songanddancegirl

HUMAN

I  AM  A  HUMAN    RIGHT?

People often forget that  says Justin Bieber

in an age when what it means to be human is

in a state of ill-repute   A horrifying litany of

daily statistics: Sunni ISIS militants  consider

200 million Shiites apostates in need of slaughter

Or North Darfur in October  200 women+daughters

raped in 36 hrs.  Then there is the Democratic Republic

of Congo where 400,000 women were violated in one

year (2006-2007)

A new term has been coined to describe the mayhem in

the Levant: Islamo-facism   And this is just the tip  In Halifax

3 youths enamoured of serial killers+school shooters  plan a

mass-murder on Valentine’s Day   In his treatise on human love

(+Lies)  Clancy Martin  philosopher U of Missouri  notes: A great

deal of how well we love has to do with how well we lie  both to

ourselves  & to each other  

He goes on to argue that a well honed ability to bend the truth is a

necessity   the glue  if you will of human love   An exercise in Hope

versus Honesty   It is also true that the current wave of death-cult

debauchery must be addressed  this slow+casual atrophy of the

human soul no less

Are you brave enough to ask your partner   staring off into space:

What are you thinking?  What creative manipulations   evasions

misrepresentations  lurk in the average human soul?   Think of the

apple   Think of life in our apocalyptic-eden  We higher beings have

perfected damnation    We are not animals      We are Man

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Winter  2015

DOG

DOG  DAYS

Nothing prepared me for what I

discovered behind Robards Library

Chinese cherry trees blooming in

February  & a dog named Sue singing

a tune  Put on your high heel sneakers

because we’re going out tonight  Sue

crooned  And somewhere an alien wind

blew what might have been to smithereens

Don’t wait for a tarnished Spring to discover

how false this life has been    Start now

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Winter  2015  minus 40

MAKE-UP

IT’S EVEN BETTER THAN MAKE-UP SEX

Ye ah  Ye ah  he keeps repeating  the way pretty young

men with beards +woolcaps do   He has been on a banter

barrage for the past 17minutes to a woman not seen since

2013   YaYaYa she responds   Tweets start-ups blind-dial blog

He drones on+on    Her life story withers on beard boy’s vine

But she does not go gently into narcissistic blight    Voice grows

shrill   Throws coffee at his hipster face   +purse through plate

glass  with DELICA in gold letters   Upscale mayhem  West Queen

West   You just know the conjugal visit sex with a woman like this

will be  explosive💣   Police cordon off the street as Torontonians

hunker home  in minus19

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GIRLS OF FEBRUARY WEST QUEEN WEST

Winter  2015  ❤︎Day

DRUNKEN

DRUNKEN  LOVE

Have you seen Interstellar?   The one where

Matthew McConaughey’s drawl screams Texas

though he’s a farmer deep in the West   He plays

Cooper the astronaut  still in love with his dead wife

Up in space the scientists debate the biological imperative

behind: loving the departed

Clearly love is the glue that holds the human tribe together

Without it there would be no civilization   Without it there

would be no hate  Not love’s opposite  but a variant on the

continuum of human emotion  The dead hold us in their thrall

Where are they after all?   A place where our after-life family  is

making a go of eternity  while back on Earth we worship the dead

with a kind of idolatry

Yesterday someone asked me:  Isn’t love the root of all enmity  misery  

treachery?  One might even place acts of revenge in this same category

Just this week the head of Cairo’s thousand year old Al Azar Institute called

for those who burned a young pilot alive  in a cage  in a well staged media

circus   to be: killed or crucified or have their hands +legs cut off

Why live for anything else?  Our masterpiece   is  LOVE

In the early days of the 21st Century love grows tired   Even Beyonce makes no

bones about the SM dimensions love can take  whipping Jay Z into a near frenzy

in front of millions of Grammy viewers  last night on tv

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*Burning someone alive is prohibited as a punishment that belongs to God alone,

applied in hell, while beheadings on the other hand have a long history among 

many of humanity’s religions.  (Globe&Mail February 5, 2015)  

Winter 2015     For Valentine’s Day  ❤︎

BLUES

WEDDING  DRESS    BLUES

I have had 3 wedding dresses to date   The 1st an

ecru silk confection by Tiel Traina   The 2nd on the

cover of Italian Vogue  Model the wife of a Rolling Stone

Eventually  the dress  morphed into an aubergine suit   (by

Price & Roman)   I even have the shoes from marriage number 1

Gorgeous Thierry Muglers  spider webbed and silver   And whenever

I get a case of the wedding dress blues   I moan on the shoulder of

old number 2

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Double Portrait With Wineglass

Marc Chagall 1918

Fall 2013

SWEDENBORGIAN

HIS  FATHER WAS  A  SWEDENBORGIAN

Need I say more?  William James coined the term

multiverse  Likely he needed a parallel reality to

the James house   A mad sister  Father heard voices

William too   Perhaps bi-polar?  or touched by the

Godhead  this revered pioneer of the psyche

Later  much later  physicists hijacked the multiverse

+made it their own    They posit a vast number of

parallel universes  where we live out different versions

of our lives    Every time you reach a crossroads   two

daughter universes arise: 1 in which you turn right  +1

in which you turn left

In each there is a copy of you living the outcome  Thinking

incorrectly that it’s  the only you   It is also true that sometimes

these parallel lives are not out of reach  Sometimes they slam

right into each other   Take the days when deja vu is so strong

you cannot possibly belong  to your own story

When you forget there is a husband #3    & husband #2 looks surprised

all the time  It’s like he never really knew you existed   One day you grow

a strange smell   +laugh like a stranger    When you speak   your language

becomes oblique  Paris France is heard as Aspen Colorado!  Parallel worlds?

