songanddancegirl

ONE EYE

IT’S  BETTER  TO  CRY  WITH  ONLY   ONE  EYE

This is not a dream sequence  though the memory was

dredged up  by a dream about a now dead girlfriend  of

some 50 yrs. ago   Took me into an empty house  back in

the old neighbourhood   Her father’s brother + wife  had

lived there  Now the house was  For Sale   She said also that

her Aunt was in a mental hospital

 

small hand prints   in black charcoal  smear walls +floors

counter-top  especially near stove  has deep black hand+foot

prints   A child burned in effigy

 

Her Aunt left the daughter  then 3  alone on a Spring afternoon

Uncle returned at 6  to smell of burning flesh  The friend tells me

her Aunt  was pretty  & now no one in the family will speak to her

& no one wants to buy the house  either

 

The other children are in the  Children’s Aid     So  there is a place

children can go  to escape mad mothers & hot stoves?

 

It never occurred to me to tell anybody   & it didn’t seem all that strange

I had heard too of parents  on many of these streets  screaming in the night

with dreams of those  other ovens  across the sea     It was the year  1963

 

Much later  somewhere around 2003  my client  a 7 yr. old boy  began to unplug

the stove when his family was asleep   He also begged for a St. John’s Ambulance

course    So happy to be returned home in the  Family Reunification Program    

 

Just  a few years before   baby brother was burned   almost beyond recognition

as mother slept soundly on the couch    It’s better to cry with only one eye   and

with the other  I watch the stove    (Pete  7yrs. old   2003)

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Fall  2014

 

MESSGAGE

THE  MEDIUM   IS  THE  MESSAGE

When Sarah Boston  veterinarian  was being treated

for cancer   the receptionist at the radiation clinic refused

to look up at her   With head down she grunted:  Put your

card  in the box

 

Seems that we’re treating humans like animals  & animals with

dignity   Sarah thinks that her dog+cat patients get better health

care  than humans do   It’s faster  with a focus on quality of life     Imagine

 

Yesterday a young man told me that: Monkeys with Ebola  isolate

themselves from the tribe   They sacrifice themselves   They walk

into the jungle to die   There seems to be a naked wisdom here   sorely

lacking among clothed apes

 

I posit that  the clothed ape has grown profoundly depressed

through exposure to repeated violence + atrocity   particularly

in the late 20th century   One may only hope that somewhere

not where we are   the  truelife  is being lived   This is likely a  crapshoot 

Ditto the treatment for depression

 

Take the 24 yr. old rapper  Abdel Bary   He tweeted a selfie with

a severed head   The comment read: Chillin with my homie   He had

simply picked up & posed with one of hundreds of heads left on the

roadside  after a mass beheading by ISIS

 

It may be a no-brainer  that we desperately need a 3rd arm of psychiatry

Not meds +not therapy   Surgery too was tried via lobotomy  and it failed

miserably   It doesn’t cost money to look up with kind eyes  and say: Yes you

are in the right place  We can help   just   TURN OFF YOUR SCREENS

 

And in the distance the sea falls endlessly as humanlife imitates the worst of

our technology:  Comprehensive analysis of violent interactive video game

research suggests such exposure increases aggressive  behaviour   thoughts

angry feelings   physiological arousal   & decreases helpful behaviour   Armies

now use violent video games to desensitize soldiers  to killing

 

Peter Neumann  director of  The Centre for Radicalization  London   said:

Detectives should use basic techniques to find the beheaders    Read their

tweets  they will give away clues   Just because they are terrorists who behead

people  doesn’t mean they don’t talk about football clubs   Many are in their teens

& 20’s   they will let their guard down

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Fall  2014

 

 

 

RED

SOMEDAY  THIS  WAR  WILL  END   RED

Honestly   she is so frail I can sling her over my

shoulder   Blunt cut  red hair  skin so white  almost

purple  Trying to get her teacher’s attention  Used to

being invisible

 

