songanddancegirl

DISORDER

HOLY DISORDER BATMAN!

is life linear  or a circle?  or a collection of single-day

sagas   disconnected lines  to nowhereville?   fading

pictures on the fridge  each day boy in Batman pose

+girl with big feet  +nose  that took a lifetime to grow

into   disappear

maybe it’s all just the sleight of hand of a cunning old

malabarista    the boy was Batman  still is Batman  on days

when caped crusaders are in short supply  his train takes

whores +gamblers

the girl was always scholarly  even recorded her professor’s

breaths   he breathes life into the system of checks +balances

natty professor Smith  in bow tie  poly-sci 101   circa 1977

40yrs. later  a man with a yellow comb-over  may become the

funhouse supervisor    screw checks +balances

then on a craggy Big Sur beach  a giant Walt Whitman lookalike

reads her Leaves of Grass  pacific ocean  body electric  rouge wave

had taken the daughter of a suicided mother just yesterday   and the

sign said    BEWARE OF:  ROGUE WAVES  

and handsome pretenders to Walt’s throne (she had a lifelong

susceptibility to charlatans)   +the future    it will keep on spitting her

+ Batman out    wet and weary   in scenes beautiful  and cruel   in hospitals

graveyards  +an airport hangar to pick up a mail-order mastiff   from Colorado

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the truth about the world   it is   a fevered dream   a trance repopulate with

chimeras   an itinerant carnival   a migratory tent show  whose ultimate

destination in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond

reckoning     (Cormac McCarthy   Blood Meridian)

SPRING EQUINOX  2016 

EVIL

HEAR NO EVIL  SEE NO EVIL  I AM EVIL

Peacefully shouting obscenities   carrying placards

denouncing everything  is the sine qua non of democracy

Seems the Donald  wasn’t at Civics class that day   Think:

Pussy Riot  Donald!  They recently received a heroine’s welcome

stateside

You are starting to sound a lot like  your doppelgänger Vlad    Think:

chest pounding+naked to the waist  (while trying to hold onto your

biscuits  beleaguered reader)    A 78 yr. old Trump supporter after sucker

punching a protester: He deserved it   The next time we see him  we may

have to kill him   Donald will pay John McGraw’s legal fees    Think: Gulag

Mar-a-Lago    

Today front+centre in The Globe  Canada’s National Newspaper  a bloody

execution is chronicled: naked man spread eagled  shields his privates   He is

covered in blood from savage beatings   He is sobbing   Off to the side a tall man

with a slim-jim automatic weapon  shoots him   This is Liberia  where the naked

man had been caught foraging for   food

Is it a far cry to imagine  what President Trump would do to: Muslims   fleeing

Mexican families   the wives+children of terrorists (I will kill them too)    even

members of the Press  for whom threats have been made on National tv    He is

beginning to sound a lot like   Comrade Stalin  a strongman  a thug    +TRUMPGRAD

signs are in the works for the re-naming of   NYC   secretly stored away until erection

day 2017

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Washington January 2017:

two mounds in the snow  one of which broke open  and up out of which

a figure sat suddenly  like some terrible hatching..   

Blood Meridian   Cormac McCarthy

Spring 2016

LOSE

WITH EACH LOSS THERE IS LESS TO LOSE

Or is there more?   On a pouring early Spring day

here in the North  transported back to childhood

balcony   Home to ghosts+ flea-ridden baby squirrels

Bring one in!   Now littlest brother flea-bitten  eyebrowless

Robin’s nest atop air conditioner next door   Generations

of bird family  our family   survivor family   live out lives in

quiet desperado-burb  where schools close on Yom Kippur

+phonies eat pork on pretty paper plates  

We just eat it with our hands    Poodle atop kitchen table

joins in too   1st boyfriend says: you could get a fork in your

hand at supper    Yes  many tests of mettle in blue kitchen  where

orange hanging lights  with little holes like swiss cheese   Very

Jetsons    (if you are under 40  lose this poem)

Birds building nests  bringing worms   looks like feeding chicks

white regurgitate?   You had to sit quietly for hours to notice   It’s

all in the details   See kitchen Calendar   father’s striking script:

I hope I make it     day of his quadruple bypass surgery

Yes details   The ones never mentioned at fancy Cardiac surgeon’s:

Heart-Lung machines frequently cut off oxygen to the brain  during

surgery   leaving patients with varying degrees of impairment    Father

made it   but never re-appeared

In the end a bird-redemption  hundreds of wrens gathered  to take him

to his other home  where the buffalo roam  +the sky it ain’t cloudy  no more

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Frankenstein  circa 1984   Heart-Lung mo fo

2 days til Spring 2016     RIP  d. bird  coolest cowboy in the land

MORTUARY

COOL URBAN MORTUARY

ghouls   zombies   ghosts   crammed onto the

rooftop   hanging out of windows   lining the

street   trudging through snow  with nowhere

to go   the funeral home at Strachan+Queen

closed for renos

not 6 months ago bodies stacked neatly in rows

cadavers awaiting make-up  +cavity filling    +

formaldehyde cocktails to go   eerie orange lights

all hours of the night

i watch from my bathroom window   a macabre factory

sans Andy  where new-dead prepared for eternity   in 2nd

coolest neighbourhood in the WORLD  (Vogue 2013)    so

what will it be?   a restaurant?   bar?   haberdashery?

