songanddancegirl

BACIO

IL BACIO DELLA MORTE

Mt. Pinatubo awoke from a 500 year slumber in spectacular

+disastrous fashion on June 15 1991   For almost 20 yrs. now

the destruction has continued   Volcanic ash seeping into veins

even into relationships   As that creature on slow thighs crouches

outside your window  waiting

The center gave out a long time ago especially for those born

mid-20^th century  only now coming into the 2^nd half of life   Rife

with disappointments like: It was supposed to be much cooler than

this   Flying cars  Sound minds+bodies   It was supposed to be secure

(in Canada universal pensions will disappear in thirteen years)

In such a climate one must cultivate a rich interior life   much like

Dr. Edith Bones  imprisoned for 7 yrs. and 59 days   The communists

couldn’t break her  And she emerged wiser +full of hope!  Let us all

take shelter inside of ourselves  though rank with decay

*(pay close attention those 55 and older)

And let us not be fooled by handsome people at parties  +the person on the

barstool beside you rubbing your stiffening leg   They have been sent to distract

you from the real business of keeping perfectly still as Mrs. Death  in an ill fitting

blouse  begins to enter you  one puckered orifice at a time

__

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

W.B. Yeats  The Second Coming  1919

Spring 2017

CANDY

SMELLS LIKE SEX AND CANDY

There is candy in the lobby   Huge piles of it   But

it is not free   Little $3 signs  sit beside curated bowls

At first you miss the signs  +thinking it’s free  a happiness

comes over you +your 59 yr. old brother  the likes of which

you have never seen

It’s like winning the lottery   Finally  free candy   after

years of pilfering from the corner store   Money doesn’t

grow on trees  they said   Well neither does candy  +a kid

can’t live on chocolate matzah alone

Here  the coloured wrappers on high end candy  bring back

ennui    Instantly   Later when the complimentary limo forgets

to pick you up  you stand in the dark  with gangs approaching

For hours   The manager says:  TAKE SOME CANDY !   And

you do   Handfuls stuffed in pockets   In a sock   One fits into your

shoe

The two of you sit with lizards  near palm trees  in the soulless hotel

for millennials  who must have candy close by at all times  (google

Google’s workplace)  And you gorge on Snickers +O Henrys   Finally

free of nagging feelings of underachieving  +untold fantasies of your

minds resurfacing

___

SPRING  2017

ANYWHERE

IF SHE CAN MAKE IT THERE SHE’LL MAKE IT ANYWHERE

Came upon them as they sat baking in the June sun

No one seemed to be having fun  except the Social

Director  Lovely lady   Wonder about the Koolaid she’s

been drinking   Giddy with manic joie de vivre   Can it be

real?

Feels more like the energizer bunny commercial   She

just keeps on going   They shoot horses don’t they?

She looks somewhat winded today   Bouncy ponytail

belies intense boredom   + the beginning of rage    It

comes out in prickly asides: High time you stopped taking

care of his sweaters  He’s freakin 95!   This to the woman

who  still has a husband   alive

Blood pressure climbs   Cheeks cheerleader pink  as ponytail

goes limp in 33 degree breeze   Smells like urine+cake   We all

weep over  My Yiddishe Mama  +watch in horror as the lady

who has fallen and can’t get up  is left on the ground for 25 minutes

Until 4 staff heave-ho her  into a chair   Waivers needed signing

Cake meted out  like casting pearls

Waitress snatches mine away  If you don’t eat yer meat you can’t

have any pudding  How can you have any pudding if you don’t

eat yer meat?   Faux strawberry shortcake  sans the cake  sans the

strawberries   More like gluey batter in a reddish puree  Could be

a lot of things   Gag in back of throat turns to song  as my beautiful

mother belts out Sinatra  + I sing along

Start spreading the news!  I’m leaving today!   She who at 93  sits

queen bee aloof   Eyes on the perimeter   dressed in impeccable Ralph

Lauren blues   She begins to lindyhop in the direction of the parking lot

+hails a cab   If I can make it there   I’ll make it anywhere!   Her parting

glare  speaks volumes

Don’t squander your courage  You’re gonna need it baby!   

