I will leave you hopeful  as too many of you grow sickly  + are a strange

shade of yellow  from following this blog too closely

 

Little Tameeka came for therapy   Kidnapped in Africa by her father

Fierce little warrior girl   Escaped genital mutilation too   Dogs at Pearson

International sniffed her   Separated form her father +sent to fostercare

At first she suckled therapist’s knuckles   Then gradually developed a smile

too big for her tiny face  +a laugh that echoed through the ethers  to the

room of her mother in Ethiopia

__

 

 

Fall  2017

 

 

 

 

 

DOWNIE

THE DAY GORD DOWNIE DIED

All the young hipsters so beautiful and free?  Buying

their coffee at Balzacs  All duded up  Stylized snapshot

of urbanity  Bye Bye Gord Downie  probably not their

poet anyway    Don’t tell me what Atticus is doing

 

This morning on the phone a friend I’ve known  forever

said: My funeral guy.. I actually have a funeral guy!  3

members of her family have died  since last July   Father

Husband   Brother   We talked long +loose about ashes +

survivor’s guilt

 

She is the last woman standing   Estranged from her junkie

brother  whose ashes will remain with  funeral guy   On the

shelf where he keeps: un-claimed sisters  dogs  +infant skulls

Ready to transmute into the next: Bowie  Downie   +The Artist

Formerly Known as Prince

 

So  if your ashes remain un-claimed  have you really lived?  Or

is your death rattle: an unheard cry for meaning?   No bereft

shining granddaughter to visit your town in Romania  Trying to

come to grips with the madness of ovens   It is a bit like the tree

falling in the forest question

 

If one is pushed  bullet riddled  into an unmarked grave of 100,000

strong at Babi Yar  does it make a sound?  While we don’t recommend

you go around believing in: Never Again  We do recommend  that to

one child at a time  you recount the history of  gassed +un-gassed family

Especially of those un-claimed

 

The ashes on  funeral guy’s  shelf  mixing with dust +mouse  belong to

a human being   He who had such promise at birth  that upon his death

the angels lined up to rent clouds of glory  +howl Kaddish at any Gods

within a 5 mile radius

__

Strange to think of you,  gone..

While I walk the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village..

And I’ve been up all night reading the Kaddish aloud..

Dreaming back thru life,  your time and mine  accelerating 

toward Apocalypse..  (Allen Ginsberg  Kaddish  1959)

 

Fall  2017   RIP   Gord Downie

 

WEASELS

LOVE IS A HELLHOLE FILLED WITH NIGHT WEASELS

A  snarly girl with giant breasts  approaches as I write about

love  at the Tampered Press   George Saunders  brilliant and bent

is exactly where I want to get   In  Escape From Spiderhead  George

proposes an experiment  using convicts imprisoned for murder

 

First George gives them a drug that makes them love  Kind of like our own

oxytocin  but less prairie vole  +more vampireliplock   drawingbloodevery

timetheyfuck   Suddenly they’ve known each other forever  soulmates in

many previous lives  +will continue to meet ad infinitum   ad nauseam

( jaded? hell yes )

 

When the drug wears off  they fall out of love  Now cadavers   empty  +wreaking

of a stranger’s sweat  (who does not know the horror of this?)  George then forces

one of them to kill the other via a drug called Darkenfloxx™️   He refuses  +kills

himself   The scientists cheer  psychopathy can be cured    A conscience grown in

a petrie dish

 

My own experiments on human subjects: the dead eyes of abused 7 yr. olds taught

me some things   You can take the child out of the locked room  but you cannot

remove the smell of feces  +mould  from nostrils   What you can do is place said

child in front of windows looking out onto trees  onto sunlight    A hawk  +the full

moon  come night

 

He cowers there for 2 yrs.+300 days   He looks like Jesus  palms out  stigmata

flowing   One day hundreds of birds gather in the trees  +start to sing  (he does not

take a hammer   bash out the glass  +begin shooting)  He notices the window  + says:

 I don’t think I want to push you out    And then he rests

____

 

 

Fall  2017

LIVING

AS I LAY LIVING

What could Vardaman Bundren have possibly meant when he said:

My mother is a fish   You know  the 8 yr. old  Vardaman   in Faulkner’s

As I Lay Dying   His mother Addie has just died in her bed  as an older

son works an adze for days   Making the coffin that will carry Addie to

her grave

 

Just prior to Addie’s final breath  Vardaman kills  +guts   a fish   The 2

converge in his 8 yr. old psyche   The dead fish + the dead mother   In the

lore of the Fisher King  the grail legend posits:  the wounded Fisher King

is the healer  the grail being one’s own personal healing elixir  made from

suffering a life

 

What wounds you will heal you   The gutted fish + the cancer ridden mother

teach the boy that there is only 1 simple truth   And the fisher of men said it

best: the truth will set you free    Fearing death is fearing life   Life  the bardo

state   the in-between  the waking-dream   For who is truly alive?

 

The cuckholded husband  who meets his wife’s lover +doesn’t punch his lights

out?  And why not?  He came to suffer the truth of what was missing in their

marriage   The answer: feeling alive   So get hold of the water of life  +whatever

it is for you  tie it in a bundle +place it on a stick

 

If it is music  also memorize the silences   These pauses  before what is coming

are important   crucial in fact to prepare you for the   great wide open    The

longest pause  where you won’t have to: mind the gap   That curious sign  posted

as you step onto the subway   Here in life no one wants you to fall through the cracks

 

Society is set up to protect you   Mostly from yourself    Should you get to know

yourself too well  you might hoist the yoke  +make a beeline    Who then would

inherit the kingdom of heaven?   Freedom is not for the meek    But then you’ve

heard it all before:  aging is enlightenment at gunpoint*

__

*But only if yer kicking+screaming

 

Learn to die and thou shalt learn to live,  for there shall none 

learn to live, that has not learned to die.  

(The Book of The Craft of Dying  Comper’s Edition)

 

 

Fall  2017  RIP John Lennon   77 today   somewhere

 

 

 

BROKEN HEARTS

ALL THE GOOD GIRLS ARE AT HOME WITH BROKEN HEARTS

First he was dead  then he was clinging  but no one could ever say

he was good looking  Heroin thin  long of face  Great white hair  a la

Johnny + Edgar Winter   But his nasal drawl  +poetic mainlining  made

you think:  I’ll take him home  We’ll raise a couple of stringy white haired

kids    Move to Malibu  where Thomas Earl Petty died    Yesterday

 

Massive coronary  66   Free falling on life support  until 8:40 pm   Add him

to the list:  Lou  David  Prince  Greg  Walter   As Pete Townsend once said:

All my friends are dead   And who has not been touched  by the mass exodus?

Which one of us not held their breath  over biopsies  +CT’s   Well it’s either

cancer  or it’s nothing   Stress boiling blood   Breakdown  cannot be far away

 

60 something refugees  kicked around  by marriages  gout  +dreams abandoned ?

But still here +Tom there  Meeting up with George  et al.   A long cold lonely journey

To a place where the inverted sun  casts shadows  over resurrected rockers   Entering

that final hall of fame   While back on earth  guitars weep   +madmen with guns  enact

carnage   Concerts now mass graves  in the war that has:  No borders   No meaning

No jingo

___

 

 

Fall  2017   RIP  TOM PETTY 1950-2017