songanddancegirl

NUMB (first poem 2017)

UNCOMFORTABLY NUMB

Who isn’t lost  at least some of the time?

Canadians report a sense of ennui  68.2%

of the time  America disqualified  89.7% of

populace doesn’t know the meaning of: ennui

Though they will be  perma-lost  post January

twentieth twenty seventeen

Did you know that the poorest Americans will

lose medical benefits  +the right to safe abortion

when orange hitler defunds PLANNED PARENTHOOD?

And that all of the BLACKLUNG widows in Appalachia

threaten to vote Dem. in the next election?  He’s fired!

But first 4 years of undoing every civil rights gain of the

last 100 yrs. in the first 100 days  (I begged them to give

Bernie a makeover/at very least a facial)  All for naught

In 2017 I vow to find myself

To stop writing about DJT?

And to light out for territories unfound

After cancer

After 60 arrives

After impeachment

Won’t wait for River Styx to freeze over

Word.

__

It is weirdly comforting to discover that  

Leonard Cohen  was often just as profoundly

lost as the rest of us.  

Globe&Mail  January 6, 2017

January 2017   First Poem

FACTUAL

LIFE IN A POST-FACTUAL WORLD

There is a giant crack when scapula rotated

Heard beyond the membranes separating

poet from world at large  Permeable membranes

Too diffuse for words  which escape into the

atmosphere  where judges judge +do not send

grant money

These poems  these words  trouble   +have caused

jurors  tingling in hands+feet   vertigo +diarrhea   Today

words chronicle the fall of Aleppo: a meltdown of humanity

Not enough sunshine for the many  No canned laughter with

this poetry

Aleppo   Giant gutted Gehry   Twisted tatters of buildings splayed

Gaping holes in concrete   Skin of civilians  flayed   Al Assad friend

of Russia +Iran   by proxy Trumpnation?  Sent troops into homes

killing women+children willy nilly

Canada trying to mobilize UN General assembly to: Take action

on Syria   This as new PM shamelessly panders to wealthy Maoists

in mansions across the land   Words fail to bring grant $  +uplift

the lumpen proletariat  So long in breadlines +fodder for tanks  they’re

voting for snake oil  neo-right

Now resurrecting words like: Umvolkung (ethnic conversion)  Volkisch

(racially pure state)  +concentration camp   Soon  kike    In the 21st C

no one gives a damn about the Nazi era   The future belongs to patriots

Many Germans simply fear that by 2040, Germany will be like a Third

World country which doesn’t consist mostly of white people –

(Ronal Glaser  Berlin based politician)

__

Baby I’ve been down, but never this down

I’ve been lost, but never this lost.

Bruce Springsteen

(December 14, 2016)

GONE

DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’VE GOT ‘TIL IT’S GONE

little dwarf trees all around me  window seat on

parking lot  paved paradise put up a tree mausoleum

all dead soon  needles in your house until the 2nd coming

when the mob will be chill  bathe his feet  bloodlust+hate

have had their day?

my christmas cards are half: BELIEVE  + half: JOY    I’m

giving the Believes to those who already do  +the Joys to those

who are to joyous  to believe   across europe+in dingy ballrooms

in donald’s amerika  heil  is the new raised fist  why must it always

come to this?

too much liberal democracy  pendulum castrated mid-swing  donald

weeps for swing state recounts   billionaires everywhere gnash gold

teeth   in new world order fatted calf messiah dances at pink trump

hotels +local hot spots

__

(December 8, 2016)

WONDERFUL

THERE’S STILL TIME FOR IT TO BE WONDERFUL

I saw a giant black truck  A monster truck  plough into

a christmas crowd  Full tilt  Santa impaled on a steel pole

gingerbread debris    Annus Horribilis 2016

If we could live it backward  +have all the firsts to wait for

the firsts would be last  +the last would be birth  A death of

a different sort   It’s like the films that really reach into the

human experience  lay it bare   Show us what we always knew

was  out there

Like the aliens who land  +suck us into their tubers

Like the cancer  the one your great grandmother flew

to the Mayo for

Living it backward would turn mortality on its head    Show

us how in spirit form we don’t need these radiated bodies

anymore   Remember  pre-birth   you swam!   Non-weight

bearing shower room to your right  said the nice lady at the

retirement home

Annus 2016  I saw a reality tv star voted president of the world

that thinks it’s free   Tell me  over+over again my friend we’re on

the eve of destruction  Or are we?  Living it backward would bring

us to the mother of all re-births  No?

Back to a time when we worshipped Earth  round+fecund   When we

knelt before rotund thigh+belly    When Venus of Willendorf was a

supermodel  28,000 BCE      Hey a girl can dream

Don’t be afraid

Fuck the cancer

Take no prisoners

Bring on 2017

__

Winter Solstice 2016

COLOUR

OFF COLOUR POEM  FOR A GREY SKY DAY

It happened again on Instagram   Someone asked

to  lick me  within seconds of signing up to post

photos of rude citydwellers   Later on  almost knocked

over by fragrant girl with greasy hair on my way to

singular boutique where bespectacled clerk told me:

the shirts don’t really fit me here because of my big

butt   (seriously!)