NO!  a giant Sephora  artifice emporium  for the sort-of-alive

who spend fortunes on potions that make us look like we care

put some light in our eyes  compassion on our lips

today a woman in Zara said to me: i could NEVER work with

children  i just don’t care    so honest!   and beautiful    +empty

about the mouth

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The Rising   Spring 2016

SADISM

THE CASUAL SADISM OF THE JESUS BED

Gabriel was childlike  with a teardrop tatt under his right

eye + an impish grin   He said: I wonder if I will go to

Heaven or Hell?   Grin now a mega-watt smile   He was

just out of his teens  death row   Texas

The warden said he’d watched hundreds of executions  +

felt not a shred of remorse  or anything resembling compassion

He added: They don’t deserve to choose their last meal   Did the

victims get to choose Tacos or BBQ?     No Sir

Anderson Cooper then took us on a tour of the facility   deep in

the bowels of the penitent-iary   The gurney is called the Christ Bed

See Gabe with arms outstretched   A chemical-crucifixtion   Few fight

the guards  most docile with fear   soiling themselves on the long walk

home

I killed a cop but it wasn’t on purpose   He stepped in front of the 

getaway car   Why didn’t you stop?  asked Anderson   Because I

was trying to getaway   Cop’s family ushered into room adjacent to

Christ Bed  +watch the spectacle through a glass darkly

Still feeding slaves to lions in the Coliseum?   Though  if the Cop were

my son  my brother  I may discover reasons to watch the needle crucify

Gabe    Hard to know   but I am thinking  so    I’m a better person now 

I found Jesus Christ  +my wife conceived all 3 kids here  Gabe testified

Cop’s wife exits the final-exit chamber   She says: Our eyes met  We had

a special connection   Some in the audience heckle   catcall    Gabe’s

wife is carried out on a stretcher   And there is a steadfast shortage of

gasps     Swing Low

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a matter of days until Spring 2016

FROTHY

THE SENSUAL WONDER   THE PRETTY IT    ALL FROTHY

& READY FOR ME

walking through saks 5th avenue  where the shower gel

smells like money   i came across hordes of hungry men

alone+wandering aisles of leather+haberdashery   achingly

metrosexual +prone to bouts of rage   one stamping his gucci

foot  shouting: where is the plump full rich thing you retail

whores promised me?

a far cry from the burly  also leather-clad apes  of 43,000 yrs.

ago?  who picked up a mammoth bone shard and made it into a

flute   why would this stinking near animal invent music  24,000

yrs. before the cave paintings of lascaux?

for comfort  i suppose   for what calms the beast into a fugue state

of repose  faster than the pipes of pan?   since the earliest days of

man   think rock my soul in the bosom of abraham    the naked ape

has resisted the death-necklace   worn like a crown of thorns   from

about the age of 3

in every tradition+culture  music is part of entombment ceremony

in modern times new musical scores are in development for those

righteous die-ers  when grievous+irredeemable suffering  make

assisted suicide  legal

in belgium+the netherlands psychiatric patients can be euthanized

+one woman  grievous angel  chose to die rather than live without

her husband   now seekers of death can shop for doctors who work

in mobile euthanasia clinics

In quebec 10 people have been euthanized in 60 days   since the right

to die law  was passed     66 more have applied for reasons of social

isolation   one man has already been accepted for: living a life without

love  +therefore having no right to exist 

what about 3 yr. olds with terminal cancer?   the highest court in the land

has just put the hand of the MAN who stilled the waters right into your own

saying: you decide and get back to us   obfuscation?  abdication?   or confusion?

Quite unlike Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court  who said of

pornography with conviction: i know it when i see it

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18 days to SPRING

PONY

BALLAD OF A SPOTTED PONY

last night i saw leo crawl inside of an Appaloosa

After falling from a cliff    +after being mauled

by a Griz   +after clawing his way out of a grave

Exhausting neo-cowboy film   Alejandro Inarritu

on steroids  or something    gorgeous winter light

lots of grunting  especially the bear tasting leo   you

might grunt too

the revenant   loads of stereotypes   most glaring:

indigenous man  sticks his tongue out to catch a flake of

snow   leo apes him   tongue  out  then in  then out again

big smile  though his body  a festering bear-inflicted sore

do some of us think that depictions of  primitive man  in

all of his childlike glory  are verboten?   maybe we are just

jaded  un-revenantable  savages   + maybe not    maybe the

starving  +genocided do not crave snowflakes    just justice

for residential school survivors + missing indigenous women

one chief’s daughter cuts the balls off of  a slave owning soldier

as he savagely rapes her   the depiction is oblique  who you calling

a savage Alejandro?

