songanddancegirl

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

INSTAGRAM

INSTAGRAM DEBACLES & METAPHYSICAL SOLILOQUIES

I cancelled my fee for a social media course

today   Only on  the facebook  briefly   Under an

alias  put a gorgeous Mardi Gras Indian  in pink

feathers  where my face should have been

Thought I could figure out Instagram on my own

and within 3 seconds of hitting  sign up here   I was

followed   I then spent the next sweaty hour hitting

delete account  

Why do pendulums swing?  Something to do with

gravity which also intervenes in jowls +circles under

eyes  But today is Halloween +the barriers are thinning

as we approach Dia de Muerta  when dead friends  +

relatives attend picnics all over Mexican cemeteries

This does not include Facebook friends  or Instagram

followers  no matter how many orgasms they are capable

of having   Only enfleshed relationships need apply   And

yes  Monica+Bill will definitely meet on the other side

Cemeteries aren’t really the problem though  it’s your

stalkers on social media  who hover in the interstices

between man + machine   A flesh-less form of intimacy

sans sacred substances   +moans     Opiate of the alone

__

Halloween  2016

HORRIBLES

OUT OF A FEVERED DREAM  A LEGION OF HORRIBLES

I fought with dark-eyed young men all weekend  as my

blue-eyed husband stood by   Afraid that I would beat

them:  You’re not leaving my house  bastards  until my

water is hot  and my tank revivified    Hot water illusive

in stucco townhouse  waning days of Fall  before the fall

Affriah  a plumber from Nairobi  tells me  it’s all by the

book lady  as though his divining is biblical   But what I

really want is some certainty   The hard passage is getting

to me   This week I woke to read that Michael Buble’s son

now 3  has been diagnosed with cancer   How can this be?

I’d imagined cancer reserved for plebes like you +me    One

rarely reads about stars +royalty succumbing to the disease

Perhaps they endure theirs quietly  secretively   so that we

continue to see them as super-heroic untouchables   Safe in

large beds by the sea

While the scourges known to the rest of us flourish in apartments

with dank hallways  +urine soaked carpets   In suburban ghettos

with trimmed hedges  +jaded dogs  who do not howl at the moon

Instincts of man + beast  AWOL   No possibility of survival in coming

Trumpocracy

Where feral dogs will be loosed upon cities  Clean up the riff raff   So

much cheaper than walls   The new siren’s call: chortle of lumpy man

in a santa tie   Orange skin  evil twin  of Adolph?  America seduced by

Solvenian model wife  in pink pop tops   who will make America clean

Rid it of all that is mean   She who worked illegally in her first months

Land of the free    Cormac McCarthy   America’s greatest living writer

would call them  gibbering apes   Now walking up Pennsylvania Avenue

gilt chairs carried by a legion of deplorables

__

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked and clad in the

skins of animals.  As once men did believe, they may believe again.

(Cormac McCarthy   Blood Meridian  1985    The Crossing  1995)

Fall 2016    Save Civilization  Vote for Hillary

BOREHOLES

OF BOREHOLES

“reservoirs of ancient water that occasionally

come bubbling up out of boreholes in the rock”

See this water   cut off from the surface for 2.7

billion years  recently discovered in an Ontario

mine   Do you ever feel cut off from the surface?

Does migraine  vertigo   or cancer perhaps  interfere

with your libido?

When I was 17  after my mother’s diagnosis  I told my

father I’d write a book called: Cancer Colony   He did

not green light the project:   It’s about a world where

everyone has cancer Dad  even the animals!  

When later I arrived at university  +found Solzhenitsyn’s

Cancer Ward  on 2nd yr. Russian Lit syllabus  I rejoiced!

Now some 43 yrs. later  my book  yet unwritten  memories

of my father’s last days writ large in boreholes of memory

Bubbling to the surface on dark fall afternoons  decay in

sinus cavities

Maybe he was trying to protect me from diving into the

cancer machine  +could not foresee a life for me  as champion

of brutalized children +writer of festering poems   He wanted

a brighter path for: the greatest little filly of them all   His auto-

graph  Grade 6  August 16, 1969   20 yrs. to the day he died

Congestive heart failure   5 yrs. after a vein from his leg was

implanted in his heart   Incision from solar plexus to ankle

(They’re gonna cut me from stem to stern  he said)  Forfeiting

heaven for 5 more years of failing body  +mind ravaged by heart/

lung machine (we didn’t read the fine print)