As I begin to back away from the Social Director lady  who approaches me for

the Samba line   I begin to gnaw off my own hand   While my mother  ever glam

ever chic  silk scarf blowing in the breeze  doesn’t even glance back at me

She just keeps on lighting out for new territory   NYC be damed!   She’s set her

sights on the Promised Land

__

SPRING  2017

MAD

HE WENT MAD IN A PARADE AT LIBERTY & IBERVILLE

Today is the day in 1907  when Buddy Bolden was committed

to the East Louisiana State Hospital  for the insane  Entered at

31 yrs.   Carried out in 1931   Coffin sent to Holtz Cemetery

New Orleans    Travelled through Baton Rouge  +Slaughter  to

an unmarked grave

No Huck Finn glory  of lighting out for new territory

Mississippi his river Styx   Buddy rotted 24 yrs in Stygian

swamp   State hospital opened in 1848   by 1861  36 girls

mostly under 12   Causes of insanity listed largely as: unknown

2nd to that for many   loneliness  or failed solitude

During the Civil War impossible to get food+water there   Buddy

died 17 yrs. before the Medcraft Shock Machine purchased   He was

there for: guard rapes  lack of heat  +hard labour   Saints posing as

humans   Ditto those murdered on the London bridge Saturday  when

3 men with long knives stabbed people randomly  shouting:

This is for Allah!

New Orleans cemeteries are places of great beauty   Hundreds of milagros

+mementos  dot the landscape   At the tomb of: The Society for the Relief of

Destitute Orphan Boys  1894  dozens of toys  +chocolate bars   The high water

table strips flesh quickly   Generations stacked in perpetuity  until all the dead

are one dead   Witch’s brew   Stew of fetuses +granddaddies

There’s a somebody I’m longing to see
I hope that he turns out to be
Someone who’ll watch over me

Nowadays  we are all exhausted   No longer know the difference between loneliness

+solitude   Most of us made mad by addiction to connection   on screens  Longing for

the savanna  +a bit of wildtenacity    The stuff that gets us through the birth canal

Through the hard passage  where remnants of our glory days hang to dry  on fragile

bones  +disappearing memories     O won’t you take me back to New Orleans

__

SPRING  2017   110 years since Buddy’s admission  24 yrs. in captivity  RIP

MEND

THE GOLDEN MEND

Kintsukuroi   becoming more beautiful for

being broken

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget the perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

(Anthem   Leonard Cohen)

Are you more beautiful for being broken?

Gold tributaries of suffering   Kintsukuroi

The Japanese technique of repair with gold

resin   The object more valuable for having

been shattered

Soul resin   A priceless gluey substance used

on lost children by damned angels   Scavenging

in the night behind orphanages +brothels  +

residential schools   Even behind ordinary apt.

blocks

I knew a girl whose youngest brother was the 13^th

child of her mother +her 2^nd husband  (also the girl’s

Grandfather) The two re-united years after her own

horrific abuse in locked bathrooms  from 18 mts.

Her smile pure Kintsukuroi   Part slash   Holding back

a rhetoric of fury  seeping out of every orifice

Where have you been soldered together?  Womb tomb?

Breast?  Heart by pass?  Did they use gold resin  or spit

gum  tar  +glue   All sacred substances too   My father a

scarecrow   Held together with 64 stitches  So much more

beautiful for having braved repair

Birds flew in abberant migration to sit on the balcony +

chirp jazzy rhaphsody in blue   So  don’t wake up every

winter’s morn in your Canadian town +expect it to be

warm   For chrissakes put on a wool layer  +save your

complaints for the undertaker  when cold will be a relative

term

__

Live damnit! Live!

(George Costanza)

MAN

SOUTHERN MAN

4 yrs. ago today  someone hungering for

alliteration +faint hope  + a poetry panacea?

smashed my car window +stole a small red

faux leather bag  curtesy of Vogue mag

Enticement to ennui+envy   I’m a loser baby

so why don’t you kill me..

Vogue May 2017:

(Pippa Middleton spent $15,000 at a spa pre-wedding

Her billionaire Scot with a castle in the highlands  whisked

her away in a Bugatti   2 outfits were requested of guests

for the day!)   

The day   also being the one that I spent at an inner city

hospital staving off depression+madmen as my old mother

was poked+prodded  Don’t think of Pippa Middleton

my mantra

The poems stolen from the little red satchel represented 6

months of slaving over the tortured birthing of Canada’s

female Bukowski   I tell you  those words were headed into

intricatefrenziedecstacy  One poem  about Neil Young  would

have catapulted me into G.G. Award territory

But they sit under a bush  pissed on by cats  Shat on by city

bats   Yellow+brown   Seeping into the ground  behind the AGO

The best I can do for those who stood by me  +read thousands

of words not too charmed by their own cleverness   is this:

Yesterday Gregg Allman died   Yes  of Cher (!) and Elijah Blue

Of heroin  + a penchant for the blues  running through  his veins

after father blown away by those bullets that explode inside of

flesh   Like shrapnel   Gregg was a boy   Later brother Duane

smashed up beyond recognition  on a Harley

Today saw a photo of the brothers  all naked by a pond  Southern Eden

Heroin-lean  about to unleash a  new sound   They cover their privates

like shy teen girls  but they still look so dirty  you can smell that smell

Of sweat+perversions   The one’s they’d be up to  on flea ridden mattresses

under full Macon moons

__

________

SPRING 2017   RIP  GREGG ALLMAN

CAMINO

CAMINO de SANTIAGO

As I trip down the path filled with pure bred dogs

+lean Gucci’d girls  the rancid scent of skunky pot

wafts up    I sell jokes  he said    No thanks!    I’m lost

as fuck   he begged   What part of this isn’t the Camino?

