songanddancegirl

SPIDERS

I DON’T MIND SPIDERS AND SNAKES

The raggedy one who looked like my brother’s

girlfriend of 30 yrs. ago   sassy-feminist-college-girl

Each sentence included the words  patriarchy +misogyny

Pretty  wealthy  +15 yrs. younger than we    These diatribes

induced vomiting  +steely monosyllabic un-pleasantries

I digress

Ratty hair  +neo-hippie valley speak   Salesgirl at Bellwoods Weed

Dispensary said: don’t worry (granny)  if you get too high  suck

on a lemon   Well suck on this: Poet so high on megadoses of THC

full blown psychotic haze  for 8 days   Spiders  snakes  +lizards at the

periphery   Entire life flashed before me   glossing over the fun parts

Were there any?

Front door  +windows a thin veneer    Ditto Ego    Little protection from

marauding haikus of suffering    Danced through said life with theatrical

alchemy   Stops in:  Big Sur   Zurich   Keswick   Big Easy    Please excuse me

while I kiss the water of the great Mississippi   +light out for territories beyond

the Pale   Like Russian Bubbie    You can take the witch doctor out of the shetl

but you can’t take the shetl out   Ever

Allan Ginsberg’s rant on LSD won a Pullitzer    So I  Howl  at the mediocre muse

who inhabited me that eve   +know with even greater certainty : within this crucible

every single shred of order you see  was carved out of a terror so vast it prevents

seeing what is in front of your nose   You are no more real than the heliotrope of

the Sufis     So slow the fuck down

Smell the past evaporating   The future a mirage of desperation  (You can’t handle

the truth!)  Jack Nicholson  A Few Good Men     The trash heap of the present

moment is the pinnacle of glory    Transmuted into gold by mediocre muses   +pot

called: Transcendence is For Pussies

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Spring 2016

WALL

BUILD A WALL AROUND WESTERN CIVILIZATION  & GET A JOB

YOU FAT PIG  (2 signs at a Trump rally today)

Munk School of Global Affairs  writing here for 9 yrs.

Garden with fountain  solid ice  Dec thru March   Cement

pond   International coterie of hipster students smoke weed

Skunky haze wafts

I sit reading poetry  this year’s Governor General’s winner

She’s using all CAP titles  like me   +1st person confessionals

a la Anne Sexton  +me    And even though it is the 1st day warm

enough to be bare chested  *(see hipster Tarzan quoting Descartes)

All I can think of   as heart pounds in cage:   What if someone opens

fire?   Yesterday a lovely man bought me lunch   He said: The terrorists won

__

*(2nd anniversary of the disappearance of 291 Chibok girls from their

school  near a forest)

Spring 2016

PIG

DANCE PIG!

One of the most depraved characters in all American Lit

has to be Judge Holden  Blood Meridian  Little girls disappear

whenever he is near  Little boys kept as pets  shot in head

when playtime over  splayed  upon his lap  In the final 1/4 of

the tome  the idiot   brother of a carnival man  becomes the Judge’s

property

Now on a leash  raped with regularity   Judge often naked  Huge+

pale  +hairless  with small eyes   Giant pigman   Enormous infant

Says he’ll never die  Debauched God of America  Land of the free

Judge says that a man seeks his destiny  but no matter the detours

will always come to the selfsame reckoning

All of us bears in a collar  +frilly tutu  +chains   bears that dance  

bears that don’t   Yesterday a near crucified comrade wrote: And all

the sinners saints   Carrying his cross across the Americas  to get to

the very same place   The crucible where Lucifer  lays his soul to waste

Yet it was he who mailed me regularly small talismans  a crown  a scarred

heart  the hebrew symbol Chai    Life    Small inducements to keep on  going

After all it’s a great thing  the dance   Dance dog!  Dance Pig!   Stop searching

+save your last dance for me   And rail  rail against the tethered destiny prophecy

*Research has shown that those who do  experience: shortness of breath  blurred

vision  heart palpitations  erections   +hallucinations   After which the leather strap

springs open

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“ESTRAGON: I can’t go on like this.

VLADIMIR: That’s what you think.”

“POZZO: I don’t seem to be able…(long hesitation) to depart.

