songanddancegirl

WAR

THE  NO-NAME   WAR      (HOW  ABOUT  WWIII?)*

Woodsmoke in the air  just received T.O. glare from

petite mother with tiny tot   This rankles  +prickles

My kindly has gone missing  as I sit here hissing a tune

Even find myself glaring at hardworking squirrels   +lanky

blonde children   For pity’s sake why are they not in school?

Today Barak & Angela met with the U.N. security council

to outlaw jihadi-tourism  Many of us are wondering just how

they will accomplish this   What are your reasons for travel

today Mr. Terrorist?   Perhaps this is why petite mother scowls

She knows her kid will inherit a  headsonpikes  kind of world

Thought we’d finished with this by 1792

Found a new park today  where eco-friendly parents escort unholy

group of children    most barefoot on ground full of rocks  glass +

excrement   Kids now running for the ice cream truck   20’s blowing

in the breeze   I thought such parents were against the evils of white

sugar?  One boy wears an: I’m Not A Role Model  tee   I begin to wonder

if woodsmoke is from a scented candle

Without Haji Obama we would lose our heads said  Sheik Mohammed Bozan

It seems that illness is in the forecast    while back at the U.N. Barak &

Angela dance  real slow   Was a time when poems flowed about ochre

leaves  +scent of coming snow   Not a single mother wears lipstick here

in my new park  *(MAC City of Sin could do wonders)   While  off camera

there is a scraggly wolf   scaling the Gates of Heaven

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*(Name For War Against Islamic State Could Come By Wednesday)

Headline  Globe & Mail October 15, 2014

Mid  Fall  2014

NEUROTIC

TO  BE  OR  NOT  TO  BE   HAUNTED & NEUROTIC

Now 1/2 empty  in shimmering dilapidation   remembering

the days of kittenish anticipation   Almost spoiled the sweet

Thanksgiving spuds    Too much chaos in old psyche  to use

utensils with care   Sauce does not fair well   ginger allspice

nutmeg in heaps  tastes earthy  old  unsweet   (throw the

orange mo fos out   my inner poltergeist screams)

How To Re-Invent Yourself at 60  For Dummies   the book is

called   1/2 of me wants to crawl under a rock   1/4 wants to

eat cake   1/4 wants to soar once more   before rigor motionless +terrific

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In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are

emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you

are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don’t know

what I am. I don’t know if I am or not. 

William Faulkner   As I Lay Dying  1930

Fall  2014

KOMMANDOS

SONDERKOMMANDOS

On October 7  1944  Crematorium IV

was blown up   The Kommandos  a special

squad of slaves at Auschwitz  were shot on

the spot    The women from the munitions

plant   the gunpowder smugglers  were tortured

& hung in the Auschwitz courtyard    Thousands

of lives were saved   & the war ended 22 days later

Today we fight peacekeepingmissions  using religious

scholars +air strikes   a.k.a. the new boots on the ground

On Tuesday  Turkish +U.S. officials warned that Kobani

would fall to the IS   yet each looked to the other to take action

As our own Justin Trudeau weighed in with: Let’s whip out our

CF-18s and show them how big they are?

It seems that transcendence has disappeared  & in it’s place

inferiority   These are crude +inelegant times   I have heard it

opined by Generals  that the West should remove itself from

ancient battles  The infidel only stirs up the beasts   Close Borders

Stop the Planes   In the end Ebola may even reign supreme

Somewhere there is a lone man building a raft straight out to sea

without compass or map  he relies on augury   The oracle is troubled

& struggles with this botch  this predicament of modern paralysis in

the face of depravity  She wants to shake us from our addle  & wonders

if good old annihilation might not do the trick   A  wipe the slate clean

prognostication   On the house  out of her love  for humanity

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*RIP: Ala Gertner  Regina Safirsztajn  Roza Robota  +Estusia Wajcblum

the gunpowder smugglers of Auschwitz

Fall  2014

FACE

A FACE THAT SCREAMS  TELL ME  YOUR LIFE STORY

Today my favourite purveyor of jeans told me   how the whole

jeanthing really began in L.A.    Then as I made my way to the

door   she told me so much more  all the while playing with her

topknot  hypnotically   Her mother had been sick 10 yrs. before  &

wasn’t like her mother   anymore:

My Dad was her enabler +sometimes she thought there was poison

in the food on our dinner table 

Then at a party on Saturday a new friend said: My father was beaten

viciously by his  & my mother died when I was 10    Almost everyday

he told me I was a worthless loser   Both the jean purveyor (21)  & new

friend (67)   had a rat’s nest of fear+unshed tears about their person

His father a fallen king  & rabid alcoholic beyond saving    Her mother a

pearl  had a relapse 2 yrs. ago   and now  she’s just back in denial

So why do you all persist in sharing your plight   your muss  your shambles?

Though I have spent many years with strangers in rooms   can you not see that

I am dressed for a different kind of success    & my skies are now always so blue?

