songanddancegirl

BUBBLING

THAT MOMENT OF BUBBLING ALCHEMY MARKED THE ENTRANCE

INTO ANOTHER DIMENSION

What was mangled?  Or more to the point  What was not mangled?

Moot   Cyclist mangled  breaking through to the otherside   Bicycle

beyond mangled   Crushed+bent+ground into pavement   Ditto helmet

Ditto pedestrian’s joie de vivre   Giant truck  fender mangled   Smaller car

tangled around itself   Glass+organic matter  everywhere   Cyclist will no

longer need glasses in his dreams

On Sunday  a 5 yr. old boy  said to me: do you wear glasses in the shower?

do you wear glasses to sleep?  dead people don’t need glasses in their dreams

He is something of a mystic  dolorous eyes+wizard’s grin  says he wants to be

an accountant   Just moments before that crash  I fingered fall finery   local

haberdashery   Heat wave breaking records worldwide   45 in Abu Dhabi  some

combusting spontaneously

They say the Rapture is heralded by fire+brimstone  Horoscope says: you will be 

redeemed  by writhing carnality   Sounds semi-rapturous to me   Young clerk in

store gazes into my eyes   You remind me of the ginger in American Horror Story

His colleague twitters  My smile grows crocodile  When they burned her at the stake

she screamed  Balenciaga!    Do people say this shit to you?

As a hellbent scribe  one becomes the ear    ear in the gutter  ear in the sky    There

is a 5,000 yr.old language  Cuneiform  The word for wisdom  is ear   After the crash

there were no sounds to hear   Tomorrow  imaginary chains  dragging behind the new

ghost  +tears evaporating  where Queen meets Beverly

__

Summer 2015

FICTION

DIALECTICS OF A RETROSPECTIVELY CONSTRUCTED FICTION

outside the inside    the familiar +wet   without warning   low tide

now into a series of houses   gimme the illusion of shelter    in a

607 page tome   a girl is born over+over again   on a february day

in 1910   lives through 2 wars   dies in the blitz    4 times or more

carnage in London   crawls across a sludgey baby   in bomb shelter

clothes blown off of bodies   ½ a woman hangs from rafters  in a

flowered dress   some physicists say reality is all in the mind   a self

scripted creation    are all acts of: promising   praying   marrying   self

performances?   if so what are the moral implications?

it is highly likely mathematically  that we perform this life repetitively

in a palimpsest of identity   in the book she suicides purposefully  in order

to be reborn +kill Adolph   remembering bits of former selves  in murky

déjà vu     what would you undo?

tonight there will be a Perseid meteor shower   a ladder will appear over

the hot-tub   you can escape the longslide   but you must go alone   today

a boy told me he’s writing a story about a man   who after a mishap   is

trapped in a spaceship  bound for Mars    it’s about lonliness

I ask: 1) was he lonely before he boarded the ship?   2) will that help him

with the long red days of Martian solitude?   He isn’t sure   He smiles+winks

+his freckles form a sentence:  Poet!   take the ladder

__

(it is a fact that depressed individuals are known to await the apocalypse in

a state of dead calm)

Late Summer  2015

TISSUE

A HIGHLY COMPLICATED CRESCENT OF TISSUE

curls around the centre of the brain  the striatum  some

call it  the villain    desire central     commander of the

dopamine-pump   human cocaine   crashing through veins

we share these  deeply wrapped  parts of the brain with lower

animals   going all the way back to fish

desire   the cry of a soul calling for attention  obliquely   but

obstinately   pursuing what it hungers for   like an iceberg

laying in wait   in the depths of the collective   power   mammon  

sex   world domination      a blind guide    commandeering the self

tests with rodents have confirmed much of this    who is with us?

who is against us?   kill what we fear   this week in  kinjia india

villagers dragged 5 women witches out of their homes +beat them

to death  with iron rods    50 people were arrested

Once the desire circuitry is lit up  it becomes more+more difficult to

find the off switch   until there isn’t one   amok abounds   a child sized

robot is left for dead in a philly gutter  leading to an outpouring of grief

while human children are not safe in yards  laneways   certain schools +

choirs     the earth means something different now

__

Summer 2015

STRAD

HE BOUGHT ME A STRAD (IVARIUS)

An entire Park   20 hectares   A not bad looking

bloke asks: Mind if I share that bench?   I give

him my most demanding deathstare   Had I Darth’s

sabre he would be a headless cyclist   Bike leaning

against hundred yr. old tree   Bloke cozies up to me

There is a squirrel with an orange face +underbelly

It too is creeping closer   Turns out bloke reeks of BEER

+has an oozing sore on his leg

Once  before I sat in parks  +freezing cafes  earning an unliving

There was a man who bought me a Strad   at a silent auction

Another woman might have learned to play  or at least strummed

it on occasion   I preferred to keep it sheathed   +counted other

women in my sleep    Sheep to the un-sheathed slaughter

Was Stradivari a cad too?  Thousands of violins have been made

with his imprint   Most are copies   When the real artifact comes

along one would hope for a working bullshit meter  +at least some

facility with wind instruments  if not violins

__

Late Summer 2015

AUTUMN

POMPATUS OF PESSIMISSIM   APPROACHES AUTUMN

A beautiful sun-browned  longhipster   Good bones   1/2 leg indigo

tatt    Wobbly kid drops biscuit onto grass  Mother in floppy straw

hat   It’s okay +hands it back   Our baby-bulldog laid up with beaver

fever from eating the grass   This is not a pristine field in Tobermory

Sparkly cardboard wolf  howls at the soon harvest moon   in the sky in

daytime   How did it come so soon?   2 yoga Goddesses  scrap+lick  upon

said grass   Downward dogs    Tongues flirt with beaver virus too    This is

not only  not a field in Tobermory  it is not a place you will find the Gangster

of Love   anytimesoon

I know a woman who has sworn off parks   She favours white peaches+believes in

empathy  At dinner last week she cried over Hitchbot’s demise   Vandalized beyond

