OH YA YA YA YA YA*
I’m writing a book on 18 century
copyright law He was an expert
at the segue bringing it back to ME
An upspeak wordcreep: Write Nadia
Lasko she’ll get you on the right faculty
lists & the list for Monday lunches!
It’s obviously rather haphazard but ya precisely precisely
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* true story
Fall 2013
BALLS TO YOU
bouncing balls flying balls (+bees)
always find me my head usually
the sky a perfect audience on most days
& childhood a brief respite on the long haul to nowhere
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Fall 2013
TRYIN TO GET TO HEAVEN BEFORE THEY CLOSE THE DOOR
The number of medically sanctioned euthanasia
deaths in the Netherlands is rising 1,923 in 2006
4,188 in 2012 While in the West we reserve humane
death for our pets Why have the numbers risen so
dramatically? Are they euthanizing cagey spouses
& faltering rich relations by the dozens?
Or is society as a whole about to shift paradigmatically
to a place so farflung from 21 century nihilism that:
the final Monarch will land on the head of our last terrorist?
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*honey bees are rapidly disappearing from the Earth (last bee 2024)
Without their constant cross-pollination a massive de-flowering will occur
as well as the loss of every color in the spectrum
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Fall 2013
THE MIGHTY QUINN
The people all sit calmly under giant chestnut trees
Huge mahogany rocks rain down Industrious squirrel-rats
gather them up for the coming deepfreeze When we will
flee bone-numbed from our Canadian winds I have changed
seats so that I might preserve my skull intact for another Winter
season A cowardly act no doubt In 2011 Winter went missing
only to return on March 14th ripping my flowered stockings & knee
A woman saw me fall and ran It’s a jungle out there
I tell you never trust old Canadian men with white beards
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Fall 2013
DEXTER HARDLY KILLED ANYONE IN SEASON 7
I once heard a therapist say: I don’t believe unless you’re psychotic
there’s any wound that cannot be healed or at least closed over with
some very effective scar-tissue Who agrees with her? Blasphemy?
Heresy? Prophecy? But then she also named her baby Baby
& wrote a runaway bestseller on healing the Motherwound
America’s latest mass shooting at a Naval Yard left at least 13 dead
One man 53 had been a shipbuilder for 30 yrs. crooked grin lanky
4 kids In Nairobi this week after the mall attack a 16 yr. old girl
was afraid to leave the hospital where her sister lay much of a leg
& lower body missing
In the U.S. it’s a lot easier to ban smoking than guns And the
I Love Guns & Coffee website has given the Starbucks mermaid a pistol
Wounds & scar tissue conversations moot as Canadian researchers find:
Once a certain segment of the populace realizes that they can kill bugs
in the coffee grinder provided they will return multiple times to the
bug crushing station Apparently sadism is adaptive
At sea the shipbuilder’s ships form an armada They will perform
counterclockwise circumnavigations in a ritual of undoing eternity
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Fall 2013
FAST TALKING HIGH HEELED GIRLS
She had cult-ish hair pawned her crown
Into cheap tricks & rhetoric A Fisher Queen
if I ever did see one
Wounds ran deep Spitting image of cult-ish
haired mother Wolf eyes belied a sweetness
& a coquetry so seasoned she unhinged Kings
Met her at 4 she said: I’m gonna get nadopted
But went home once more where baby brother
burned on stove Wolf eyed mother left kids
alone again
I heard that 10 yrs. later she worked the street corner
where audacious lofters searched for warm brunches
& the Grail For 30 yrs. I entered a room spoke an arcane
language where small P.O.W.’s greeted me pre-verbally
An older boy who could speak said: It will get dark Therapist very dark
The voice still stalking me on the terrace Don’t talk to me
about metamorphosis please
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Fall 2013
BARDO THÖDOL
In a play last night the question
was asked: Would you return to
your body after making the passage
to the otherside if you had the choice?
The AIDS ridden protagonist struggled
Like Hamlet he had suffered the whips &
scorns of time enough thankyouverymuch
With no desire to be plunged back into a
perpetual state of loss But return did he
Buddhists & Hindus believe that the last
thought at the moment of death determines
the next incarnation And Proverbs xxiii 7
suggests: As a man thinks in his heart so is he
There is a vast system of ravines & underground
rivers in Toronto where last thoughts ricochet
landing in the hearts of lost travellers
DON’T GET LOST THINK BIG Heaven is close to
Bathurst St. Wrong turns are frowned upon
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Fall 2013
THE BRAIDED STREAM
Stephen Bantu Biko the founder of
the black consciousness movement in
South Africa died on September 12, 1977
He was 30 & had been shackled naked for
days No hunger striker was he Autopsy
revealed brain hemorrhage from head injuries
Died on the floor of Pretoria prison hospital No mercy
The holy grail of paleoanthropology posits :
human evolution is a braided stream and not
a simple march of progress In 2008 north-west of
Johannesberg in the Cradle of Humankind a nine yr. old
boy discovered a 2 million yr. old hominid skeleton a transitional ancestor
with a small brain not much bigger than a chimpanzee’s
Much likely a more humane creature built for climbing trees
with fierce capacities for compassion especially for their young
Memorized their mother’s voices They did not prey on each other
Nor were they prone to: terrorism mass-psychosis or torture
Those were simpler times The Mother-ship hovered The light
at the end of the tunnel was ON And the last one standing had an alibi
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*in 1997 5 former police officers confessed to the Biko killing
to a Truth & Reconciliation Commission. The men were never tried.
Fall 2013
DIPLOMACY BLUES
The dragonfly lands on my writing paper
matches my outfit red-wings The sky
hydrangea It won’t get more maudlin Stay
It feels like we are hovering on the precipice
Obama stammers now grey & bent He of the
mythology: No red States No blue States We are
the United States No you’re not
I want a list of names Now scatter
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Fall 2013
CHILD BRIDE SANAA YEMEN
Rawan died at 8 after her uterus was
ruptured on her wedding night Betrothed
to a man 5x her age No Action was taken
against the man 14% of Yemeni girls are
married before 15 and 52% before 18
At my office in the trenches of humanity
I was asked to bear witness Girls & boys
much younger than Rawan became child
brides & grooms in Toronto in large numbers
As I looked into their eyes many appeared to
be staring into space as if half asleep or absent
And I hoped that like *Shmuel in Auschwitz
these children: were able to convince their souls to
not live inside of their tiny bodies, but to slip away
and sail to the door, and rise up into the sky
Clamouring to get out only made it worse
One boy often said: Therapist you can hit me
with the biggest stick and I won’t feel a thing Go on Try it
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Fall 2013 *The Boy In The Striped Pajamas John Boyne 2006
songanddancegirl... at 4
songanddancegirl 