songanddancegirl

CHILDREN

HE TIGHTENED HIS GRIP ON THE CHILDREN

Virgil Gus Grissom  1st casualty of the 1st seven astronauts

of U.S. manned space flight   Gus died in 67  perished in a

fire aboard Apollo 1   All were: superb physical specimens

with genius IQ’s  none taller than 5 ft. 11   the dimensions of

the Mercury capsule

Gus looks older than the rest   He looks like a friend who died

John Glenn is the only one of the 7  still alive  Godspeed Gus Grissom  

Posed in spacesuits  silver with many zippers + round white helmets

Smiling faces  robot-men  except for Gus Grissom  serious  +intense

Hand of Mcfate on his left shoulder     It is 1959

14 yrs. had passed since the great liberation   NASA hopeful after rape

+pillage of planet    70 yrs. now come & gone  Buchenwald survivors lay

flowers  They wear their striped pyjamas  +one man his striped cap   His

home held 250,000   More than 56,000 died there  from  torture   +medical

experiments    +starvation

Next to these images today  our National newspaper displays  3 girls

hanging out of a window  one clutching a small stuffed cat  all looking down

at fellow students  U of Nairobi  who jumped to deaths in mistaken terrorist

attack    Felix Muriuki a 3rd year student said: I could see students jumping  

one of them landed on his head

Now move your eyes down the page  right smack in the middle of all this  in

red+blue  is Hillary Clinton: The deck is still stacked in favour of those at the

top  she said   Her strategy in the next race for President will be to avoid a sense

of celebrity  

Despite wealth+fame Hillary cares about ordinary people:  I want to be their

champion!   Her blue hawk-eyes may belie a just folks sincerity   but more likely

they scream: Don’t fuck with me  and especially  no questions about Benghazi

I leave you with the fresh faced men of Mercury 7  explorers of the heavens   And

the news that: today’s largest manned space flight will be one way  86,000 Canadians

have signed up so far    They unlike Hillary   are proud to be celebrities

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She is plump. Her beak is open.  She breathes hot hawk breath on my face.

Formidable talons.  Sleek.   (H is for Hawk   Helen Macdonald  2014)

Simpler Times   Mercury 7   1959

RIP  Gus Grissom

Spring 2015   

NUMBERED

OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS

creep into house after dusk  drop bikes on floor

of garage  cat with kittens  eyes glinting  it’s 50 yrs.

since  +you still remember this   grab a kitten in the

morning on the way to school  take a long scratch to

back of hand   worth it   something alive in your pocket

+in the coat closet

more alive than teacher droning on about the Voyageurs

canoes  traplines  James freakin Bay   stole your mother’s

red silk robe for the play on French Canada!  teacher impressed

you knew how a bishop dressed   not so your mother   glamorous

montrealer   hats+gloves+gowns

later at u of t studying shakespeare   a mid summer night’s dream

mother’s gown dressed the Faerie Queen   professor patricia moodie

stuck her hand inside  tickled your fancy  +read the label in near ecstasy

by GOD she cried   it’s a fucking Schiaparelli !

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Spring 2015

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

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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

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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

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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

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*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

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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

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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

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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