Today watching the doc:  Strangers on Earth   I heard a

chic pilgrim say:  There are arrows everywhere!   She

would know where she was going at all times  +hoped to

meet God   It seemed like Disneyland for seekers with lazy

souls   Some even called cabs

Again I ask:  what part of this life isn’t the Camino?   For one

thing  I have yet to see an arrow  signposts are few   Choices

usually just smokescreens in disguise  behind which fate takes

you kicking+screaming into  repetition compulsion  old habits

+older story lines   How many times have you married your

mother?

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle  than

for a rich pilgrim to enter the kingdom of heaven   They chatted

guzzled wine  +fought over cell phone chargers   Some rented

donkeys

It seems unnecessary to spend 5 yrs. wages  in some parts of the world

jet to Spain  +walk among arrows +charlatans   raising false hope that

upon your return answers will fall from the sky like shit from a goose

When what is more likely true  is that  people in parks who tell you they

are  lost as fuck  shall inherit the earth

__

SPRING 2017

DEVIL

THE DEVIL’S JUST A DAY AWAY

We hail from the Ward  just a stones throw away from

where we spent Saturday May 21st   His 96th birthday

Cemetery bound  when his bride began to hack like a Hoover

(yes! she has a sense of humour)

The Ward:  a melting pot of jewish-italian-irish  huddled

masses   The Psych Ward  a place where Buddy Bolden

perfected his coronetsmanship  +a few aunties nestled

beneath couches in the lounge   Ward Cleaver  decidedly

NOT  a member of our family

Emergency Ward  Mt. Sinai:   No milk + honey in sight

Inner city megalith with a 7 foot bleeding madman  perilously

close to bludgeoning our coughing mother   Another inmate

snarling 4 letter epithets  even after being given a cheese sandwich

( and a pen  with which he proceeded to gouge out his eyes)  

No flies on  Mt. Sinai  Oedipus   My exasperated brother  now

almost deaf  said: Zen?  Zen?  What in the hell does that guy know

about Zen?   NO!  not Zen  a PEN!   This day went on until hell

froze over   +Mr. Dybuuk needed to escape from the Jews he was

trifling with

Especially the mother   Coughing like the now endangered  Whooping

Crane   I’m NEVER coming back here again!  The tea is like pishuchtz

she remonstrated   I prayed for a Zen-mind in which to hide  +used arcane

hand signals to induce a trance   Behind dead eyes  my soul had joined father

graveside  where the dead have their own business to do  as do  the living

So what is the business of this dead father?  No longer bound to white tee

shirted angina  seething in suburban fugue state   Cigarette gleaming  long

into dark nights of the soul   Ditto dial of his watch   Glowing green numbers

tick-tock tick-tock  like the croc who ate a clock  now following Captain Hook

for his other hand   Our father’s ticker  counting down the years to infarction

____

what’s a hospital?  a hospital is just a bunch of 

disconnected buttons, dying people and very sophisticated and

comfortable orderlies. but the whole world is like this:

nobody knows what they are supposed to know –

poets can’t write poetry

whole nations led without leaders, why the whole thing is like

trying to copulate with a wooden

dick… oh pardon me!

(Charles Bukowski: The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses 1969)

SPRING  2017

LEE

A RAPTOR NAMED LEE

blazing blues  immortalized here many times

would be 96 sunday  eyes very much like a

hawk’s  a member of the raptor family  could

spot a bullshitter from miles away

lately such a bird is frequenting the balcony

of his bride  now 93   let’s call him lee  regaling

her with tales of horseraces  gangstas   +escaping

from burly london toughs   hey jewboy!   

now the witching hour  +illinois honks his horn

ella sits in a housedress  +louis throws back his

leonine head and laughs  white teeth gleaming

lee the hawk dreaming a little dream  of me

__

Hawks have up to 1,000,000 per sq. mm of photoreceptors

in their retinas, against 200,000 for humans.

SPRING 2017  RIP LEE ATKINS  A MAN    May 21, 1921- August 16, 1989

FLOWER

FLOWER POWER

At the Vimy exhibit in our nation’s Capitol

they gave out paper  with poppy seeds embedded

From Flanders Fields   Mere specks   No one knows

how they grow into flowers  +soldier’s ghosts

simultaneously    Plant them in your yard  +the bones

of our good Canadian boys will rise  giving off the faint

scent of mustard gas  +the sea

__

Spring 2017   Ottawa