Or late middle-age  when you no longer disrobe   in the shower

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Our universe is one of potentially numerous slabs floating in a higher

dimensional space, much like a slice of bread within a grander cosmic

loaf.    Brian Greene   Physicist     The Hidden Reality  2011 

Deep Winter  2015

PERSEPHONE

PERSEPHONE IMPRISONED FOR ATTENDING SCHOOL  SPRING CANCELLED

It’s so nice to escape news of Jihad  You drive out of your city on 2 lane hi-ways

Snow covered trees  creep over limestone escarpments   toward Stone City

Confluence of St. Lawrence  +Rideau Canal  Say good-bye to Lake O  frozen now

with huts (not fever huts of dying Irish)  fishing+skating  pink twilight  on horizon

night+day

ISIS now a world away? Except for giant screen tv in soul-less hotel (with best 

restaurant in Stone City!)   tv flickers green   Too late  jihad enters refreshed psyche

Kenji Goto’s mother shredded   His brother may never fully recover from seeing the

decapitation  Orange jumpsuit in desert execution    a jarring re-entry  to reality

Flip off tv  turn to pg. 2 local rag   Whitney’s daughter Bobbi K.  21  unconscious in

a tub  Still uncertain if she will make it   Lost her mother in tub  at 45   On the way

home  the hills+fields+trees  don’t look as free  not as pristine   as you drag Bobbi

Kristina  +Kenji Goto back to the city    It’s February 1st   & tomorrow is the Wiccan

Imbolc  a hope filled ray in this dirge     When all the seeds begin to stir

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Persephone Under 20 centimeters     Spring Rising  2015

EYELASHES

SHOES   EYELASHES    PROSTHETIC LIMBS

Suitcases  gold teeth  dolls  in piles on  platforms

Work Will Make You Free      Arbeit  Macht  Frei

No It Won’t   We will starve +torture you  especially if

you are a twin   We will incinerate you   because we can

Throw your babies into the air   +catch them on bayonets

You ain’t seen nothing yet  Juden

But wait!  A ray of light  William Glied  14  had already lost

his family  Now emaciated   with typhoid   he hears the cries

of newborns  & wonders if he is dead   Do angels cry in Nazi

death camps?  No    7babies born that Spring  7pregnant inmates

spared by rough beasts   As delirium of degradation slouches toward

it’s End  

70 yrs. ago yesterday Auschwitz liberated   Russian Jewish soldier

down on his knees  cradles 10 yr old twinless-twin   Sister tortured

beyond human recognition  Dr. Mengele  Chief Sadist  crouches on

slow thighs   Escapes to Brazil   Will he wear the yellow star on the

Styx crossing?

The extermination doesn’t seem that long ago  Atrocities unfathomable

until a new breed of Nazi beheads prisoners  orange suited   with small

carving knives   Well scripted executions  Jihad coming to malls +villages

everywhere?  A recent archeological find in the Levant region places Homo

Sapiens at the dawn of Civilization

But this must be oxymoronic  no?  Might it have been the interbreeding

with Neanderthals?  Or is it bred in the bone?  This uncivilized ape we

continue  to call Homo   Did you know that modern Sapiens lose short term

memory capacity yearly?   All that remains in the end are long held events

Like the train rides in cattle cars as children

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About 1.3 million were deported to Auschwitz from 1940-45

About 1.1 million Jews  The remainder: non-Jewish Poles  Roma

& Sinti (Gypsies)  Soviet prisoners  & others   Of these 1.1 million

people were exterminated there (Globe & Mail January 27, 2015)

Winter  2015

2043

WHERE  WILL  I  BE  IN  2043

when the BIG meteorite passes within inches of

the Earth?  Should it veer a few miles off course

I’ll be in the same place as you?  Starts with an O

ends with an N   (not oblivion)  You must work

much harder to insinuate yourself into this poem

..a long novel just like your life; you were going through

it without thinking and then one morning it ended: there

were bloodstains.   (James Salter  Last Night)

That home    An uncle shrieked: Turn some Goddamned 

lights off   it looks like a 3 ring circus over there   We did not

Same uncle to sleep over  Parents escaped  London 7 days 1978

Barred the door at 10 pm  Heard him banging+cursing for 16

minutes  freezing March night in Great White North   He never

came back for more

There is a longing for the past   so innately human  For your own

personal Eden   Even if much of it is  fantasy  playing in repertory

for the duration   For a time when you felt more  expected more  

knew less   Cervical spine not yet compressed by gravity  rear-enders 

bad feldenkrais teacher  from Arizona

Lifted+thrusted  lifted+thrusted   Called you at 11:30 one night to ask

about your perfume!  By then 36 revolutions of the earth ’round the sun

Knew enough to run from scum-bag guru  with moves   When the meteorite

comes you will wear your after-life face proudly  But who will recognize you?

No one who knew you when you were coltish   Whatever holds people together

will be gone

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It is easier for a needle to pass through a camel  than for a poor man to

enter a woman of means   Just go to the graveyard  and ask around 

(Mark Strand  1998 Pulitzer Prize)

Winter  2015

                                         octogenarion

BIG

BIG  CIG

Just about every person  young  old  male

female  sane + insane   was sucking on a big

cig today   It even looked like they were

protecting said cigarettes   not from the

whipping wind   but from those of us who

wolflike crouched  on streetcorners  waiting

Even indoors where smoking is prohibited I

saw a mother with a croaking baby  light up

aggressively   The intake  a seeming last breath

Croak went the baby   croak    Coffee clatchers

looked confused   I dashed out and passed a sign

that said: Try to be one of the people on whom

nothing is lost  (Henry James)

Though likely better if I did miss some of the minutiae

The sordid ceremonies of  urban life in Winter   Ditto the

alleyways full of limping dogs  +yesterday’s spittle

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