Hint of a smile   From a mile away  you can see  that she

will always be  on the periphery   One day she will have to

overcome the sudden desire to die   And who will say: Let’s

run away   Marry me    

 

Last night Barak said he would save the world’s children  But

her immediate concern is not the butchers of the Islamic State

Her immediate concern is trying to get someone’s attention  anyone’s

attention  She drifts to the back of the line as a cherubic boy slings an

arm  around the teacher

 

This week Robert Hansen 75   the  Butcher Baker  died in prison  He was

convicted of raping + killing 17 women   Strippers & prostitutes  no one would

notice went missing   drifters  peripheral sisters  end of liners   He drove them

into the Alaskan wilderness   set them free    & then hunted them  with his rifle

 

I wonder if some funding might be diverted to the HOMELAND  for mental health

& gun control   please

__

 

Hansen owned a bakery in a mini-mall in Anchorage  lived across town with his wife 

+ children  He was serving a 461 yr. sentence  at the time of his death

 

 

 

Fall   2014

 

 

 

DEMONS

I  LAY  DOWN  WITH  MY   DEMONS

PastPresentFuture exist as one   You know this

though the calendar has been invented to prevent it

You are ever so eager to have a past  until you don’t

In fact you’ll take anything they give you  won’t you?

 

Before 9  nothing can make you mortal    For a brief season

it is all yours   you may even be bored    You don’t know enough

to take the genuine thing in your teeth  & hold it fast  makeitlast

 

What if life’s not a river  but a fatted calf?   What if  it’s an oath?

What if the first voice  will be the last voice  you will hear?

What if you are secretly in love with everyone who you grew up with?

FUHCK

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POSTSCRIPT

Now that you are cured   you have a life  and somuchmore

Someday they will harvest this madness and sell it in bottles

stamped:     Kosher   

__

 

God looks on me and I am terrified  He makes the incubus

descend on me  Before he knows it  there I am in his lap   I

pull on his white beard  He throws me the ball of the world  

I throw it back        Adelia Prado  Baggage   1976  

 

 

Late Summer  2014

 

 

 

 

SOON

I  MAY  HAVE  TO  LEAVE  YOU   SOON

Today in front of me at U of T  I saw a sight

my brain fights to glean   Pretty young girl

tall + rail-slim  walking at a strange angle

Her shoes on close inspection hopelessly too big

& on her t-shirt in black chunky letters:

Hansel & Gretel Never Made It Out

 

She loped along making the day feel like the last

A girl like this could only appear pre-apocalypse

on the very day that Barak will tell us how he proposes

to deal with I.S.I.S.  *now hacking heads off of American

journalists

 

We live in a world where wars are called Peace Keeping

Missions  & both sides declare victory after 40 days + 40

nights  of blowing each other to bits     At a Futurological

Conference in the 70’s  Stanislaw Lem proposed  a world

happily drugged into hallucinogenic oblivion     BRING IT

 

The slim girl with a certain quiet beauty to her brand of

insanity reminds me that:  It is not Summer anymore  +

there are madmen gathering in Caliphates  knocking at the door

__

 

 

 

Fall 2014

 

 

 

ANGST

AVOID  ANGST   IN  THE  EVENING

In our 2nd home  they bought the boy next door

a basketball he spent the next 10 yrs. bouncing

We un-gallantly accepted the mad metronome

counting aloud the seconds of our waning youth

Our diminished senses   The flies in the ointment

of our dribbledondreams   Go straight to hell Basketball Jones!

 

His father  a kindly man  waddled home each night

His sister easily the man’s doppelgänger   The mother

wore beige polyester pants  had a mannish profile  &

survived a brush with an early Reaper   At a certain point

all stories  are true   Where now young B. Ball Jones   of

the sweet face and bulbous nose?

 

 

Fall  2014

 

 

 

 

MATERIAL

NEW  MATERIAL     S’IL  VOUS  PLAIT

Today walking by a gaggle of  constructionguys

I hear one of them say to another:  Who will she choose?

I’m   the before     You’re   the after     Men can be oblique

The amuse bouche    + the dessert?   Is he proposing a menage?