repair in Philadelphia  I will not tell her that a hunkered-woman with snaky hair  just

queried: Can I talk to you?   NO    No?    NO     Now likely circling back  to bludgeon

me

__

Hitchbot: a Canadian social experiment designed to travel the world. It is immobile

+relies on the kindness of strangers. Recently spent a week in a heavy metal band

+had its portrait painted in the Netherlands. Final photos will not be released in

order to protect young fans. 

Autumn 2015 slouching toward Toronto  to be born

KILL

DR. PALMER  WHY DID YOU KILL CECIL ?

Parks confuse people   Free open green places  where the

personal-space rules  are hazy    A man has just tripped

over my crossed leg    Blue suede 70’s inspired boot  akimbo

That’s how close he crept!    My glare boring into his citified

soul-hole   Empty now   Pan Am hell left too many glassy-eyed

Many more stupefied over $50,000,000 Olympic bid    Over there

the pervy park auteur  is making a documentary about a comely hipster’s

crotch    Seriously    Now 3 more city-dwellers on my tail    One woman so

close I smell last night’s sausages    Oh give me a home where the buffalo

roam  +parks with corrals+queues    And a world with one less dentist from

Minneapolis  who hates lions+tigers+bears

__

Summer  2015

WHERE

WHERE IS EVERYBODY?

Think of the famous Fermi Paradox:

1) humans are the only intelligent life in the universe

2) advanced civilizations destroy themselves

3) we are in a galactic zoo

4) aliens hide in plain site

I bet you forget that we are but a speck in the vastness

beyond the sheltering sky   Most days thinking this is all

there is   But have no fear!  There is a new telescopic camera

One that will measure: abundance+vegetation growth  +ozone

All for 100 million U.S.   provided by a Russian   Yuri Milner

When the abundance numbers come in  +they are expected to be

staggering   will anxiety+depression  plummet?   Will we revel in our

abundance?   Perhaps we will embrace the  Sapient  become the wise

Homo   And realize that: sloth+greed  wrath+pride  lust+envy+gluttony

hide in plain sight    The aliens within us?

Or  the sine qua non of what it means to be HUMAN?

Except for Hermann Meuter   Whale researcher  Not he a petri-dish

in which aliens might flourish   Stroked  +whispered to a stranded Orca

for 36 hrs   though thousands of seals made sounds like laughter   I have

never heard a seal vocalize  said Hermann   

And somewhere out there  beyond the 5000 exoplanets discovered to date

by the Kepler telescope  laughter is building +picking up steam   It will take

at least 3 billion light years to reach the Blue Planet  where a deep and twisted

silence will have reigned for millennia  +the last laugh+the first laugh will

be united

__

Summer 2015

RAT

RAT RACE BLUES

Bell Canada lady asks: No work today?   Big Sister

1984    This call is being monitored  for your sanity

Yes home today   a writer  so lots of time for Bell+Rogers

And a dip into call centre dystopia  where there never

was an Arab Spring   +GiGi Gryce streams endlessly

Dizzy  Thelonius +Max  banned    Photos of Louis prohibited

The man’s smile could start a revolution   Instead drones monitor

us endlessly   Our phone centre whisperings  muted cries for HELP

Today it is a blistering 34 celsius  hottest day in local history   Barack

is in Addis Ababa   +will move his worn smile to Chicago come 2017

Bell Canada lady: Save Us From Mike Huckabee   whose oven-rhetoric

(there is a boldness +clarity to it  Mike protests)   is an affront to common

decency   It brings to mind  Hellboy:  Regaliceratops peterhewsi   a species

of dinosaur with a large mouth + tiny horns

__

Summer 2015

CREEP

NO SOUL LEFT TO SEE THE RUTHLESS JUNGLE CREEP IN

How is it possible for your history to disappear so absolutely

Your home to be devoured  by desperation    +indifference

Meaninglessness the new religion  With all information at your

fingertips  no need for study  for rigour   or  imagination

Mortis the order of the day

But wait!  You still have the doll with one ear in a Van Gough yellow

dress  +Blue Period eyes   Take her to the doll hospital on a crisp Fall

day  +they will make her you new again   With burnished cheeks  +ears

galore  she will sit on the shelf of your great-great niece who heard you

were alive once

__

INFAMY

GIRLS OF SUBURBAN INFAMY

We were spirited girls with minds of our own

Our parents hesitated to leave us alone  at Caribbean

hotels+Huron cottages    Young Nassau bellhops  chasing

us down carpeted corridors   Local toughs smoking beneath

cottage windows   Inhaling 2nd hand Camels+countryboy

dares   Obscenities wafting through humid air    We were

fearless-sunburned   +immortal    Portal to bargirl days opens

wider   Crawl through  and keep on going

__

Summer 2015   for dena