songanddancegirl

AL

NECROPSY OF AL

Sticky note on cover of Al Purdy’s: rooms for rent

in the outer planets  1962-1996    Note says: go see

Al Purdy’s statue  Queen’s Park   So here I sit  at

stone Al’s feet    Al Purdy  Poet  1918-2000  carved

into concrete

Long bobbed hair  all in black   shirt sleeves rolled up

Cool deshabille   Al gazes off into now ochre trees   That’s

poets for you  autoerotic pencil flailing  in lonely parks +

freezing cafes

This poet sits on Al’s left knee  gold Chanel shoes glinting

in November rays   Al missed Justin’s swearing-in today  by

15 yrs.  Don’t know how impressed he’d be with the ceremony

There was Sophie G.T. clutching her heart   blonde locks

flapping in the golden girl breeze

2 tiny throat singers all shock+awe  as our Governor General broke

into loud gaffaws   Al won the GG award twice in his lifetime  Born in

Wooler Ontario  died in Sidney B.C.  Someone called his poetry: effortless 

gratuitous magic   Not a poet certainly   Now I wipe word-sweat off of

stone Al’s brow   if he could move he’d surely seduce me

Al thought love: a comic disease  yet I kiss his cold cheek  + squirm on

his knee   Too late to resist becoming poet-cliché   Sun now setting  time

to climb off of statue   When Al Purdy groans  +hauls me back  2 french bullies

begin to howl   as I succumb to advances of giant stone Al

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she stands above him as a stone goddess   weeping tears and honey

she is half his age and far older  and how can a man tell his wife this?

(Married Man’s Song 1970  Al Purdy)

Fall 2015

FA

PSYCHO KILLER QU’EST-CE QUE C’EST  FA FA FA FA FA FA FA FA

a smooth girl sitting ramrod straight  against a tree

albino squirrel dangerously close to me   as i prepare to

bolt momentarily  over there 2 topless men spar  is it a

hipster thing?  their jeans ripped oh so perfectly   yes you

might die from beauty  in my park today

many of us hope Justin legalizes pot in the coming months

the governor of colorado has said: no new people became users

its just old hippie resumers   specking out my vaporizer   going

to add buzzy-buddha to night time anjeo ritual    these are the

kinds of things you look forward to  when as Pete Townsend said:

all my friends are dead

late last year a woman at starbucks whispered to my brother:

my dreams they aren’t as empty  as my conscience seems to be

he married her on the spot  this his 2nd marriage born at starbucks

1st wife a psycho killer from poughkeepsie

but then  he did have a wicked jew-fro at 9  +lived for anything jimmy

hendrix said   when father asked him what he’d like to be  he said: black

Now gold wolf howling in the setting sun  park going dark  time to run

the whole of a story is never told

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Fall  2015

DEAD

SO THIS IS THE DAY OF THE DEAD

We talked of tombstones  + a blue dinosaur  rising from

my father’s grave   He couldn’t be saved   her husband of

23 yrs.  Wheelchair bound for the final 4   went down for

the count in his early 60’s   Steve had small hands

Carl Jung noted that diminutive hands prophecy  an early

demise   Now beside me  astride a bungee rope  a guy balances

spideyesque   +on his T-shirt it says: fuck life  fuck death   Sam

Beckett would not protest

Yesterday at the Beckett Trilogy  in a darkened theatre  coughers

coughed  Drowning out the sound of disembodied lips  Lady beside

me shouted: Silencio!   Cough  rheumy +wet  turned to choke

Get that rat bastard out of here  I broke   I broke  I broke   Beckett

is all about  repetition

The longer a man stays in a form not his own  the greater is the peril

of losing oneself  permanently    With depression there is the fear that

should you get clear  you may leave some of your best parts  in the

blues dumpster    This is not necessarily a bad thing  especially if

mundanities eat your soul  +chitchat is anathema

Now spiderman beside me juggles coloured globes   All things have a

name  I implore you: discover the name of your shadow  and yours

shall be: my get out of jail free card  +my bullshit meter   even though

I need them so desperately  Today China changed its one child only policy

+ the masses will now be allowed 3      Bullshit meter   tingling

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Dia De Los Muertos  2015

CHRONOLOGY

BEDAZZLED ARE WE BY THE SUPERSTITION OF CHRONOLOGY

My swimming badge from 1965  turning yellow (Tri-Bell Deep-Ender)

Slim girl doing a nose dive into azure pool  studded with bourgeois wives

in crocheted bikinis  One the mother of future comedian  She is sweet+

caramel tanned   Ash blonde long gone  His father too   Stocky-hairy   5 ft.

three   Not a little scary  with stogie jutting from his mouth

Deep-Ender girl still alive out there  somewhere  Did her parents create her?

Or did she create them?  Does the past change the present?  Or the present

change the past?  Is chronology a fallacy  or does life happen simultaneously?

(send your answers to: #reinventme)   She walks to the bank in strip plaza

down the street   Model-mother from command post in bed  sends her out into

brink   Bring me the money

Note of introduction in palm of girlhand  cheque squished in pocket   Navy

trench  yellow London-look boots  Girl From Uncle lookalike   Brown pig-

tails with purple tie  sit dusty on her desk now   The body does not lie

Young banker un-scrunches cheque  +calls fabulous mother: Describe her 

he barks  Slim girl blushes dark   Banker goofy-grinned:  Yes she is!  

