songanddancegirl

A STRANGER OCEAN

IN  A  STRANGER  OCEAN  THAN  I  WISHED*

What do the Po Mo’s want from me?

They say it is: tres bourgeois  to sit down

and write poetry   

plotless bastards  archivists treacherous avant-gardists

By the end of the class  I was alone   The group

disappeared    two by two when I extolled the

virtues of  meaning   One woman ran for the door

shouting over her shoulder: My bird whistle is not

a craft item   You lyrical bitch!  (true-story)

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Winter  2013

*Barbara Guest   Parachutes My Love Could Carry Us Higher 1957

(decidedly NOT a Post Modernist)

BABYLON

BY  THE  RIVERS   OF  BABYLON

To look into Mandela’s face  is to see the face of:

Gandhi

Dali Lama

Gautama

Jesus

Yahweh

Pan

The peace  joy  suffering  wild abandon  wisdom  innocence

A union of opposites   a face of transcendence imprisonment

freedom enslavement   Buoyant

He rises now  above  Robben   where his sweat caused flowers to

grow  & his tears the rivers he now sails upon

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ANIMAL

I  AM  NOT      AN  ANIMAL

After a 4,500 kl road trip   3 elephants

arrived at a California sanctuary  Bob Barker

(The Price Is Right)  was elated    He’d

spent  a small fortune  and several years of

his life lobbying for this

Mr. Berridge (T.O. Zoo) said: We’re all emotionally

drained    when you  work with elephants they get

inside your soul    Fair enough Bob & Mr. Berridge

I find the same to be true  in work with human children

Over the past 5 yrs. in T.O.  funding for children’s mental

health  has been radically cut    12 sessions is all they get

Be careful about asking for more   Therapists    We do not

want to encourage a dependency 

dark circles crack house graduates lakeshore motels without

the meal plan  burns bruises  being peed on at 18 months in

cold showers  angsty & powerless   self-anesthetized zombies

I will lobby for a transport truck    Surely the PAWS Sanctuary

has room?  It will likely be cheaper to haul 30 child survivors

than 3 aging elephants    The children are rail-thin  don’t use

toilets  and can dissociate into long periods of trance   No costly

staff with degrees in Zoology needed

The pachyderms now resting comfortably  will die in captivity

but the children may someday break free   Their voices trumpeting

long   into the California night

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Winter  2013

MY PORTAL

BACK  AWAY  FROM    MY  PORTAL

I want your life   she said    Do you want

it now?  Do you want it   knowing nothing

about it?  (other than my vacation plans)

Are you an incubus?  A succubus?

Forlorn girl at local drug-mart   You say: I bought 8

giant Hershey kisses for xmas presents &

ate 2 in a row   You know how chocolate

makes you thirsty  right?  My clothes feel   tight

Have a chocolate   they’re small   HAVE ONE

petite lady with perfect life    Lips curl into snarl

I back away   and miss slipping on hunk of ice at door

Uneasiness persists throughout the day

Drug-mart girl is dark & exotic   witchy smile  dangerous hips

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Winter  2013

LOVERS

LOVERS  IN  A  DANGEROUS     TIME

They are so wrapped up in each other  blue smoke

rises from their heads  Once separate   now fused

a  participation mystique  

In the news  a couple married 88 yrs.   The old

groom reports:  I always keep a hand on her knee

Another warrior of a 75 yr. union said:  I make sure

to keep a piece of my Chapati for him 

Yesterday my 3rd husband baited me: Who was your

2nd funniest husband?   Unbaitable   I did not answer

Likely  I have not married him yet

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Winter 2013   *inspired by: Embracing Figures With Blue Patina Otto Guttfreund 1913

STEEL

FEEL  LIKE  MY  SOUL  HAS  TURNED    TO  STEEL*

2 girls skipped down the street today   protesting

our grey pre-winter mortis  Looked like they would

careen into sad Canadians   20 somethings   blonde

& coated in sheep  Now stop to light smokes  Giddiness

transformed to hip   with the flick of Bics

Today the anniversary of Sandyhook’s slaughter   20 who

will never cavort except in the emptiness of late afternoon

When parents forget   then remember   then forget to

remember

The shooter   also 20   shot his mother in the head 6x with

her own gun   He hadn’t left the house in 4 months    Since

then  there has been the Boston Marathon bombing   the Navy

Yard shooting   & each day in the U.S.   82 have died of gunshot

wounds

Recently in a Sand-tray session a 20 yr. old man placed a robot

near a breastfeeding Mary   Was he hungry? Curious? Murderous?

