songanddancegirl

MAD

WE ARE ALL BORN MAD  SOME REMAIN SO

Man sweeping debris  broom touches my knee

Eyes meet  its 33º    Tomorrow last day of Summer

Summer of high anxiety  scorching heat+humidity

He’s back at it   the sweeper   with dolorous eyes

Boots Landscaping & Maintenance  on tee    Don’t stand

so close to me   Smell of sperm trees  +rot  +squirrel droppings

Sweeperman sweats profusely  drips on my suede Sam Edelman

boots   Leaves a skull+crossbones stain

I weep + turn away   but not before he of the thick thumbs winks

Evil reaper of Summer’s deshabille    Summer when hope biopsied

found malignancy   Especially in Aleppo where children photo’d

with blood+white dust about their faces   Bodies rigid+zombie

Not Halloween for 40 days   Ditto Israelites wandering in exile   Now

we huddle haphazardly  waiting for the ice+snow already seeping into

Canadian bones    It’s in our DNA  eh?

The land of milk+honey 8 frozen months away   Walking on eggshells

for news of Gordie   On the eve of final  Hip concert  there was a full blown

rainbow    Full umbra over gnarly Toronto  promising happy endings

+remission   Only the meek know that the dawn is dusk backward   Don’t

wait for me

__

It’s Godot!  At last!  It’s Godot!  We’re saved! 

I begin to weary of this motif.

(Waiting for Godot  Samuel Beckett  1954  winner of Nobel Prize)

End of Summer of our Discontent

DEEP

THE DEEP CYANIC SKY     THE DEEP CYANIC SKY

So Cormac McCarthy repeats   All The Pretty Horses  pg. 202

Is this a sky you have known?  A sky you have been ravished by?

Is it even  knowable?  As it hangs over this fable of Mexico   A

magical land filled with pretty wild horses  febrile young men   +

the Goddess Mary still weeping for her crucified son  well into the

new millenium

He of the cyanic eyes  bringing the Word to huddled masses  Now

the Pope worships at the temple of Zuckerberg    WORD   (see photo

Pope embracing Facebook Jesus  Septemeber 2016)  This week horoscope

advises: be like the wise wild child in everything   But between the child

+everything   the world lies waiting

Don’t be seduced by too witty oracles in Art & Culture magazines

My childhood friend  whose sister was bitten by our bulldog  recently

lost her mother at a gas station  when a truck rolled over her   This

mother  small for an adult  lived in a 10,000 sq. foot house   round of

face   +impish grin

Maybe she lived with crushing sensations in her lower extremities  Maybe

she dreamed of giant trucks under azure skies  +fields of cyanic daisies

growing by the river of Babylon    Don’t believe any form of knowing  will

save us    Oracles be damned     The future isn’t what it used to be

__

ORACLE OF DELPHI   8th Century  BC

One of the main stories was that the Pythia delivered oracles in a frenzied

state induced by vapours rising from a chasm in the rock, and that she spoke

gibberish which priests interpreted as enigmatic prophecies.

Fall  2016

*vapours have been known to flow from crevices in the ancient riverbed

at Trinity Bellwoods Park  frequented by poets+perverts alike

CONSTELLATIONS

IT WAS ON WEST QUEEN WEST THAT I SAW

THE CONSTELLATIONS

Last night a huge meteor streaked past my

window  right in front of the glowy-red CN

Tower   Every night a light show wizard at

the switch  He must be on lysergic acid  Some

nights the show induces vertigo

But this light show was the real deal  +billions

of years old   Not 48  +disconsolate on Front St.

It flashed by as my brain strained to:  a) determine

if a nuclear attack   b) make meaning of the bluey –

green ball of fire  with a yellow tail

I already miss it  +know that I am as likely to see it

again  as are the 323 reindeer struck by lightening in

Hardangervidda Norway  to rise from the dead   Grassy

mountain plateau covered in carcasses    Is that one with

a red nose?  (see photo: Globe +Mail  August 30, 2016)

And as for meaning  maybe there is no meaning  No grand

scheme  No raison d’être   Just a lot of ancient shit  not backlit

floating around in my life   in our lives   Waiting to escape through

brokenhearts  +mysterious black soulholes    (saddest line ever!)

My friend told me that his new mantra is: LIG  Let It Go  This is noble

Mine is  They Shoot Horses Don’t They    No  truthfully it’s:   LTYT

Lie Through Your Teeth   Just face it   No one’s interested in your deep

truths   or in something you didn’t do

__

Fall 2016

(August 29, 2016, NE sky , over Ontario,

confirmed by Global Meteor Records  +NASA)

PINBALL

HE SURE PLAYS A MEAN PINBALL

When you get right down to it  don’t we all

die  for + from  causes unknown  +unknowable

With names like disease   war   +natural?    As if

in naming it  we beatify it    Though it’s all we’ve

ever known   the only friend   the End

Same way we live  trying to make meaning

out of the Big Bad Meaningless  with malls as

huge a cities  trying to distract    Tommy can

you hear me?   Tommy?   Tommy?    Donald?