You can take the therapist out of the room  but you cannot take the room  it’s botch

+it’s doom   out of me

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Fall 2014

WEST

* CLOSE  TO  ZERO  EBOLA  RISK     IN  THE  WEST

Sitting in a military cemetery   foot of Wellington St.  established

220 yrs. before we  roaming the streets with our smart cars   We with

our even smarter phones  Many of the tombstones stolen or vandalized

10 remain: 2 drownings mid-20’s   3 infants 4-9 mths. old  1 suicide  31

Lieutenant Zachariah Mudge  universally beloved  2 toddlers 18 mths. & 3

1 wife  36   I wipe my weeping eyes     1 drummer  25

We in Fall 2014   mess+ a half     Leaves still green   flowers only semi-putrified

belie what is coming    Howling winds up our backs  hackneyed Christmas cheer

(please do discover the dates of  OUR  holy days  it wouldn’t kill you)  

We familiarizing ourselves with  dead body management  in Monrovia   Where?

Monrovia   There everybody is collected + burned    When the body snatchers

collectors arrive   on rocky hillsides   families fight them off   But there is no where

to hide   Mrs. Jacob’s body was sprayed with disinfectant +burned like a dog’s

(bodies are most contagious in the 1st hrs. after death)

More recently garbed in yellow Hazmat suits  in 45 degrees   Red Cross workers flee

for the stigma+the suits   They must be changed 10-15 x per day    Today we see a

9 yr.old girl  butterflies on her tee  eyeing suspiciously  the 2 yellow clad  body

managers  hauling her away   We  hope you survive this day  Nowa Paye   from

a village near    Monrovia

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*Globe&Mail Tuesday October 2, 2014  pp. A9

Fall  2014

CAKE

TOLD  THERE  WOULD  BE   CAKE

In a curated village by a dead lake   with a curated

husband  +2 *manservants    I contemplate & ruminate

*a new alternative to the greasy gyrating strippers of bachelorette

parties according to Canada’s national newspaper   Rent through: 

Manservants.com  offering bespoke semi-nude  platonic gigolos in

collar  cuffs  +apron  from $94.50-$250/hr  Plus a premium for guys

with special talents  like singing

Ruminations lead to bespoke abyss  as heart beats 4500 x  per minute

(unless manservants gyrating nearby)   Is life not a brief vision between

2 worlds of darkness?  Nabokov wondered why we view the pre-natal abyss

with more calm than the one we are heading to   The inventor of McFate must

have known that it all boils down to consciousness

As time slowly becomes a prison  & all of the 10,000 things cannot return you

to eternity   Not even 10 manservants with topknots + a partridge in a pear tree

You are here to stay for the duration

So who are these parents   these giants you wake up to?  Many of my child clients

called adults: the giants who sex you   But that truth is for another poem   Today we

focus on the existential crisis of  awakening

Do you remember when you woke up?  Where you woke up?  The day you were lost

forever to your inner-savage?   I knew a 4 yr. old boy  who on moving day   after the

BIG TRUCK rolled away  began to shriek: Please don’t leave me with these people

A small cold guy  wanting to be in another world   The star of a car commercial   or

something  The Hunchback of Notre Dame   Anyone   While all around the sparrows

laughed  The gulls too   ha ha  another flesh-coloured prisoner!

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I went to elementary school overmedicated & exhausted  plagued by anxiety

germophobia  hypochondria  fear of sleep  & a syrupy terror that lasted for days

(Lena Dunham  spokesperson for a generation)

Fall  2014

DAY

TAKE BACK THE NIGHT   DAY

Here under canopy of hundred year old trees   sinewy-wolfman

now all I can see   People spit a lot in this particular park   I wonder

what this can possibly mean?

2 curly headed twins straight out of GAP climb on mangiver  like

young lemurs   Get a little too far afield & now like me  wary   Girl-twin

eyes me suspiciously  walks fast sideways  never taking eyes off of old

sinewy-poet

Mangiver has just let twins pee beside a tree   their nakedness startles

shrill citydwellers  One woman shrieks Lenny!  And pulls her child

away   Not a pink cherubim  Dozens of Fall wasps cruise me   & it is

clear to see that I am the only one flailing   aggressively

Perhaps time for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? Where a kindly woman

with long white hair will teach me to stifle monkeymind  now well out of

it’s infancy   But can she erase the image brought via satellite late lastnight:

Man+boy lay half nude on ambulance floor   Boy now fallen to ground

Commentator says: These Ebola victims cannot be clothed due to exploding

fluids & are too tired to move  All 17 beds in the hospital are taken   Man from

United Nations: Yes it’s disgraceful  I will look into it immediately   Commentator

doubts his sincerity    We switch OFF the tv

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Welcome to my nightmare said my 5 yr. old client each Tuesday at 10 a.m.