Even a poet of my wordrenown cannot make this shit

up    I inched closer  sidelong glances   Obtuse young man

trying to seduce me?   Later we joked over macarons +latte

and he proceeded to tell me that he prefers real redheads  for

reasons unbeknownst to me

I do tend toward naiveté   Fodder for charlatans with

affectations   Pronouncing words like Nicaragua as:

Nicarrrragua   + arsehole with a slight lilt to the e’s

Later though at the Four Seasons  our clerk left in a hurry

Shirttails flapping in the late November breeze

Curated tryst gone terribly wrong   My hair: Clairol Crimson

smudging the damp sheets  as chandelier began to quiver

unrequitedly

__

Winter  2016

BELIEVE

I FEEL THE NEED TO BELIEVE IN HE WHO LEAVES US

HELPLESS IN THE RAIN

Especially these days when soon to be Prez

D.J. Trump  embodies the worst of the national

character in a country founded on slave labour

+stolen land   Where white mobs lynched blacks

for entertainment  as white parents taught their kids

to cheer  (ditto Nazis)

In our own country  also founded on stolen land  +

degradation of First Nations  the military has finally

admitted a link between combat+suicide  High time

And with all of the skyrocketing hate in the world

it seems Halloween may need to be cancelled

Where once we avidly donned costumes from every

culture +creed  playfully walking the streets in safe

en masse revelry  today the extremists of the PC police

have decreed that such costumes are: racist  exploitative

+vile acts of appropriation

Brothers + Sisters!  Why are we fighting? shouted Lennon

His pulpit bloodstained  Bullets are equal opportunity  Rip

through flesh of peaceniks too

I point you in another direction  that of Lucy  whose skull+

bones were found 4 decades ago today   Lucy  ancestor of the

genus  Homo  named for her compatriot   The one in the sky

with diamonds   This skull buried in sediment 3.2 billion yrs.

ago  bore the hominin imprint  Our skulls the great equalizer

As an art form nothing superior  +enitrley PC!   To the untrained

eye no signs of: race  gender  sexual orientation  political affiliation

or religion  A clean slate  A sacred object that celebrates our oneness

Did we not walk out of the same place? Develop from the same oceanic

stew?

Was it not a more sophisticated hominoid who filled ships with chained

cargo thousands deep  laying in their own feces?  Built ovens diabolical

Spewed Jews across Europe  Or did the wise apes regress?  Beginning in

a lofty place on the savannah  hunting+gathering  through numberless

genocides  to a place in 2016  where a harmless evening of costume+candy

becomes the emblem of internecine hate

Perhaps we have given away our power to artificial intelligence  because we

are tired of the responsibilities that come with being  rulers  of the food chain

We’re bleary eyed from war yet hungry for more   Our Gods ravaged +bleeding

on crosses  +bayoneted beyond recognition in war theatres where: To be  or not to be?

is the question asked by 34 out of every 100,00 soldiers who suicides successfully

__

Fall 2016

DEAD

CARNY BARKER OF THE DEAD

I will soon be asked to speak on the subject

of a local psychic   She who traffics in false hope

The shadow side of holy    A dark art to be sure

She knows not what she does  Perhaps well intentioned

trimming her hemlock   +shrubbery   Perhaps a lover of

taxidermy

We sapient apes have been consulting oracles since the

beginning of time   Since the day on the savannah when

a greying ape lay down   They poked + prodded but it did

not rise   Soon maggoty silence   Bones cleaned of sinew

With this they knew  long before the apple+the snake  Forever

creatures unto death   Crouched in fear of the insatiable God

of the Mystery  They howled like dogs into the wind   All art a big

SOS  We are here  Rescue us  Resurrect the dead   We’ll give

you our firstborn son   Flay the skin   Pots of gold    Old ceremonies

bestowed immortality  upon the few

A fisherman   A boy by a Bodhi tree   But no such opiate for you+me

What makes us vulnerable to the dark artist?  to exploitation?  to abuse?

All sorcerers are intuitives  highly skilled observers  and so are most

pedophiles   I don’t need a medium to lead me to my father’s voice  It’s

in my DNA   Love is the glue  the grail   It fills the chalice  and makes him

ride again

__

His eyes were very blue and very beautiful half hid away 

in the leathery seams of his face. As if there were something

there that the hardness of the country had not been able to touch. 

(The Crossing  Cormac McCarthy  1995)

GLORYVILLE

FADED GLORYVILLE  & GILDED SUTURES

What’s holding you together these days?

