songanddancegirl

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

fiancée

Little Fiancée Of The Atlantic

car crash coma at 17   at 20 first trans-atlantic

solo   sailor florence arthaud  dead at 57    remote

gorge argentina   helicopters touched briefly  then

fell to the ground    filming the reality show

DROPPED

a hero in france   her eyes fierce beacons

inscrutable glare   stares out of front page

news   hair leonine   mouth screams don’t

fuck with me   skin leathery    wizened brow

the whole of a story is never told   when she was

a girl her passion was to catch a bird   countless

hours spent crouching in tall grass   her father said:

if you can shake salt on his tail   he is yours

birds filled the sky on the day she died   birds guided

her over the frigid+black atlantic    they carried her

out of the gorge yesterday at dawn   arthaud slid gently

+elegantly into ceres gravitational embrace    a dwarf

planet with a dusty outer crust+a rocky inner core

__

Winter 2015    20 days to Spring

CURIOUS

WHY SHOULD HE PICK SO CURIOUS A PLACE

We left him on a frozen hill beside a stand of Pines

Slick white snow  churned earth   dry+brown  looked

trucked-in   How deep can you dig in 23 below?  First

thud of earth on wood  a shockwave through the crowd

Dead-silence   Thud  Clomp  Thud  Clomp    Clomp

until 6 ft. under ground

Hearts freshly rent  trudge back to civilization  for coffee+

knishes   A glance back to snowy knoll  & behold a fiddler

madly fiddles   New ghost takes tentative first steps  barefoot

in the snow   Sun glints off of trees   his laugh echoes   as old

ghosts form a receiving line    Turn back one last time  now

hoisted up above their heads  new-ghost  horahwild

An empty chair floats close by  waiting for his earth-bound bride

Last night she dreamt of a blind man running his fingers over nose

+lips      Clomp  Thud        Clomp

__

Winter  2015       for S.R. & L.R

HARD

A  HARD  SPRING  IS GONNA FALL

flawed ice sculptures on the lawn  there a

giant snake  slick+sheen-clean  +white   ice

pellets overnight   friend’s husband in a chair

gave him 3 yrs.  he lasted 4    funeral sunday

first above zero in 98 days   my serpent will be

melty   slushbrown   crown of thorns

resurrection a month away   time of pagan eggs

chocolate rabbits  +last suppers    REBOUND

said my amazonian shaman in the California hills

28 yrs. and still  reverberates  especially on days when

shit’s creek overflows

__

(amazon warriors removed a breast to enhance archery

skills   survival of the fittest is not for sissies)

Winter  2015

I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.   Bob Dylan

BOX

THE DROP  BOX

Some baby-hatches in China have been so

overwhelmed in recent years that they have

been closed

Little baby boxes by the thousands piled high

UN committee on the Rights of The Child will

ban the box soon  in cities near you

Out in March fields  crocus+babies grow  Snow

covering toes  sun warming noses +wings   Nearly

two thirds of all babies left outside die  before being

found by birds+dogs

__

Winter  2015

W.W.W.

WORLD  WIDE  WEBS  WE  WEAVE

A new term has been coined ISFG (Islamic State Fangirl)

radicalized in their bedrooms  on twitter  tumblr  +murdr

Post millennial groupies to beheaders   How can they have

missed the well staged executions   orange jumpsuited  bloody

desert mirages stuck on replay   OMG gutwrenchingly awesome!

tweeted one recruit

Messianic fervour +magnetism  can whip up female hormones

alarmingly (Yasmin Alibhai Brown  The Independent)    A sad

commentary on humanity   Today Bebe  the uninvited guest of

Barak said: The enemy of your enemy is your enemy (btw Bebe

John Boehner is your frenemy)  Among the enemies of the Free World

are violent warrior heartthrobs seducing our daughters

They see it as emigrating to a better life  They say they feel free

(The Guardian)  More beheadings please!  tweeted another recruit

But can this really be?  Mass rape  oppression  +the new crucifixtion

as aphrodisiac?  Everything they need to know is on the Internet  even

what to pack  in the new  jihadibridefieldguide.com

__

Tonight’s the night, come on surrender
I won’t lead your love astray, astray, yeah
Your love’s a weapon
Give your body some direction
That’s my aim

Justin Timberlake  Take Back The Night 

Winter  2015  (tweets reported in the Globe+Mail 3/3/2015)

STAIN

HUMAN  STAIN  HOTEL

There is a dripping yellow-y substance

seeping from the ceiling  reminiscent of

seedy hotels out on the lakeshore strip

drip  drip  drip    It’s 4 a.m.

Insinuates itself into dreamscape  watery

flashes of yellow seepage  captures slippage

of dissolving moon   On a canoe  drip drip drip

6 a.m. yellow stain moving toward the bed  will

envelop disgruntled city dwellers by noon

Now creeping toward husband’s head buried under

pillows to stanch sound of GIANT pummelling truck

Water is pouring out of pipes onto street  Worlds collide

Somewhere Noah weeps  as our house floats over sewage-y

waves  We are Huck+Becky  on a townhouse raft  lighting out

for the land of Spring     drip  drip    drip  

(so where’s the fucking rainbow already?)

___

Winter  2015    20 days until Spring..

RODEO

NOT MY FIRST   RODEO

If the mammo-technician keels over

or ISIS attacks  I will be stranded

here in the clutches of this giant

robot breast eater   Women lined

up for hours to give offerings  Silent

pacts with ugly machines  Please don’t

find anything that will kill me  Then spat

out onto -33 streets  hair blowing in the

frigid breeze  But free   And freedom tastes

like warm milk

__

Mammo-garage

Mammo-machine

Winter 2015

ROMANTICS

THE  NEW  ROMANTICS

Today is the anniversary of John Keats’

death  in Rome at 25  Shelley alive until 29

died at Sardinia  drowned in a stormy sea

His elegy for Keats  Adonias  remains the

great lyric treatise of the Romantics

Lord Byron too died on a far shore  Greece

at 36  from a cold +violent fever  The last of

the great Romantics   She walks in beauty

like the night of cloudless climes +starry skies

A far cry from the: New Romantics  A group of

brits  ex-patriots  who walk  in darkness   The latest

recruits of ISIS   3 teenage girls 15-17  heading for

Istanbul  Soon to be the wives of jihadis   My little

sister is an A student   To convince such young girls

who are vulnerable  is really evil

Romantic notions of becoming jihadi-brides   shattered

along old spice-routes  leading to lives of servitude  rape

+martyrdom   Look at the girls in sneakers & colourful

clothes smiling as each walks alone  through security at

Gatwick

On their way to Turkey now  where youth grows pale  and

spectre thin  and dies  where beauty cannot keep    These

light winged dryads  of East London

__

Come home. We miss you. We can’t stop crying.

Abase Hussen 47   father of  Amira  missing since Tuesday

Winter  2015