Like the shooter   crouching in the shadows by his mother’s bed

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(Sand-tray Therapy: Jungian psychotherapeutic modality utilizing

figurines in sand as part of the healing process)

Winter  2013     *Bob Dylan  Not Dark Yet  1997

LONELINESS

LONELINESS  LONELINESS

Hate hate   Love love   Loneliness cannot

be turned into a verb (go ahead & try)  It is

a stand alone noun   The lonely feeling will

alert you    You are about to become prey

Too close to the perimeter of the group

Social animals used to rely on one another

to survive   Loneliness meters now broken

Irreparably mutated by the Vollmer M35

and social media technology   We all live on

the periphery of the tribe

A new kind of post-industrial anomie   Prey

to loneliness   and 12 yr. old home grown

terrorists   Though loneliness trumps alcoholism

smoking and obesity   40% of Americans   (especially bartenders)

die of loneliness each year

Loneliness is not depression   which should be

treated by  a professional   There is no treatment

for loneliness  But there is an  APP  simulating the crowd

Beware   this will only confuse your fight/flight instinct

& you will loneliness yourself to death

Pandora Mclean-Hoover clinical social worker in

Pano Texas   cautions: Feelings of loneliness will

not go away on their own   Go to a bar & talk to

a bartender (Globe & Mail November 2013)

Or just be still   in the dying days of our tribal

consciousness   and you may hear   the last laugh   reverberating

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Late Fall   2013

Please Give

PLEASE  GIVE  AS  MUCH  AS  YOU  POSSIBLY  CAN

Yesterday 3 men gave me $20    2 in a restaurant

1 in a shoe store   My book seemed the reason for

the largesse    All 3 were Italian  & amorous   The 3rd

sold me a pair of shoes made in Italy

One man was smooth & hard all at once   one was doleful

the other earnest    Today no one has approached with

money   though I wish someone would

It is late Fall   crisp & sunny   and I am receiving sidelong

glances   My Italian shoes are dust magnets   and a lack of

sleep has corroded parts of me    generating a well hammered

exhaustion     One dream will have to be removed surgically

A black market has sprung up for my book   and a committee

struck to explore the enforcement of:  sleep   happiness   &

suave Italian men    I am especially encouraged by this   development

Fall  2013

SHAKE

SHAKE  YOUR    MEANING-MAKER

I am aware that you have come to expect

meaning  from me   No 1/2 way crucifixions

You want the words nailed-down   Yet it was

Picasso who railed  at being nailed  to the wall

And I do want to satisfy you   But sometimes

meaning is muddy   and I have not crawled this

far to be your meaning-maker   modern Sapien

Meaning is a relatively new gene variant in Homo erectus

We used to be able to tolerate not-knowing   some 1.6

billion yrs. ago   Genetically predisposed to spot danger

we now struggle to see angry faces in the botoxed crowd

You wear your mortality like a bullseye  under a sky of cosmic

blue   where the clouds are moaning  over you   And like our

newest planet   PSOJ318.5-22    (no poets at NASA)   which does

not orbit a star    you have been cast adrift   in a world with a

serious shortage of  silence

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Fall  2013

ZOO

ZOO  OF  THE    HUMAN

The entomologist Renzo Perissinotto

has had a new species of Scarab Beetle

named for him (G.perissinottoi)   Sacred

in ancient Egypt  their images were imprinted

on amulets & funerary objects  A recent study

found that Scarabs mate  quick & dirty  with just

about any bug around

While 64% of Canadian students (age 18-24) said

they’d had a sexual encounter in the past year

without any method of birth control   Sexual health

expert Blondie Chaplain said:  There are gaps in knowledge  for sure     

A more interesting observation is that regarding the

Higgs boson:  Primary particles are almost all the same  it’s

just their juxtaposition that makes your flesh flesh  and wood   wood

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Late Fall   2013