ESTRAGON: Such is life.”

Samuel Beckett  Waiting For Godot 

SPRING  2016

REPTILE

REPTILE WISDOM  ZOMBIES ON THE LAWN

Barry Hurts  film critic  calls Sleeping Giant a visceral

portrait of the ugliness that is growing up  Think about it

untold tragedies dot the horizon   Or don’t  think about it

that is   because they do   4 recent deaths by their own hands

5 by slow decay  in our small circle alone

Legendary author  Jim Harrison  warned us: Nobody can be

helped by anybody   He of death by no determined cause at 78

just last week   Jim had a great  been passed the secret   face   While

Barry Hurts may have had a childhood of unquiet desperation  ugly

+perhaps dank

But there are still those among us who can conjure scenes sans

lysergic acid diethylamide  of: whistling cardshark uncles   a man

named after The Stork  who brings popcorn+Mars bars to unruly

children  +vomiting dogs  +1 rabbit who escaped the idyll  not

unscathed  Rarebit for fatfoxy in backyard

Children kept from vicissitudes except for the internecine warfare

of groundhogs who nearly ate smallest brother  Father took him to a

psychiatrist   Truth will not set you free  Childhood memories tainted

dreamscapes   Cardshark uncle  molester of the pretty   +un-pretty

Still there was a horse named Tex  +a giant’s cabin in the Laurentian

Mountains by a Precambrian lake!  (how does water not fall off a

mountain?)    Cardshark uncle sat near wood stove    Lake was a moss

gunked marsh    Water too obscene+green to fall off of mountain

But no drive UP  has ever been filled with such naked lust  for life

We large apes are creatures who lie down on pallets of all shapes +

sizes  Lock our doors +windows  +leave our bodies through small ego-

cides for 6-8hrs. nightly   There we live  with ardent abandon   Uncles

morph into duckbilled platy-pie with longish ropes  for wrangling

Last night my husband’s water broke  +the skeleton of a 1.1 metre

tall individual would be found the next day in the Liang Bua cave

Homo floresiensis  the Hobbit of apes    And there under your own

bed   under the loose floorboard  rests the bones of the child you

never were

__

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness

And they live by what they hear    Such people become crazy

or they become legend.     Jim Harrison  RIP

Spring 2016

GHETTO

IN THE GHETTO

Why make it plain as day Mr. Curator?   Louis Jacob

/OUTSIDERS  A.G.O.  asks us: Do you recognize yourselves

in the monkey’s otherness?  He tells us: dividing lines

conjoin what they separate    A Jazz riff plays  somewhere

down the hall    A white woman  +a negro man hold a chimp

in NYC   it is 1967

Gary Winograd the artist tells us: the monkey is the product of 

miscegenation   The woman beside me says: a bit too long for

scrabble   Dividing lines have never conjoined slave +master  only

rape  aka misegenationdegredation  also too long for scrabble

This week the old white Jew who is running for President said:

White people don’t live in the ghetto   A word politically corrected

into oblivion   He was instantly excoriated   And though his language

is dated  the word ghetto  as in Warsaw Ghetto  never went away   Jews

by the 100,000’s  murdered there   1942

If a word grows up out of the dung heap of racism   why not keep it there?

Who is allowed to use the N word   Kyke   Ghetto?   Relics of a time when

schools were segregated  +washrooms at Toronto’s beaches had signs:

No dogs   Negros  or Jews  

What word would you choose to describe the huge tracts of tenement blocks

in every American city  where a disproportionate number of African Americans

live?   The Projects?   Whitewashing the truth   You cannot take the word Ghetto

out of the Ghetto   Why not call a spade a spade?   Who you saying lives in fear?

__

What I want  

What I am  

What you force me to be  

Is what you are

(Gordon Parks  1st African American Photographer  

Life Magazine  1967)

Gary Winograd American Photographer  1928-1984

Spring 2016

SMELL

SMELL THAT SMELL

2nd visit to Song Dong’s Courtyard A.G.O.