I run real fast  as the aftermath  chases afterme  all along West Queen St.

 

Yesterday I consulted with a Podiatrist from Yonkers  who charges

$4000 per foot for:  structural re-alignment     I tell jokes  he said

Do you want tame  or racy?   A little racy is okay    A woman had the

map of Canada tattooed on her ass    + every time she bent over  we

lost Quebec

 

Tomorrow my husband will say:  Today is my 38th wedding anniversary

& BTW  I’m having lunch with her  next Thursday   With this  I will lose what

might have been called  my poise   She’s still hanging around?  What’s she like?

Allgood  + nogood  too   I like her   he will also say   (instead of falling to his knees)

And much later   tomorrow eve   the night weasels will come

__

 

 

End of Summer  2014

 

 

ROSE

THE  ROSE  OF  JERICHO

The only sounds in the abandoned Liberian

village  were the cries of  Fatu Sherrif   12

locked away with her mother’s body    Starving

& thirsty   After more than one week Fatu fell

silent   Ebola was 1st detected in the family on

July 20th   When health workers arrived Fatu’s

father had been dead 5 days    brother Barnie  15

still roams the village  alone   scrounging for food

 

He said: No one wants to come near me  & they know

I don’t have Ebola    The shunning villagers are on the run

themselves  shunned   by neighbouring towns   Only Mamoh Wile

septuagenarian chief + Barnie   remain

 

So  how would this play out in our town?    Our city’s children

cared for  unaware    Afternoon women at lunch    as worlds have

disappeared   What mayhem would ensue?   The city you were meant

to triumph in   a spent horse   And in January ice will cover everything

Whatever you have known is  lost   Belongings lay abandoned   the doors

of houses left open    And in the morning it snows  some more   as packs of

pedigree dogs roam the core  fighting over scraps of last night’s dinner

__

 

 

End of Summer  2014

SEDUCTION

SEDUCTION + DEATH     ATOP  T.O.  TOWNHOUSE

A Fall wasp is rubbing himself on me   before I know it

sweet stinger will be under the skin of my left knee   Usually

no innocent bystander  I cannot say that I seduced Mr. Wasp

today   Here I lay sprawled under skybluesky  He sniffs me  & I

remind him of decomposing honeybun  he landed on   at noon

 

What will he get other than certain death   from stinging me?

A chance to ride a poet for a moment   + provoke ecstatic confessions

 

Now loud cursing from the rooftop  where sticky with honeygarlicsauce

I lay    All is strangely quiet  as blue turns to reddish purple    Summer

ebbing away     My 90 yr. old mother says: I think he has eyes for you

I’ll arm-wrestle you for him   I tell her   as I slap Mr. Wasp in an urban

girlfrenzy   now a yellow mush on the floor    In the city  aggression builds

as snow threatens    +  aging Canadians sing songs around campfires

__

 

 

End of Summer   2014

BLEED

PRICK ME    & I  BLEED

In a play yesterday   the onstage

lovers caught in their own  feedbackloop

of:  lovehatelovehatelovehate    I pate you

said my 3 yr. old client   That’s okay said I

You can pate me + like me    I pate you + I

hate you  said she

 

Let us extrapolate to the  Global stage   Take the

Levant for example   Ancient hatreds + loves (?)

spring up   in the midst of  an aborted  Arab Spring 

There will never be peace  the pundits say

 

And what of the  Jewish Question?    3 Yeshiva boys

kidnapped & murdered   1 Arab youth immolated   Late at

night we hear the wail of  the Mothers  floating over Galilee

Grief has no creed   it is democratic  +free

 

So  are Jews measured by a different moral yardstick?   Are we

not human too?  Are not  self-preservation  revenge  + hatred  the

sine qua non of humanity?    They never stood up for themselves  

fought back    Why did they walk in single file to the oven doors?     

In my world it is the year  5774   and these questions are not rhetorical

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I am not an animal. I am a woman.

The Elephant Man

 

 

Summer  2014