songanddancegirl

BLUEBIRD

Pfieffer Beach  Big Sur  California

IF YOU MEET THE BLUEBIRD OF HAPPINESS

ON THE ROAD  DON’T KILL HER

Contemplating a tattoo under or near her mastectomied

breast   Maybe a bird with a heart on its chest   2 birds with

1 stone  His quadruple bypass not far from her scar  Set us 3  free

Birds can travel between the realms it is said

In the days before his death a colony of wrens gathered to

whisk him away   They returned daily thereafter  raising a

cacophony  on the balcony where he sat   Ticker time-bomb ticking

like the croc who swallowed the clock in Peter Pan

At night the little bluebird  tatt will fly off of my chest  not a prisoner

of the rib cage  unlike my heart   No escape  without a cardiovascular

surgeon  an Egyptian high priest for weighing against a feather    A

taxidermist  or undertaker

Blue will flitter above me  +rise up through the skylight   And like the Reaper

in A Christmas Carol  walk me through the life that might have been:  You

may still be here tomorrow  but your dreams may not    (Cat Stevens)   

So many things I’d wanted to be:  rodeo queen  missionary in Africa  rock star

rebel   jezebel    And there still may be time

But wait!  Bluebird  veering west  +flying via the prairie provinces to the land of

grapes+honey  (+the Beats)   It was 30 yrs. ago today  young self  condoms in

zippered pouch  boarded a plane to the sounds of Count Basie  with Ella crooning:

April in Paris   Raggedy parents waved goodbye   Ticker time-bomb  675 more days

alive          tic toc tic toc  tic  ti  t 

Flew to San Fransisco   Big Sur wanderings   Medical LSD  psychiatrist boyfriend

mailed regularly   Broke up with him abruptly during a Marcel Marceau show  They

had pay phones back then:  It’s not you   It’s me    

Each morning  the bluebird of happiness  will return to my chest  scented with the

African savannah  +California coast  all salty+redwoodsey   One night many of its

brethren will gather + this time deposit me at Pfieffer Beach   Permanently

Back in my bed a warm indent where I used to be   Ribcage+caged heart breathe

a sigh of relief on way to the beach    What a wondrous thing!  And all for $89.99

The tattoo special at: Pearl Harbour Gift Shop  Kensington Market   Xmas 2017

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History will make this poem prophetic  and its awful silliness a spiritual music

I have the moan of doves  and the feather of ecstasy  (Allen Ginsberg  1961  Kaddish)

Fall 2017   for M.bird + D.bird   +Rachel Tyler Atkins

WILD

THE WILD & THE INNOCENT  & THE AGED

She said: I wish they could give you a needle to wake you up

I don’t think they have one   I know  She’s 93   Sounded like

one of those dreams where you keep trying to awaken  but

cannot    Once in a while you do  but then fall back into the

SAME DREAM

Waking up in the same body  same psyche   same identity   age

family  city  house  bed    Even if you vigorously protest   The you

inside of you  the Self  + it’s casing   does not budge    The Gnostics

believed that we spend this life awakening to a Self put to sleep at birth

The Sufis did too

Self-remembering is big with Sufis   So too is watching a flower move

toward the sun   Many at 93 are looking to go to sleep   But not she

Her life force is of the roaring 20’s   Born in 24   Part child   part nymph

part Queen   Maybe wake up as Nefertiti  mixing of Semites + Egyptians

not uncommon

The ancient Egyptians said: Follow your heart as long as you shall live

At death it is weighed against a feather  to determine a blameless life  There

is no concept of head/heart conflict  as we in the West torment ourselves

with   Living by the heart is like living by the sword   Much blood +ruin  It is

decidedly not for the faint

I imagine she will wake up  as an Egyptian Queen any day now  +live by the

heart in her palace on the Nile  Near where Miriam placed the infant Moses

And she too  like his people  will be free   This place she has been  is no place

for an innocent   No place for a child-woman    No place for a Queen

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Fall 2017

CARE?

CARE?  WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT MEAN  CARE?

*(Charles Manson on the fate of Sharon Tate + her dead baby)

Mould on sandwiches at school   Urine scented sweats  reek of feces

too   A small ball of bowel debris rolls out of pant leg onto floor  Therapist

scoops it up  says no more   Later as boy examines pregnant Barbie  leaves bite

marks on removable belly   Baby stomped flat   How to explain this to the

state  who pays green eyed boy’s keep   Is he a sadist now  at 8?    What will

he be by 13?