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the horseman’s faces gaudy +grotesque  stripping the clothes from the dead

ripping off limbs  +heads  gutting the strange white torsos   some fell upon the

dying  +sodomized them   as the horses lay screaming  

(Cormac McCarthy   A Comanche Attack – Blood Meridian  1985)

one of the men emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each

hand  swung them by the heels in turn  bashed their heads against the stones

so that the brains burst forth   a hundred tethered dogs were howling

(Cormac McCarthy   Attack by Federales – Blood Meridian  1985)

Almost Spring  2016

GOD

Leo Dicaprio inside the gut of a pony  The Revenant

WHERE I’VE GONE TO HIDE FROM GOD

falling spotted pony   a splayed+blood-soaked chiaroscuro

enters my bedroom at 2:30 a.m.   blood seeping into white  entry-level-

mercedez  carpet   entrails a steaming heap next to the cherry armoire

(a woman must have cherry said Moe  furniture salesman extraordinaire)

i rise from the curly-maple bed  (our bedroom an urban forest   husband

resists wife’s efforts to metro-sexualize his soul)

the spotted pony has my name written all over it   i see that i could easily

fill its womb-tomb cavity   husband says with a smile: it stinks in there city-girl 

i crawl in  with Tom Ford’s  sin-in-a-bottle  clutched firmly in hand    soon i

forget the deaths of some sweet ladies we know   i danced the tarantella with

one   a mere 2 weeks ago

inside the pony i am warm+wet+bloody   it is o so familiar    now an urban-girl

revenant?  a pony soaked Persephone whose name is Spring in 7 languages?

one might think aviva an expert on:  resurrection!   reinvention!    think again

this spotted pony   is growing on me   i may not come out until Spring    or Fall

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Almost Spring 2016

ICE

I LOVE A GOOD ICE STORM  LET ME COUNT THE WAYS

Poet’s lumbersexual beau insisted on shovelling snow on the

walks adjacent to at least 3 neighbours homes   Even the one

who didn’t lift a finger last pellet-storm as poet lay forlorn and

twitching after lifting a Poinsettia

Bushwhacker’s winterzealotry  appears disloyal   but then he does

hail from 179 Royal Ave. Winnipeg MAN  where real men eat squirrels

with bare hands  if necessary

Today poetsicle dreams of Inn at rented lake  where poetry flows like

manna from Heaven  +the fine last lines you have come to demand   fall

from this pen liked greased hogs at the rodeo

However  at this hour: what is bizarre   what is oblique   the revelation   obtuse

+twisted    That which grows out of the poem  by itself  (you should live so long!)

and all littlemisscan’tbewrong poet has to do  is sit there  and catch it escaping

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Almost Spring 2016

NASAL

THAT CRAZY LITTLE THING CALLED LOVE  IN A NASAL SPRAY

Researchers at U of Zurich have developed an  oxytocin  nasal spray

as an adjunct to couples counselling   It increases positive communication

and reduces the stress hormone  cortisol   during conflict   Happy Stepford

couples everywhere!  Couples therapy no longer anathema   It will all be so

easy   With no heavy lifting of: complexes  +projections  +affairs!  

Think Huxley’s  Soma  in a nose spray  Except that everyone in the Brave New

World was so: happy  +calm  +repressed  that the Savage   a non-Soma user

hung himself  first chance   Love is supposed to be messy  Supposed to be filled

with loss  remorse  +pain    It is the glue after all  holding this human tribe together

And on the other side of the abyss   there is dopamine induced bliss!

All of this  is about to change  First with the Love Nasal Spray  next with Nanaya.co

A free website that helps you  through algorithmic-magic   decide among other things

if it’s time to break up  +meet a batter match  perhaps years down the road    Leave

nothing to chance    Take no risks   What do you think?   Send me your thoughts at:

#whybotherhavingasoul

Now all of this may just be propaganda in pushing the naked ape toward populating

Mars   Every time you use your oxytocin nasal spray  or contribute to the: Algorithms

Are For Dummies  pool   the human conscience dissolves  one drop at a time  Making

it possible for your off-spring to board the Mars Shuttle +jettison you  and your

greying minions    A journey from which   there is no return 

My young friend recently said:  the Mars Mission is a young man’s game   I heartily

agreed   For where I am going  assisted or not:  Mars  +colliding black holes   +

gravitational waves  are child’s play

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All right then, said the savage defiantly, I’m claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to

mention, the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and

cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in

constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the

right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.  There was a long silence.

I claim them all, said the Savage at last.

Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream

of revolution.

(Aldous Huxley  Brave New World  1931)

Deep Winter  2016