All my friends are dead  said Pete Townsend  +that was

30 yrs ago  before Lou  Bowie  +Leonard    Mose Allison too

Died yesterday  at 89   It’s been a precarious year for music men

members of minorities  +citizens of war torn countries

It is the year of the working class white man   Populism

nationalism  racism  creeping along ruptures in the

culture  Up through tectonic plates  making a bee line for

Pennsylvania Avenue    Somehow the ground shifted  as we

debated ad nauseam whether the internet shredded human

love   The glue  holding our tribe together  by a thread

We mourned too  the death of hope  in trenches filled with

vermin  +Germans  +mustard gas  about a hundred years ago

Around the time that Freud belaboured the point that: Sometimes

a cigar is just a cigar   And sometimes it is a racist billionaire

hiding in plain sight

These people are NOT your friends  working-class white man   No

matter how many lumpen carrots they dangle    And in the waning

days of the free world  populist exit strategies abound   For those of us

approaching the final third of boomer un-glory  we recall slogans like:

Never Again!   We  who clung to them  so fervently

So that when they hand me the yellow star of David  I will count on my

neighbours to don one too  And in this sea of yellow stars  they will never

find the real Jews   Yesterday the Donald was made an honorary Cossack

by Putin  this  the outfit who pillaged with impunity   Razing the Russian shtetls

My high cheekbones attest to the Cossack kiss  administered to a long dead

ancestress who struggled in a ditch  near Vitebsk

__

The alt-right: a group of mostly young white men who believe in white

supremacy; oppose immigration, feminism, and multiculturalism; delight

in harassing Jews, Muslims, and other vulnerable groups. There is every

reason to be concerned that someone who willingly trades in hatred will be

a key part of the next administration.  (Mr. Bannon/Breitbart)

The next President will be an unprincipled bully. It is doubtful Mr. Bannon or

anyone else can control Donald Trump. And that’s what America and the world 

should truly be worried about.

(Globe & Mail  editorial  Novemeber 17, 2016)

Late Fall 2016

CRAZY

BELIEVING HERSELF TO BE NO MORE CRAZY

THAN THE WORLD MADE HER

Olga Hepnarova  a mass murderess  rejected the

insanity defence   and so do I   Soon I will speak on

the subject of psychics  unless the young filmmaker

reconsiders  after paying special attention to my non

specific grin  +hollow eyes

He may do better with his father  an expert on exorcism

who always implores one to: answer questions with questions

He tests me regularly  with photos of a bloody Linda Blair’s

penchant for crucifix as dildo   He was a child who placed rags

in the furnace  for which he was beaten with a hockey stick

This led to nocturnal emissions  + a lifelong hard on for  Gordie Howe

who he stabbed with a pen at our local mall

All in all  he remains a man who leans toward the macabre  lately

wearing balaclavas  even when travelling to soulless hotels in

Eastern Ontario   He was once accosted by a huge buck  who chased

his young Beatle loving son to the front door  He knows that Dionysus

takes many forms  +considered the sighting an initiation into the

ecstatic rites  where men must fearlessly face the Maenads  who would

tear them from limb to limb

But more recently he has the need for the thread of Ariadne  A labyrinth

replacing the buck at his front door   And with the courage of an Argonaut

and the fierce  kill you with my bare hands  mentality  of Judah the Maccabi

He faces the minotaur  joie de vivre intact  +a heart that weighs not an ounce

more than a feather*

__

*(in ancient Egypt this guaranteed immortality)

Late Fall 2016   For JMA

GROTESQUES

CURIOSITIES & CAGED GROTESQUES

The week went from bad to worse   A vulgarian

will be President of the  free  world in a mere 67

days   And as Obama buried the hatchet in a show

of faux unity  yellowish Hitler looked scared   Perhaps

even dissociated  i.e., placing himself outside the oval

office via a fight or flight psychic mechanism  sine qua non

of higher apes

He went to a place back in his childhood where he reigned

supreme  Large +ungainly  a bully sent to military school

by 13   Oh Donald don’t you weep  don’t you moan   His skin

the burnished tone of the coward’s belly

Then on Thursday the music died  that is  the version of the

music  ravaged voiced +luxuriant   More recently an ecstatic

confession  in growls   Oh Leonard Cohen do weep + do moan

for the minions left behind

Who without your assurances that life is a gory riddle with no 

solution  will continue to chase their tails seeking answers   And

illusive holy grail elixirs to rub on the gaping puncture wounds

sustained by the Barthe brothers  attacked+asphyxiated by a Rock

python in 2013    Answers are for sissies     God hides in questions

__

RIP Leonard Cohen    You lived long enough to see yellow hitler

elected President  + missed by mere days the appointment of an alt-

right anti-semite as chief strategist  +senior counsellor  

You want it darker. We kill the flame.

Leonard Cohen  final album  November 2016

November 2016