Karen Kain is still trapped   The smell of death

diminished since pieces first uncrated   Tears+

mildew evaporated into thin air?  Or settled into

the hair +crevices of A.G.O. minions   See the little

ghost-girls now escaped from mirrors  running free

through the gallery    Canada’s invisible refugees

This hall of mirrors is growing on me  in all of it’s

wretched un-glory  I sniff the wisdom of the poor   It

smells like bread  +resurrection

__

(companion piece to: CREEP SHOW PEEP SHOW AGO  

January 28, 2016)

Karen Kain In Song Dong’s Courtyard  A.G.O. 2016

Spring 2016

HOLE

THERE’S A HOLE IN THE BUCKET

Sometimes you die by the drop  said Tibor

the glass restorer    Everything he said was

cryptic  Humpty-dumpty rhetoric  +fractured

platitudes

He was rugged  +prone to monastic retreats in

Slovakia   Obtuse humour:  Is that your truck

outside?  pointing to the 3 ton  engine running

I laughed out loud  long+hard  as Tibor shuddered

spasmodically

On a day when yet another friend fell into the grip

of un-hingement  by vertigo   Stygian blight on 2nd

half of lifers  Who must now cling to walls +strange

men  to keep from keeling over

Maybe the world is flat after all   +this is the part where

the edge is  everywhere   By way of good-bye Tibor grabbed

my ass   He said: Walk like a sailor  +learn how to fly   baby!

__

Come Spring  2016

APES

IN THE PALEST STARLIGHT OR IN DARKNESS ABSOLUTE

BOKO HARAM   A TRIBE OF BANDED APES

Did you know that the orb-like eyes of a falcon can see

small objects one mile away  +are 30 times more colour

sensitive than ours are?   Maybe the king of birds might

be brought to Nigeria  help find the now 2,000 abductees

some as young as 7 being hitched to suicide vests

Here in the West many believe that efforts have been made

Few know this is pure fantasy  Think logistically   Take the

400 children in their elementary school  shocked+sobbing

as boys are separated from girls   The school now stands empty

How do you transport  +feed an army of abductees  14+under?

Unless you do not   Likely there are bones in the forests  +many

madmen with 10 small wives a piece    Before the young bombers

are sent into market places +cities  the equipment is tested on

live candidates    Only really depressed poets are literalists of the

imagination

__

Spring  2016

WALL

TEAR DOWN THAT WALL  OR BUILD A BETTER ONE AND BILL MEXICO

What would Gorby say?  Would he recognize the world today?

These days Daesh makes the Cold War seem child’s play    Oh

that’s a soft target  said the pundit   31 dead   200+ injured  pre-

security check-in Brussels    Airport loungers lying in blood +shoes

Bombs in suitcases on trolleys   injuries below the knees    You know

what that means   Boston Marathon re-play of instant severings    All

human flesh: soft-target  at malls  theatres  +hotels  near you    There

is a fierce urgency of now  Dr. King said from a balcony   1960’s USA

before the day bullet splayed +bloody   at 39

Remember Coretta’s face?  Jackie’s pink suit  clawing her way onto the

trunk?   The naked child running along a path from raped village  Viet Nam

We play characters who exist on multiple levels of dissemblance  concealing

hatred  +fear   putting one’s best foot forward

There is a Happiness Movement  afoot    Zombies like you+me are encouraged

to: walk in a way that is associated with happiness   This will elevate the mood

 of those of us who still have 2 legs to stand on   In Brussels today surgical theatres

are being readied for appendage removals  +re-assemblies    Once again fewer of

us are in a position to adopt the  Superman Pose   highly recommended by

Happiness gurus everywhere

__

Adopting this pose for 5 minutes will increase

happiness +confidence 10fold

with a selfie  50fold

Spring  2016

DUNG

OF DUNG BEETLES AND RICH MEN

I live the poet’s life!  he said   One of my brothers

told him he looked like Zappa  the other he was

full of shit   Charlatans like this captured my fancy

by the dozens back in the days of yore

Now I know the dung-heap rejectee for all that he is

+all that he wantstobe   See him there  leering   with not

a little lust for my last clutch of middle-years youth   Red

dress sashaying  scintillating repartee   Weight of yearning

about my hooded eyes

1950’s father would have surely taken him outside   where

he’d have sent the bullshit+machiavellian grin  to the moon

Alice  to the moon   When men were men  and real men ate

poets for breakfast

__

Spring  2016