songanddancegirl

we are so lightly here…said Leonard Cohen

are we Len?  i mean yes to: you know she’s half crazy..and that’s why

you wanna be there..  Jack knew too: the only ones for me are the mad

ones..mad to live +burnburnburn..

yet so many rage against the cage

where there’s always free cheese

we are here too heavily  

c’mon   rattle those chains

when the rest of you were busy being children

i was busy being a saviour

of children

of adults

of the world!  

she’s got the whole wide world in her hands

when the rest of you

were being children   i became a monk

(Frank Stanford  Arkansas 1976 ..2 years pre..3 bullets to the heart..at 29)

lately there have been  signs

24 kettling hawks   8 low planes

over the dead

starkdark underbellies

dropping leaflets at the cemetery

SUCKERS!!

a light on this poet’s face  at her bro’s place   at sunrise

for whom does the bell toll   this time?

(sunrise over Frances Atkins’ dead body  circa 2022)

Ernest +Frankie   shotgun suicides  gnaw off a foot to fly  what with all

the testing to see if yer gonna die  cuts insouciance off at the knees   old

brittle gimlet me   fabulous roman candle    descent into bathos ain’t pretty

i know that priest with the giant gut  sucked 14 yr. old Frank’s lifeblood  at

the monkery  flayed him  as boys without fathers  are more vulnerable to be

they always promise refuge   don’t they just

i was pursued like this all my life  

the boy with the wild hair they called me

i made promises to death  + kept them

(Frank Stanford  at 23..)

i am not here lightly   no Holly Go   sailors sold me into captivity  at 3

the dancing she-bear in chains  the girl with the wild hair  of a cajun whore

i knew many children like me  in the trenches of humanity

suckled by lions+tigers+bears   +priests

much like Frankie

poet  swamprat  prey

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Fall 2025  ..for Frankie & Apesie..

the tailor Muttle Kamzoil

he had a way with words

he had a way with witchywomen

with a football

tallish  handsome

not strong

not the silent type

beautifulloser at heart

this the rub

his father Charlie erased him

before he began the race

SCRATCHED

like the lamed ponyboy

oh his impish grin

+cruelstreak

his rise

and fall   and rise               and fall

his last breaths on a yellowed

florida bed   raggedpallet

ancestor visitations

he spoke  in arcane handsignals

HUT!!!!

sister christian

witness extraordinaire

her bro’s band of angels

all in cleats

she flew home then

to tell

his pretty mama

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Fall 2025   ..he rises yet..

..but we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.. says Haruki Murakami

No?

why do i write my autofictional narrative/confessional  prose poems?

all diatribe   memoir-esq  +rage   always prone to hyper-vigilance +amygdala

hijack-ers   especially  re:  bugs  serial killers  +narcissists  (what’s the difference?)

they’ll eat you alive  clean your slim bones dry   dem bones  dem bones dem

dry bones   1st 65 years in a rage   last 7 in grief   pandemic  cancer maximus

a brother  and old mother  crept away  +on+on+on    now it’s  rise up time

from perpetual  fightflightfreeze   un-Anna Karenina me  the train already upon

her as she decided  to rise  does memoir try  to pin down the un-pinnable?  nail it

to a cross  where it withers  forever a relic  mementomori

maybe the past shifts +transforms  as we do  how-what-who  is remembered

maybe it’s all a mirage  hallucination  feverdream   did big Paul Paladino exist?

a small time mobster from Buffalo  circa 1968    did bovine Jackie Gaudaur?

(who should rot in hell)

how ’bout blacksonavitch?  poodle extraordinaire  he who spoke 5 languages

held my hand in the night  when parents cussed+squealed  +wild animals entered

the suburban backsplit   made off with my 1st husband   and where now Difranco?

frogman in the Great War  dance teacher  gigolo   your family reads like a 

broadway play!  said my de mentor  who was not fond of  over-rhyme   his

own father in a ward   mother married the handyman  who beat her

..my father is frothing at the mouth..his hair  is disarranged..his eyes crackle

like electrical storms..his fly bursts..his cock emerges huge+wet as a wriggling fish..

my father was a classics specialist and died from a torn heart when i was 9 1/2..

(David Donnell  Water Street Days  1989  Governor General’s Award  for poetry 1983)

Haruki Murakami   these wounds

+their perps  seem to have one helluva

staying-power

which is my hand?

which is hers?

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Fall 2025  ..at 92  Rhonda  who killed her rabbi husband against a fence..

perpetually begged for a bowl of her mother’s soup.. (true story  inmate #666

Living Life on the Avenue  a now defunct hellhole mirage)

salvationgirl blues

title  compliments of spellcheck gods  a mystical

transformation of  halva  into  salvation  !!  which

i desperately need    but who doesn’t?

halva  a dessert made of sesame seeds  desertdelicacy     open sesame

get me out of here!  one brother had a serious halva crack-up   at 8

as the other bro ran in circles  with a behemoth on his shoulder

(it is still there)

   (where all hoopers learned to flop)

my brothers are nice guys   otherwise   leaning toward the

eccentric  +alienabduction   when the spaceship came they

clambered aboard   willingly

all of this as i herded the other leper messiah + 1 giant black poodle

into the cedar-closet   where we hid among  mother+father’s  clothes

silkgowns  houndstooth  the odd saddle  +some greasy black kief

our parents had fled years earlier  can you blame them?  salvation

it don’t come easy   and it likely doesn’t come at all  according to

buddhists  +stoics  everywhere

but once you know this  you western clingons to immortality   ruin  harm

+loss upon loss  are just lowly words  so fer chrissakes  try suffering them

with dignity   +fuck immortality

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Fall 2025  ..Happy 5786..🍯  ..oh and there will be no certainty..