songanddancegirl

ANIMAL

I AM NOT  AN ANIMAL

Maybe there is a limit to how much of a good thing

is a good thing   There is a car in my neighbourhood

with every kind of plastic flower glued to it   I have

never seen the person who inhabits it   Surely she has

risen above this melancholy   +can hook me up with the

Oracle  just beyond the gate

__

Have you forgotten what we were like then   when we were

still first rate  and the day came fat with an apple in it’s mouth

(Frank O’ Hara  Animals  1950   dead at 40  crushed by a Jeep) 

Oracle of Delphi

Spring  2015

REAPING

THE REAPING  &  THE SOWING

time  love  death  religion  life   What if

these are real  +not just illusions?  What if

wild men who caught and sang the sun in

flight  did not go gentle?

Somerset said: dying is a dull+dreary affair  

my advice to you is have nothing whatever to

do with it    History will keep grasping for you

anyway

The poet Clive James (Sentenced to Life)

dying of leukemia+emphysema   He with bandaged

head where carcinoma radiated  said: I was faithless

sly  deceitful  I regret it all

Clarity seems to unite the death memoirists    Clive writes

in a recent poem: when did you ever see so much sweet beauty?

Why wait to smell Mr. Reaper’s acrid breath?  Take the cutting

shears to your life   leave only what is vital    Oliver Sacks  the

psychiatrist with multiple metastases in his liver says: I want to

travel!

So can the living learn to think like the dying?  Self-flagellation only

works while flagellating  Egos are almost immune to death  otherwise

who would get out of bed?  And episodic amnesia is exactly what it is

cracked up to be    Each day brings another shot at immortality

the day they will find the cure

ban the bomb   resurrect ronald reagan

who finally banned the neutron bomb he

considered the perfect death-ray!

What if your favourite places: the last bohemia sinking into the sea

a whaling island packed with Range Rovers until Labour Day  exerted

a magnetic pull  greater than your  grey city with dirty mounds of melting

ice +dog shit everywhere  The one that has an iron grip on your soulless glory

Cry UNCLE   or   gnaw off your left foot   + RUN

__

I am taking percoset to sleep, and I have

become an addict, and don’t care!! 

Drugs are wonderful. Looking forward to Spring!

(excerpt from 97 yr. old mother-in-law’s diary)

Spring  2015

WASTELAND

WASTELAND  O  SUBURBIA

down in the ravine  an empty giant’s cabin

he walked across the americas to winter in

miami beach   family ghosts sitting in the trees

family dreams ford the muddy stream   smells

like prehistory

duck+chicks scatter as you run wildchild+mad

to catch feathered friends   our 2 fathers + 1 mother

fertilize flowers+seeds in a grassy field nearby

it’s 2015   ravine with bulldozers   adult children

of eden-dwelling family  inch closer to eternity

once-girl in a wading pool   lightening in the sky

certain she can fly

so  is it a circle  or a straight line?

_

Spring  2015

DEATH

DEATH  THE CANNIEST CAREER MOVE

James Dean  Cobain  Joplin  Morrison  Basquiat

There is even a term Basquiatiana   His blackness

didn’t hurt  says the Globe & Mail   Nor did his 

wild-child urban noble savage mystique  a wild pet

for the recently cultivated white  said one art critic

And though he lived on the street for a while  he was in fact

an upper middle class private school child  whose father drove

a Mercedes  He has 2000 sq. ft. at the A.G.O. this Spring   Also

in the building are the photos of   Henryk Ross  Lodz Ghetto:

dead bodies on the ground  children in carts being carted to camps

& the man who saved the Torah!

Notice the yellow stars sewn onto chests & backs   the better to

identify you Jew  especially when running   Let us unite these 2

artist’s works  One a visible minority  the other invisible   Let us

place a yellow star on the forehead of Basquiat’s self-portrait

Black dreads  white slits for eyes   +the star of David

__

Spring  2015

BITCHED

WE ARE ALL BITCHED FROM THE START*

They find each other through reincarnation   Boy Lama

knows old Lama’s favourite cereal  +the number of raised

moles on his grandfather’s cheek   On this day in 1959 our

Dalai Lama arrived in Dharamshala with 80,000 followers!

