off with her head
my hands don’t look like my hands anymore
they are wrinkled +carbuncle but not much
of me really does face mild resemblance skin
none canada is cold barren as an old aunt
skin sprackled +crepey i look to the horizon
in search of more sailors
__
Winter Solstice ..light shmight..
got to carry on without me
fanmass of blue from the sky 3 hrs. plus of football + i
cannot help but wonder why these hulking manboys earn
umpteen millions carolina on my mind they lost to the
saints last night in a mediocre game qb cam a giant
babyman chews blue gum +sulks but i wanna share his
clothes flamboyant +jagger he struts in pink fur for which
i am a sucker that +filthy lucre especially where a 250 lb.
burnished heisman is concerned he is my trophy boyfriend
and in the same dream i circle the new pink planet farout
(like naming the black dog blackie dad!) and there i find my
deadfootballbrother in the bullrushes
__
Winter 2018
where life pulsed obscenely fecund
a picture window in the room sunblare fountain cool
florida heat outside the room 2 little visitor girls approach
the bed and winged shapes flutter overhead he being
called back to the ancestors pallor of foetal pig in biology
lab at 17 i am not cutting into that thing! so dropped sciences
+became a fisherking grail of wounded children taught me
not to gasp at suffering a supervisor said: you are the mary
poppins of family therapy you must take off those white gloves
and touch their pain except i touched it too much lost a ventricle
and in the bowels of this hospice-from-hell lost what was left of my
sanity too but as the little girls in summer dresses sparkle with life i
wipe the dust off and fly home now winter and dead beetles caught
in the screens unholy foolsister seeking spring when the melt will raise
her up again emptier less aprill
__
Winter 2018 for fisher kings wounded healers +feelers of too much..
in restless walks he’ll prowl the night
waiting for my dead brother’s phone to ring me
+waiting for Spring when 2nd chances will be
handed out quite liberally
__
Winter 2018 ..light returns in 7 days..
here comes the son
watching football with the boyz a silly girl
banished from the inner sanctum grab my
barbie case beautiful +round with barbie’s
pic and lipsticks on cover i own 263 shades
as of today a lifetime of silly girl attracting the
big boys ran away many a sunday from house
on ravine where father +boys screamed for their
team a man in a fedora and trenchcoat who looked
an awful lot like daddy the coach tom landry how
do i even know this name 5 decades later and i would
vote for him for prez the boys of purdon in my blood
like holy wine thankfully joni and leonard (allavashulim)
were there to wrest me from those wolves and return me
to the land of girlcool in my room disco-set blaring to drown
out their malebonding but i’d still rather be one of em +though
my girlsoul flies with the departed ones on cold canadian nights
the boys remain skeptical + testosterone
__
Winter 2018 ..for the boys+men of purdon.. RIP lee marty leonard
ain’t gonna moan no mo
isn’t it time to be happy? but how happy can i be
when a huge piano labelled DEATH is eventually
going to fall not only on me but on you too wonders
george saunders whose lincoln in the bardo gives you
the inside scoop as nothing else in the canon can read
it if you dare for there you will find a chronicle of human
sensation a sensual dismemberment of what it is to be alive
and dead is it the hoarfrost on december windows? etchings
on glass see through to melting tributaries come april +may
when birthdays of departed will bite you and in the shade toads
+lily of the valley wait to enchant and bewart you should you be
fortunate enough to move out of the hurtling piano’s way for another day
and do try not to be bitter while you wait especially about the shrinking
of tumours in people other than your brother’s livers
__
Winter 2018 ..come spring poems galore about sunshine +daffodils.. i will melt you with maudlin joys..
spiritbaby
my new baby brother is on the bed and i lay my head
next to him he is beautiful smells like powder +life last
time i lay my head next to a brother he was dead brainmeld
with the big C but in the wee hours of morning right beside
me a sturdy new boy let’s call him martine we rub noses
like the inuit who have 3,2001 words for love brotherly love
trumps hate it takes the cake is the cake okay i’ll stop
__
FALL 2018 ..in this dream u get a redo! resurrected on a mangerbed..brand new…run with it martine..
body
electric
there’s something very undignified about dying
and i have instructed my sister-in-law to have socks
on my deformed feet as well not to allow any deathbed
tourists into the crucible when i tell her these things
she says: check! and i know that she will make sure that
i have dignitas to spare that’s how she rolls
and in the aftermath before the afterlife no doubt i will
be reunited with my brother and we will decide how we’d
like to spend eternity (not in mexico bro) we will likely hang
around to play spirited games with those who remain how about
calling them from our cell phones deader than we
not funny martine! as well we will torment them in their showers
a place humans blissfully sing unless you are gutwrenched with
grief then you dread getting in the shower a chamber where
electricity melds with soap melds with ions of departed souls
so that you no longer know where they begin and you end
__
stout as a horse affectionate haughty electrical I and this mystery
here we stand i sing the body electric has anyone supposed it lucky
to be born? i hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die the
smallest sprout shows there is really no death
(Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass 1855)
Fall 2018 .. Martine! please don’t call me from heaven when i’m driving..
oh mexico! the sun’s so hot i forgot to go home
they re-assign numbers he said trying to
reassure me this won’t happen forever
forever a time frame incomprehensible to
this grieving sister whose dead brother called
her this afternoon
i called him back +his voicemail picked up
MARTINE! it chimed his mexico name i wanna
be re-assigned to the place my dead bro’s phone
is calling me from because in that mexico he is
stirring risotto +waiting for the cab from guadalajara
carrying me home
__
FALL 2018 ..still out here begging for a re-do..or 2..
a man needs a maid
curled up between my now dead father (at 68)
+bro (at 72) but for a virulent cancer one would
have expected my brother to live well into his 90’s
long livers on our mother’s side but his liver a
metastatic miasma just recently
in this photo circa 1973 handsome brother in a
straw cowboy hat beads around his neck ‘stache
+hair down to there a football hero hippie just
returned from nassau father in his 50’s football
glory days return in dreams on freezing suburban
nights when arteries whisper dark songs
but this day jazz plays daddy smokes a cigar +
14 yr. old girl jewfro in a can atop her head curled
comfortably between her first 2 men both cocky
charismatics but in different ways both old world
patriarchs in the same way re: a woman’s place
what respect she wrested rested upon her spunk
brains +unwavering belief that she was one of them
the one who walked slowly toward their deathbeds
encouraging them to be unafraid
a fearlessness she learned in the arena mother’s
mastectomy when she was 17 and the steely will of
real men alchemically seeping into veins
__
FALL 2018
songanddancegirl... at 4
songanddancegirl 