Let us look at Charlie   Born: No Name Maddox  1934    Died yesterday:

Charlie Miles Manson  82    At 13 he held a razor to a boy’s throat  raped him

His mother a 16 yr. old prostitute  Kathleen Maddox  Heavy drinker  Lived on

the margins  Never knew his father   Spent most of his life in prison  Car thief

Pimp   Serial killer   Mesmerizing brown eyes  +cheshire smile  lit up the unholy

darkness

Mother of boy with green eyes  lived with a man  now in prison for his de-

humanization   She promised an X-box  promised+promised   What troubles

him most Therapist?    This   +the locked bedroom door:  I couldn’t get to the

bathroom so I used the floor  Is that bad?   Barbie’s legs now akimbo  about to

give birth to the rough beast on slow thighs  slouching toward Los Angeles   1969

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FALL 2017

FOREVER

FOREVER YOUNG

Joan Didion  modern day femme Montaigne   Gorgeous  +insolent

Willowy  infused with cigarette smoke+dyed in the wool chic   Bought

Susan Kasabian her embroidered dress for the trial of the century  Up close

+ personal with Charlie Manson   Jim Morrison   Warren Beatty apparently

ga ga

See Joan standing in front of phalliccorvette   Stiff suffragettist daughter  At 82

veins gnarly +purple   Garish  misshapen  tendrils   Arms more like the legs of a

Blue Heron  than a woman’s   Not majestic anymore  But not to be confused with

diapered moustachioed crones I’ve known

Joan is whippetquick   Brainteaser of the cocky breezy octogenarian school   Such

women are few   Many compatriots sit  hands unbusy   waiting   My own plan is to

drop down on all 4’s  +scurry into a brambled ditch one day   Let’s say  at 76  when

it will be time to walk into the wilderness   As Neolithic crones did  their bones  +

totems all over Old Europe

My ossuary will contain: 1 hot pink skull by Betsy Johnson  degenerated discs C4

through 6    Arthritic knee debris  +a well made brainstem   used to unlock the

mysteries of Jung  + Jim Morrison   Bad boys in shallow graves  up the road

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We are imperfect mortal beings. Aware of that mortality. So wired, that when we

mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were.

As we are no longer. As we will one day not be  at all.   Joan Didion  2005 

FALL 2017

SFUMATO

SFUMATO OR THE SLIGHT SOFTENING OF THE EDGES

Sfumato me  (+while you’re at it unfuckthisworld)   On 2nd thought perhaps I

best not be sfumato-ed   With too soft edges  you will no longer be able to count

on me  to bring you the unabridged dirt  as I endeavour to morph into Joan Didion

Of whom it is said: stunning candour  piercing details  electric honesty  I cannot

imagine dying without reading The Year Of Magical Thinking  (New York Times) 

In this book Joan writes about losing her husband of 40+ yrs  +her 20 something

daughter within 9 mths   Abruptly  Unexpectedly   She is likely still in shock well

into her 80’s    Joan admonishes us not to speak of: recovery  but instead to dwell on

magical  occurrences within the the first year  after  

Today I will walk you through the first 6 months  after  losing a father   Some of you

may want to hit  unfollow   NOW

early mornings  coming to consciousness  +within seconds of gluey eyes opening 

remembering  he is dead  all over again  +reliving in those seconds the long scar from

ankle to breastbone  from breastbone to ankle  his courage  the rocky balboa of the

quadruple bypass  his breathlessness for years before   the fucking doctor saying: you

could live 10 years more!   he was 63 +still unsqualid   i’ll take it he cried

He died in 5  +there was little quality   Doctor forgot to mention  blunt force brain

trauma  from heart/lung machine  during 13 hour surgery

Then one day at the 4 month mark  I saw him in his wheelchair at the Landsdowne

subway stop   Dishevelled  with sores  but smiling  Had I been braver +not bolted  we

might have gone for coffee  and those early morning awakenings might have ceased

gluey eyes open  grey light  walls of books  hulking boyfriend   in comes the reaper +

his people  and it starts all over again

Good news though!   28 yrs. later  awakenings are fairly regular   Hulking husband

looms   walls lined with books   Now edges sfumato-ed with scar tissue  + 60 yrs. of

ego-deaths   But there in the corner of mind’s eye  I play a game with said Reaper:

Come on  present him again  In any form  Anywhere  Anytime   You wily bastard

Today will be the day I set him free   Rocky Balboa of my dreams

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You will stay on, restive, serene   The soul is captive  treated humanely 

kept in suspension  unable to advance much farther than your look   longing

to be free    (John Ashbery  1975   Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)

*(Some who have suffered a loss report actual sightings, what Freud described as:

a clinging to the object through the medium of hallucinatory wishful psychosis.)

FALL  2017

SNAKE

HE THAT HAS BEEN BITTEN BY A SNAKE  IS AFRAID OF A ROPE

*(Edward Albee)

And I said to my friend Gregory: Who among us doesn’t

have a bleeding goat in his living room?  He looked at me

quizzically   We’d just seen Edward Albee: The Goat Or 

Who Is Sylvia?   Then waxing poetic about Las Vegas  +

yesterday’s church shooting in Texas  27 dead from 17 mths

to 82    He ran for the loo   But who is not familiar with this

blood-dimmed tide?