They’d all walked over the Himalayas   an exodus sans the

unleavened bread

Dalai looked geeky big rims black lace-up oxfords white socks

+broad child-smile   He was bitched from the start   Communists

want to kill him still   +his boy Lama replacement rots in prison

Were you bitched from the start? Drop me a line with details   & I

will immortalize you sometime soon (#bitchinglorystories)  No doubt

that I was bitched   All poets are  So is every butcher you will ever meet

My high school BFF’s dad Lou Goodfield was a butcher   +a ginger

This July it will be 3 yrs. since my notebook was stolen   cover gold

+filigree   Words dredged out of swamps +songbook from hell    One

angry poem about Neil Young’s vanity project Granddaddy   Shouted

obscenities all night from a box at the ACC  2003   Bitched most definitely

__

*Hemingway in a letter to Fitzgerald

Spring 2015

BEAST

THE  BEAUTIFUL  BEAST    LIFE

beautiful + cruel according to cg jung who knew

a thing or 2 about the vicissitudes   he invented the

collective unconscious at the burgholzli asylum where

dementia praecox  ruled    down they fled into the

labyrinth  without ariadne’s spool   the minotaur is

not your friend  modern hominid

janice stein professor emeritus +crone said: the middle

east is on fire  so is the globe   she lamented a time when

earth was warm under our feet  we swam in rivers cold+deep

+there was new everything  

the light is silvery-strange  an un-named woman rides alone on

a horse   something is different about this day   horse now flying

upside down   lands on woman’s legs     silence in the meadows

how many minutes does it take?  millennia to crawl out of lava-pools

+riverbeds   in seconds  she will never live by the sea

in nimrud the islamic state loots ancient treasures   a 3,000 yr. old

site on the banks of the tigris   john kerry says: no terrorist can re-write

history   but as all good fascists know: demoralize the demoralized  +the

world is your oyster   colonies of ants with complex hierarchies re-build

the hill  in it’s exact configuration  while bamiyan buddhas +the winged

bulls of mosul will become embedded in the visions of  25th century

psychotics    everywhere

__

my sympathy with all creatures was strictly limited to warm blooded animals

the only exceptions among the cold blooded vertebrates were frogs and toads

because of their resemblance to human beings   CG Jung 

Spring  2015

OF A THING

OF A THING WHICH COULD NOT BE PUT BACK

She approaches the door in leathers  cottons+denim  Brittle

rain slanting down on bone-chilling March day   Does not

head out  into fray   Closes the door sits on chair  upholstered

with grapes on vines  Foot beats time to American Roots music

Fiddle sorrowful  banjo plucky    She does NOT move

Early spring inertia brought on by news:  500 women+children

kidnapped  yet again   Boko Haram taking over the world  one

village at a time   Souleymane Ali  local trader quoted B.H. :

They are slaves so we’re taking them because they belong to us

His wife & daughter not excluded

There is no protection  by the army of  Goodluck Jonathan   On the

road to Damask 100 bodies lay  many with throats slit by retreating

madmen  And from their desert prisons Ceres is a beacon  46,000 k. away

Ancient asteroid shines a light on plight of 500 newest slaves

Obama said he’d find  the girls  but can we blame him for all our ills?

While big dim +obscure Ceres (a.k.a.: apt description of G.L. Jonathan)

is about to be explored by NASA’s Dawn Mission     Would it require

rocket-science to locate 500 people?   Infrared cameras operate in the

dark at wavelengths as long as 14,000 nanometers!