Girl knows  just what mother told him   Both girl+mother live into future  though

aging brains deliver past when least expect it   Mother told banker:  She is beautiful  

And now as we pass through the final inferno  Deep-Ender girl clutching mother’s

eulogy begins to read: She was a star at 19  a rare beauty  born way ahead of her time

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Samhain  2015  a time when the veil between the earthly & spirit worlds is thin

HAPPY

WHY CAN’T SOMEONE MAKE A SPACE MOVIE

WITHOUT A HAPPY ENDING ?

said my 22 yr. old  film school nephew  as I was growling

about Ridley Scott’s: THE MARTIAN    An American feel

good flick for deathdenyers + Hollywood hi-flyers   Complete

with Abba tracks   + Bowie’s: STARMAN   (WTF?)

Had it been SPACE ODDITY  I’d have walked out  +begun stalking

Ridley immediately   Dear Ridley Scott:  why not make a space film

about a place where all of our dead-loved-ones live  except   the only

way to get there is by dying   Too real?  Too much of a downer?

Depress the masses who self-medicate so passionately?

Anesthetize me Mr. Stoli   Mrs. Skinnygirl Chardonnay   I guess that is

what happy endings are for  Though in truth  the effect may be paradoxical

If you were bold enough  brave enough  NOT to candy coat it  Ridley  we may

get so used to the idea of death  it might become the other birth   In the same

way that violent video games helped prepare us for Littleton  Sandyhook  +Umpqua

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FALL 2015

LOVE

TAINTED LOVE

There is a line of poets waiting to squeeze

into the hole where the wolf sits curled   But

I bet once they get you in there  they mess with

your infrastructure  and tomorrow you will sound

bite randomly   Let us hope not as daftly as the

Trudeau boy since Monday

In this room at the A.G.O. there is a squashed blue

bird resting on a glove  under cellophane   & an ex-

friend in red shoes +bag   1/2 the woman she might

have been   Charlie Brown mouth  glumchum zig zag

as usual

Back to the bird   He lays there mournfully   not the bird

he used to be   (now she spies me +begins filming with her

cell  Tonight when the moon is high  she will project my image

onto her bedroom wall  +stick pins into my private sorrows)

On the way in today  over on Beverly St.  beside the park where

I have witnessed 3 sex acts   a lone woman slouches  Her eyes

watery+hopeful  gazing in my direction   Gold shoes from Vegas

veritable Moloch magnets   By + by I wear the red chord of Ruth

It protects me quite nicely from tainted love & scorn   Not so much

old battle-axes   + fragile narcissists

_

(As she swam out to sea someone cried   Help me!  

Fucking narcissists  shouted my analyst  +swam the other way)

Fall 2015

OUTASIGHT

THE LIBERALS ARE BACK & WE THINK IT’S OUTASIGHT

Fall canopy floating to earth all around   Hoarfrost on the

ground Trinity Bellwoods Park   Gold wolf plaintive howl

Hunger in the eyes of scratching men  One practising Tai Chi

far too close to me   Bruce Springsteen needs a new plane  asking

us to shell out dollars again   for re-treads of: The River   Can’t

we retire too?

Perhaps get through  this election day with conscience intactus

Everybody’s gloating over voting stratagems   In 3rd year Poly Sci

Professor Smith of the natty bow tie  said: In the West we have 

delusions of democracy  while in the Bloc they know freedom’s

just another word for  Bolshevik  Menshevik  Putinik

Tomorrow the lilting rhetoric of Justin Trudeau will ring out across

the Nation  sans the pirouette   This son lacks imagination  Spouter of

safe diatribes  inch to the left  inch to the right   The fountain in the park

is stuck on ON today  water more pristine than anything we have seen  since

August

Soon the voting station at the park’s edge will close  +West Queen Westers

flock home in droves  Tonight top-knots will unravel as craft ale flows like

a River   In Tuesday’s pale dawn light  lumberjacks+sailors will lament   while

the rest of Canada hold hands   Stratagems be damned

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Fall 2015

WORD

WHEN I USE A WORD IT MEANS JUST WHAT I CHOOSE IT TO MEAN

NEITHER MORE NOR LESS  (*Humpty Dumpty  Alice in Wonderland)

I thought that I might like to be the Writer in Residence at

Al Purdy’s place  in Ameliasburgh  Prince Edward County

Past tense   All of those un-poemed words floating around

+Eurithe’s un-moaned moans   Ditto Al’s jism on the wall

Now they will never accept my application  though Al would

applaud the word jism  He was not one to shy away from the

vernacular  “This poetry is the voice of the Canadian vernacular” 

If you say so Margaret Atwood   But who you calling  King of the

Vernacular  Peg?   Queen of Dystopia  High+Mighty

Al Purdy+Charles Bukowski enjoyed a correspondence filled with

vomitous pith   Sometimes one must kneel astride the porcelain

in order to kiss the sky

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And you  you bitch  no irritating questions re love and permanence

Only an unrolling lifetime here between your rocking thighs

 (Al Purdy  Song of The Impermanent Husband)

I don’t know of any good living poets. But there’s this tough son of a bitch

up in Canada that walks the line.  (Bukowski on Purdy)

Fall 2015

PEARLS

CASTING PEARLS BEFORE

focus  focus  buddy  focus  he is 3

she videos his every move  he will

never not perform for the camera

always be self important  tiny narcissist

in training  surly when applause is drowned

out by authenticity  never quite there  blank

stare of the underthetabletexters   you think

you have fooled me?  i have been saying the

same word over+over again for 46 seconds

& it rhymes with bloodsucker in a not wholly

tangential way

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Fall 2015

CRAZY

WHO’S GOT ERE A RIGHT TO SAY WHEN A MAN IS CRAZY & WHEN HE AINT

fall deshabille  all around me   today in golden shoes

+halo  bordello dorothy   black fishnets  seams askew

man in slippers slinks behind me  slack jawed  very

As I Lay Dying   if i had a son i’d name him Vardamon

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My Mother is a fish. 

Vardamon Bundren 8 yrs.

 As I Lay Dying  William Faulkner  1930

Fall 2015