I wasn’t being hypothetical   the original meaning of  tragedy

is  goat-song   The play is about all the desires we cannot control

or even admit we have   The dad  Martin  falls in full blown love

with a goat  after 20 yrs. of marriage   He comes to know  Sylvia  in

the biblical sense  by the fence  at a farm where she lives  nearby

And with Clytemnestra’s cry  the scorned wife disembowels little

Sylvia  +brings her home  for dinner?  A twisted tale of bestiality  +

ritual sacrifice  Now let us look at matricide  Orestes slays his mother

Clytemnestra  +the furies torment him for eternity     Unsuffer me

YES (!) hypothetically  there is a bloodied goat on my coffee table   It

resembles my mother

Both Electra  + Oedipal urges are normal aspects of human development

As long as one does not act upon them   Ditto the murder instinct for adultery

Last night  Ms. Raquel Duffy  acted on our behalf   She played the wife  Stevie

in all of her liberal democratic civility   Smashing a vase or 3   throwing books

to the floor   Later making a beeline for the door   + going Greek

Stevie  using the families cerated honey-cake knife  slit the little she goat’s throat

Then dragged her husband’s lover home  dripping goatblood all over beige shag rugs

Now tell me  which scorned woman out there will have Ms. Duffy act on her behalf

tonight?     The line forms here

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Fall  2017   (Salvation operates in the abyss.  Adelia Prado  1988) 

SHALOM

NO SHALAM  NO SHALOM

Sunlight so pristine  turning tops of trees into burnished

gold in late autumn breeze   Leaves scattered on shitty

sidewalks  (guess you thought poet going soft-filter  maudlin

well guess again)  Come back long suffering reader  Dive into

this bardo  where words slice you open  +words glue you back

together  Where hope is a relative term   And no  I did not buy

the mug that said: Fuck Death!   ($15  @ Red Pegasus)

So many distractions for the living:  sugar  sex  methamphetamine

tequila  For those of you over that bad trip  back in 76  when you guzzled

the cheapstuff  +in an agaved frenzy  slept with 10 engineers consensually

3 of them women   2 satyrs    +5 run of the mill guys:

can I see you again?  No

can I get yer number?  No

can I stay over?  No

can I get a reach-around?  No

can I get a raincheck?  Sure

But I digress   George Saunders  Lincoln in The Bardo  writes of the dead

with such uncanny knowing  he must be  or is soon to be   He tells of near

ghosts waiting by their sick-boxes   Apparently there is a period  or bardo-

state  when one might return home  Willie Lincoln 10yrs. old waits for his

father  who comes nightly (historically true)  +lifts the boy out of his box!

The nearby dead are filled with shock  +envy so deep they begin to gather

+self-flagellate in wormy shame  For not one has been touched after that day

(Oh they’d touch you alright.  They’d wrangle you into your sick-box. Dress

you how they wanted you. Stitch and paint you as necessary. But never touch

you again.   Lincoln in The Bardo  George Saunders)

Why is this so rare an act?  Biological imperative?  Bacteria?  Disease?  Or some

other reason  In Judaism they want you in the land of the living  prohibited to

even visit the new grave for 30 days  By then you’re back at the mill  But certainly

if death by quadruple by-pass  no germs remain?  Heartworms?  Angina droplets

inhaled?   Root word of Angina is: RAGE   Yes  RAGE  at the separation

Why not ignore the exhortation?  Return that night +lift your father out   Talk +

laugh until early birds catch the fucking worms   RETURN!  RETURN!    Re-write

the arcane rituals  +the concept of eternity will be ripped open by bored hellhounds

And you +your dearly departed  will alchemically worm your way back into each

other’s psyches     Only Believe

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Uneraseable  because already erased

Everything finally of course is metaphysical

Frank Bidart  Metaphysical Dog Poems 2013

Fall 2017

OUTLANDOS

OUTLANDOS D’AMOUR

When Outlandos D’Amour came out  I was 21   Thought myself an outlaw

of love (!)   Didn’t so much have a mean streak  just a penchant for MAC:

sadistic vixen lipstick  + stilettos   Young  +untested by grief   The kind when

your feet are cut off   like Willie’s were in  The Heart is A Lonely Hunter:  I got 

this terrible misery down in my toes   

But I have seen the future + it is a flaccid beast    Not slouching toward anywhere

to be born   Now I know: that when you cut a child away from his family  +like a skin

graft  try to grow him onto another  the psyche rejects this    Said child throbs  with

loss of limb   Go explain this to agents of the state: Why does he keep crying at night

with phantom pain  Ms.Therapist?      He misses his parents  

Blank stares   You’re just a high priced baby-sitter  (save me from angry dads who

require a swift paradigm shift)   I just wish I knew where my f-f-feets are   That the 

main thing that worries me    Outlandos D’Amour at 21?   More tough girl poseur

But not anymore   In a state of pre-grief  especially when eyes spring open at 3 a.m.

Did you know that your heart is roughly the size of your fist?  My fists have not grown

since about the age of 5 or 6    So I am looking for ventricles people   Check my add

on eBay  or at #poetwithsmallishheartseeksroomforfuturegrief   + a tablet or 2 of

nitro    The last loss  of a bulldog named Poydras  left me unable to visit certain street

corners  +my local park for 2 yrs

It was there that he had shlumped along   drawing ankle blood as the need arose

A wild and slobbering rube   It was a different love  not like anything she had ever

felt before  (Mick Kelly  age 14  on loving the town mute  in Heart is A Lonely Hunter)    

Yes I want nitroglycerin  for when the BIG ONE comes    Until then  hope will be

rationed  +love will be a rabid dog from hell     Let him in!    Let him in!

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FALL  2017