Yet we are driven to explore rocky+primitive way stations to God?  Planets

that have not changed much over the past 4 billion years    Ceres is 2.8

times farther from the sun than earth  & is likely stone cold   Of course you

know  warm hearts beat all over the Nigerian hinterland

What more is there?  The last traces of dinner gone   glasses washed   &

gleaming  on this soon  barely remembered day   When hundreds of small

feet marched  on their way  to guerrilla camps  +new husbands

__

Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the 

deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they

hummed of mystery.   Cormac McCarthy  The Road

Spring  2015

SHE

SHE  LOOKS  SO  HAPPY  &  SEEMS  SO  SAD

Self-promotion is the new spirituality   Many whisper

about passion-projects in dark alleyways  where the neo

bohemians pee on graffiti masterpieces  Everyone has a

site or 2   numerous links  & at least 3 business cards   The

whole thing reeks of Lena Dunham  +her grating gyrating

GIRLS

Today I met 2 prophets:  #1 was working on assemblages

with her father  an upholsterer   They will revolutionize

lounging   #2 was a reasonable facsimile of a 13 yr. old girl

+likely 33    She prophesied the return of confession as a

way of life

Bring me your  self-promo-weary   +we will build a

bonfire of multiple business cards  bullshit  &hormones

Especially dopamine   The one that makes you see everyone

as far more interesting +attractive than they really  are

Including: Lena  Obama    +me

__

She’s a little lost girl in her own little world

She looks so happy but she seems so sad

ah ah oh yea oh oh oh yea    

Joey Ramone   The Ramones  1974-1996

(Past members: Dee Dee Ramone Johnny Ramone

Tommy Ramone Marky Ramone Richie Ramone 

Elvis Ramone C.J. Ramone)

Spring  2015

HEART

I AM  BARNEY’S HEART

Barney Clark a Seattle dentist became the

1st recipient of an artificial heart (The Jarvik 7)

It was March 23, 1983   Only catch was that Barney

was attached to an air compressor for his last  112

days

His dreams were filled with childhood memories

though strangely the love of his life  Lola Loman

morphed into an hourglass shaped robot  who

mopped Barney’s brow  and stroked his chest as he

slid in & out of consciousness

In the end Lola carried Barney  Jarvik’s body  over

hill & dale to a grassy knoll in Yellowknife  Where to

this day they watch the Aurora play in the night sky

over Blachford Lake   Many say that Barney’s sacrifice

was too great

__

I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and

life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing

animation upon lifeless matter.  

Mary Shelley  Frankenstein  1818 

John Lehmann  Aurora Yellowknife  April 2014

SPRING  2015  for Lee Atkins author of: I AM JOE’S HEART 1967

SKUNK

DEAD SKUNK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD

Walking home through skunk verdant streets   My

brother asked me to write: You know  More upbeat 

I quoted Dylan (Bob not Thomas)  another dark+

depressed Russian Jew    Who knew that being a poet

would require so much peeling back of the skin  a ritual

daily circumcision

As much as I try   daffodils+sunshine  elude me   And if

you really want someone to blo-sunshine  I know a good

colonic clinic around the corner    But maybe it’s just a

question of place  BIG SUR seemed so much closer to the

heavens   Easier to believe you might catch lightening in

a bottle  up there

Down here when we see a Dolphin   Messenger of the Gods

by God!  What stands out are the scars  etched like stars  all

over the laughing mammalian body   Down here the shredder

takes its toll  all the shilling of one’s soul: Your book is a thing

of beauty  But hard to tell if it’s a journal or a calendar  without

any writing on the cover  

Why not OPEN IT  Giftshop lady?   Poems will float out + fill

this dingy city   Why daffodils will sprout from every orifice!   You

know  even though female Orcas stop breeding at 40   they live into

their 90’s  & are much more likely to be the LEADERS of the pod

Just another mammalian cousin mystery   while you struggle under

the weight of your 2 legged legacy   of apeman misery

In pre-historic times Dolphins were terrestrial   and before you

were born  your foetus swam+breathed  a creature of the sea   Let’s

build a world where anxiety has no currency  One where it harmlessly

hovers  +we grab hold of fantastic  and run for the hills

Hello out there    Hello

__

BIG SUR

The season of dancing was endless  +many who wished they could

would never be able to stop    Delirium Waltz   Mark Strand  1998

I am going where I have already been.    Shooter  Cincinnati Kid 

4 days til Spring 2015        for my 3 brothers