Then smashed the golf club hard into my soft-tissues

The key to the security of the playroom is patrol ships, subs, a fleet of destroyers,

jets +missiles.   M.A.C. Farrant   The World Afloat    2014

Fall 2014

ROLL

HEADS  WILL    ROLL

We are learning a lot about beheading lately

A staple of the Crusades   still practised in some

parts of Europe during WW II    Preferred by the

most prolific execution state in the world    Saudi Arabia

currently beheads in all murder  sodomy  & witchcraft

cases

Why  humans even use it   as a method of trophy-gathering

often on a massive scale   We have also collected scalps +ears

But the head is best   leaving no uncertainty re: the victim’s

identity   Groups such as I.S. eliminate any semblance of the

quick+painless beheading  using a short knife requiring

prolonged sawing

This week police in Australia mounted a counterterrorist raid

foiling a plot to behead random members of the public  Mubin Shaikh

security officer   infiltrated the  Toronto 18   terrorist cell    He said:

You have the same types in Canada

Now in addition to standing against the wall in subway stations   I hunker

with fear   everywhere    Drawing-in my head   like a box-turtle   especially

when hulking men walk close     My throat still exposed   not yet in winter

turtlenecks

Yesterday I heard Ray Boisvert  former assistant head of  C.I.S.I.S. say:

You can’t really ensure that this won’t happen in Canada  it’s not a question

of hiring more police +getting more shiny toys  The advantage always goes to

the attackers

As I write this a navy blue squad car drives by   back seat filled with metal cage

I notice the tip of an automatic rifle poking through   I am now intimately

acquainted with automatic rifles since the manic replay of:  a 9 yr. old girl

killing her instructor at the rifle range   His 4 children in an open letter wrote:

We forgive you   It was an accident    We hope to meet you someday

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We have time to grow old.  The air is full of our cries.  But habit is a great

deadener.  At me too  someone is looking, of me too  someone is saying, he

is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.  

Waiting For Godot   Samuel Beckett  1954

Fall  2014

ONE EYE

IT’S  BETTER  TO  CRY  WITH  ONLY   ONE  EYE

This is not a dream sequence  though the memory was

dredged up  by a dream about a now dead girlfriend  of

some 50 yrs. ago   Took me into an empty house  back in

the old neighbourhood   Her father’s brother + wife  had

lived there  Now the house was  For Sale   She said also that

her Aunt was in a mental hospital

small hand prints   in black charcoal  smear walls +floors

counter-top  especially near stove  has deep black hand+foot

prints   A child burned in effigy

Her Aunt left the daughter  then 3  alone on a Spring afternoon

Uncle returned at 6  to smell of burning flesh  The friend tells me

her Aunt  was pretty  & now no one in the family will speak to her

& no one wants to buy the house  either

The other children are in the  Children’s Aid     So  there is a place

children can go  to escape mad mothers & hot stoves?

It never occurred to me to tell anybody   & it didn’t seem all that strange

I had heard too of parents  on many of these streets  screaming in the night

with dreams of those  other ovens  across the sea     It was the year  1963

Much later  somewhere around 2003  my client  a 7 yr. old boy  began to unplug

the stove when his family was asleep   He also begged for a St. John’s Ambulance

course    So happy to be returned home in the  Family Reunification Program    

Just  a few years before   baby brother was burned   almost beyond recognition

as mother slept soundly on the couch    It’s better to cry with only one eye   and

with the other  I watch the stove    (Pete  7yrs. old   2003)

__ 

Fall  2014

MESSGAGE

THE  MEDIUM   IS  THE  MESSAGE

When Sarah Boston  veterinarian  was being treated

for cancer   the receptionist at the radiation clinic refused

to look up at her   With head down she grunted:  Put your

card  in the box

Seems that we’re treating humans like animals  & animals with

dignity   Sarah thinks that her dog+cat patients get better health

care  than humans do   It’s faster  with a focus on quality of life     Imagine

Yesterday a young man told me that: Monkeys with Ebola  isolate

themselves from the tribe   They sacrifice themselves   They walk

into the jungle to die   There seems to be a naked wisdom here   sorely

lacking among clothed apes

I posit that  the clothed ape has grown profoundly depressed

through exposure to repeated violence + atrocity   particularly

in the late 20th century   One may only hope that somewhere

not where we are   the  truelife  is being lived   This is likely a  crapshoot 

Ditto the treatment for depression

Take the 24 yr. old rapper  Abdel Bary   He tweeted a selfie with

a severed head   The comment read: Chillin with my homie   He had

simply picked up & posed with one of hundreds of heads left on the

roadside  after a mass beheading by ISIS

It may be a no-brainer  that we desperately need a 3rd arm of psychiatry

Not meds +not therapy   Surgery too was tried via lobotomy  and it failed

miserably   It doesn’t cost money to look up with kind eyes  and say: Yes you

are in the right place  We can help   just   TURN OFF YOUR SCREENS

And in the distance the sea falls endlessly as humanlife imitates the worst of

our technology:  Comprehensive analysis of violent interactive video game

research suggests such exposure increases aggressive  behaviour   thoughts

angry feelings   physiological arousal   & decreases helpful behaviour   Armies

now use violent video games to desensitize soldiers  to killing

Peter Neumann  director of  The Centre for Radicalization  London   said:

Detectives should use basic techniques to find the beheaders    Read their

tweets  they will give away clues   Just because they are terrorists who behead

people  doesn’t mean they don’t talk about football clubs   Many are in their teens

& 20’s   they will let their guard down

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Fall  2014