The future just isn’t what it used to be

__

End of Summer  2016     a.k.a  Summer of Donald

SENSES

DESPERADO  WHY DON’T YOU COME TO YOUR SENSES

The waiter at Frank’s Red Hot says: You should go to Mexico!

As though I have desperado eyes  +not blue agave induced dark

circles  +menopausal discolourations    But these never did stop

an old poet from hiring a $350/hr call girl named Izzy  +driving

down to the Painted Desert in a KIA SOUL

With Soul etched all over the back seats   protesting too much

that somewhere  through the hard passage my soul has survived

And waits puppy-like at the door  pissing itself with joy each time I

arrive from a day of bad retail interviews  Just hired to sell $4,000

jeans by a design collective from Düsseldorf  with the slogan: Drink Me

And Live Forever   Dadaists everywhere are rolling in graves

And a weekend of carpet cleaners from Alexanians  who left me

with regrets for not jumping into their truck   Carlos: Ma’am we 

can’t clean carpets worth shit  but we can take you as far as the

Pecos  +put you on a tequila drip

This week they discovered an Earth like planet  tantalizingly close

enough to study   It circles the star Proxima Centauri   They named

it Promima b  (!)   Again Dadaists everywhere are rolling   It is stuck

in eternal night  with huge temperature extremes  +bathed in radiation

100 x stronger than on Earth

Stephen Hawking + a Russian billionaire will send a computer sized chip

spaceship there in 2-3 decades   Won’t that be thrilling for the nocturnal

+radiated Proximers  to have the Sapient Ape arrive on their doorstep!

Why  in twenty or thirty years the Gods will have forgiven us  + our child

selves will have returned from exile  in droves    In droves Jerry

__

Everything lives on waiting only to be wanted back badly enough

Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my mother

and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?

(Tracey K. Smith   Life On Mars  Pulitzer Prize winner  2011)

Fall 2016

CBC

LATE BREAKING STORY ON THE CBC

Are those burn marks on Gordie?  Side of

head  Also strange  indent   Concave where

convex once lived    A bedridden brain  +vestigal

freckles   The last of the great carny barkers

never to ride again

A nation whispers  will he go free?   Is there any

way  this isn’t the last time  Gord flings his  body

sweat +words   at a hungry world?   For chrissakes

let the man in fuchsia +spangles go home to his

kids

__

Thanks for listening in the back.

Thanks for listening period.

Have a nice life.

(Gordie   August 20, 2016   Farewell Tour)

End of Summer 2016

PLEASURE

BURIED PLEASURE TREASURE

Yesterday I heard an artist wax poetic on:

turning 50  her divorce  her affair  +the

purpose of the female orgasm   I could smell

her youth dying  musty wet +cheesy

Apparently in  lower  mammals  who don’t

ovulate monthly  the orgasm sets off a chain of

events producing an egg at will!   This sounds a

lot more complex than in the higher apes   A

profundity-fecundity   if you will

It seems too that the clitoris is simply packed with

nerve endings  over 8,000!  It is likely the only human

body part created for pleasure alone   Unlike that mean

machine  the penis  responsible for procreation+urination

Hence female circumcision  a.k.a. genital mutilation

ensuring there is never pleasure  only pain    Turn women

toward more noble endeavours  such as producing babies

with newly sewn vaginas

The question would then seem to be: is the vulva a thing  or

is it an absence of thingness?  Certainly the penis  so much

easier to get a handle on  protrudes  exuding confidence +

sacred substances   See da Vinci’s lovingly rendered sketches

of the male anatomy  circa 1493

And do note that the human clit was not ultra-sounded until 2009!

When it was found that the 8,000 nerve endings are just the tip

of the iceberg  +that lying inside the labi-rinth  is a chamber   One

where the Gods  well hidden from prying eyes  have been transmuting

base metals into gold   It is also the place where we women store

the missing earrings of our husband’s whores

__

a man’s woman

the dream of a man

is a whore with a gold tooth

perfumed

with false eyebrows

earrings

salami breath

high heels

a little bit fat

a little bit drunk

and who will stay a week

just one week

(Charles Bukowski  1972)

Summer 2016   hottest summer since 1947

PIECES

LITTLE PIECES OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

FLOATING AROUND FOR 4.5 BILLION YEARS

Have you ever seen the full majesty of flaming

comet dust?   Tonight the Perseid meteor shower

debris trail of the Swift-Tuttle comet  will be burning

up  in brilliant streaks of light

I saw one the other night  over the Chocolate factory

gentrification of Massey-Ferguson industry  in cripplingly

hip Arts+Design district   I wondered if it was a divine sign:

GO WEST!   Finish the aborted vision quest begun 30 yrs.

ago  in San Francisco

When one’s heart had way less dark goo  pooling inside young

arteries   A cardiologist from Princeton claims that my rotting

cells  akin to blackened shrunken apples  shown in the sidebar

of his infomercial  are crying out for avocados  olive oil  + a new

religion

Materialism +a North American diet of donuts (Glory Hole down the

street makes the best Creme Me Ups you’ve ever seen)  has rendered

me heartless   +ready to believe in Hillary   Unless she is assassinated

by the 2nd Amendment people

Yet in the midst of this anomie  I earnestly applaud Jeni Stepien who

walked down the aisle with her father’s heart  transplanted into Art

Thomas  who gave her away   Her father Michael was shot on his way

home from work in a teenaged armed robbery   My own father’s heart

sits in a jar on my shelf   Enlarged by wanderlust +entropy   he was not

a candidate for transplant surgery

__

Jeni Stepien + Art Thomas dance at her wedding

Summer  2016

..in the pre-dawm hours of Friday Aug. 12th there will be

200 meteors a minute..

SPIRITS

WE ARE SPIRITS IN A MATERIAL WORLD

Sitting at the confluence of an ancient riverbed +

hipster heaven   The gold howlin wolf  glinting

Children dressed in Lulu dispirited in the

splashing pool   I’m bored   I want  more  

Every day at 2  the young staff don rubber boots

+Hazmat suits   They scour stylish kid gunk  as

purebred dogs hump long legged girls  with wild

abandon

The weed store on the corner beckons with free

samples  +gummies for the kids!  The tree above me

has a neon green cross sprayed on decaying trunk

The weed freebie makes me bold  +foolhardy

I sit beneath a branch after measuring the trajectory

of a sudden drop  Like the one that killed Pierre  just over

there  last week   Memorial flowers rotting in Delta-like heat

What does the neon cross mean?

A word would be helpful Parks & Rec. people: safe   run   widow maker  

fool     Instead today’s national newspaper tells me that: there is no non

physical soul  or ego   These scientists +philosophers must be really

depressed   Or perhaps not believe that sex is like pizza  even bad sex

is still pretty good?

Michael Graziano  neuroscientist at Princeton says: Consciousness is a con

game   The brain playing with itself   Mystical masturbation?   Graz has never

heard  Summertime  + likely suffers from a gluten allergy

While Giullio Tononi  a major force in the science of consciousness  predicts that

devices as simple as thermostats +dildos  have glimmers of soul   Ditto that a dvd

player can be many times more conscious than the human brain

So  are we just depressed computers?   And soul the ghost in the machine?

Will Pierre’s unborn son   present at his father’s crushing   not sit by the very

same tree  somewhere around 2023 + know his father intimately?

Believe

__

..witnesses say that Pierre pushed his pregnant wife to safety

just as the giant branch popped..

Summertime  2016

*Falling tree limbs have injured or killed at least 20 people in 

the past 7 yrs. in Toronto, which is falling short of a goal set to

prune trees every 7 yrs.  Now pruning every 15 yrs., and 

paying more than 2 million in liability claims so far this past 7 yrs.

GENIUS

RACKED WITH SYPHILIS  A LEGEND  A GENIUS

June 7 1848  Gaugin born  Paris   died Tahiti 1903

He embraced la vie d’artiste bohème  Called himself

a savage  Deserted 5 children in full rebellion against

bourgeois respectability   So enamoured was he with

pert brown breasts  Exploitation or exaltation? You tell

me

Reportedly wed increasingly younger girls  prepubescent

queens  Elevated debauchery to fauve glory  Initiation rituals

now considered child rape  But then we are a species who as

recently as 1980 routinely subjected babies to open heart surgery

without anesthesia  because: infant brains were not developed

enough to feel pain  ditto  the 9 yr. old hymen of 1893

So when the sun finally sets on human civilization  will it still be

believed that the size of the wise ape’s brain is related to: sophistication

of social behaviour?  What would the yellow-haired ape have to do prior

to the coming U.S. election for the nobility of his party to outright reject

him   +send him gibbering back to a padded room at Mar-a-Lago?

What might this act be?  Jolt land of the free out of complacency   Make

Brexit regret look like child’s play   Wait until he begins  the rounding up

the barbing of wire  a la 1933   Too extreme?  Or has the last remnant of the

American dream finally been scraped off of the glass ceiling?  So that you

might almost see the human spark when it first began to glow!

__

Flowers rotting, flies web caught; riots, roars of caged lions, clowns in

love with dollar bills, nations moving people like pawns. But they’ve

left us a bit of music, a jigger of scotch, a small volume by Rimbaud,

and a horse running as if the devil were twisting his tail.

(Charles Bukowski  Mockingbird Wish Me Luck Poems  1972)

Late Summer 2016     Have you no decency Sir?