My tough old father did not retreat   He stuck around for another

1,825  days  and 3 to his tattered last still said life is sweet

__

https://vimeo.com/61136990

Fall 2016

RIP Lee

UN-SUNNY

CONFUCIUS SAY: UN-SUNNY WAYS

Almost Halloween  scent of decomposing poets

+general decay  Dia de Muertos several days away💀

Leonard Cohen is growling: I don’t need a lover the

wretched beast is tamed    82 +described as frail by

art critic who needs a colonic  He who felt that Dylan

was too Pop for the Nobel  But Bobby doesn’t need their

approbation  Visions of filthy lucre blowin’ in the late fall

breeze  along with what’s left of Canada’s dignity

Did you know that a 23 yr. old indigenous youth has been

held in a plexiglass cell  lit 24 hrs. a day?  In solitary 52 months

+still no trial   U.N. says 15 plus days in solitary is a form of torture

Perhaps a little too  Silence of The Lambs  for polite Canadians

Ladies to the right of me  speaking in platitudes   Hushed voice

says: Whatever fate sends our way  we must embrace

Gag me

Leonard!  Revivify the hoary beast you say is slain  +limp to

the nearest railway station when Lorca crouches in the laundry

room  spraying Shout on your soiled PJ’s   And do FREE  Adam Capay

Justin  as all of Tibet turns it’s lonely eyes to you   Lover of giant

Pandas   +all things Mao

__

Fall 2016

BUTTERFLY

DANCE LIKE A BUTTERFLY STING LIKE A WOMAN SCORNED

My inclination was to catch it   The last yellow

butterfly known to mankind   There in the park

mingling with hipsters +Jay fans rushing home

for the game   Glorious day  9º above normal for

late October  Sports fans will be trapped indoors

smelling each others pheromones  for hours

Will they take sex breaks?  Stats say most do   1.5

times per inning   Now the butterfly is tucked neatly

into my pocket  more alive than I   Sap-reversed  +

polymorphous perverse  attracted to the sentient +

non  + to last butterflies

Goal being to keep it alive until Spring  +release it in

a world where Hillary has jailed divorced Donald for

finding her too unattractive to grope   One where

Melania  after escaping from Trump Tower  lands a

job with the Clinton Foundation where Bill does not

find her too unattractive to grope

Now look at  crooked Hillary  so full of promise at 23    Why

did she excuse Bill’s debauchery?  Little Tammy Wynette

wife   friend to Melanias everywhere

__

“You know,  I’m not sitting here as some little woman standing by

my man, like Tammy Wynette.  I’m sitting here because I love him

and I respect him and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve

been through together.  And, you know, if that’s not enough for people,

then, heck, don’t vote for him.”  

(Hillary Clinton 2015  in response to Bill’s “bimbo eruptions”. )

Fall 2016   20 days to U.S. election

MONSTERS

WHERE MONSTERS DO LIVE

..then rising up again like funhouse figures,

and stripping the clothes from the dead and

seizing them up by the hair and passing their

blades about the skulls and snatching aloft

the bloody wigs, gutting the strange white torsos

and holding up great handfuls of viscera, and

genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with

gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some

fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud

cries to their fellows.  

(Blood Meridian  Cormac McCarthy  1985)

__

The only other place such atrocities have been witnessed

has been in the play  of children   Extraordinary acts of

sadism  beheadings  burnings in baths  +rapes    Sex me

therapist   I won’t tell anybody   Too often  mass executions

in the sandtray    Tissue paper blood  splattered on ponies

kittens  +Pokemon

So much to do   So little time  the boy who loved Pikachu

sang   Welcome to my nightmare  the girl with greying teeth

+biker father  said    Thrown against the wall at 3  by Mom’s

new boyfriend named  Cookie

Yesterday in  American Honey  a band of misplaced kids

led by Elvis Presley’s granddaughter  Riley  hopelessly make

their way across Donald’s kingdom  Lord of the Flies-esque

except  in urban wastelands   Youthquake bacchanalia   Post-

millennial debauchery

One cherubic neo-hippie  baptizes herself in a river  +though

we are told she cannot swim  up she rises  Dreadlocked Queen

of abject poverty   Hopelessness crackles through the screen  but

not louder than popcorn man behind us  or some deviant in front

on the phone   Too afraid to confront him  lest he rear up on hind

legs

Baseball cap does not mask tips of red leathery ears   Please allow 

me to introduce myself    We hunker down in plush seats   My seat

mate determined to prove that we have witnessed  an epiphany!  But

then he takes the message of Christ quite literally

One cheek often bruised + bloodied   Hope is God  he has been known

to say  as I cower  waiting for the other shoe to drop    If God is hope

temperament is destiny   +all the children in therapy will live happily

ever after

__

Muta Abana, the father of a released Chibok girl said: Some of them

came back with babies, but think about it, are we going to kill the

children?   (Globe & Mail  October 17  2016)

Fall 2016   22 days until Donald rules the land