songanddancegirl

bluejean babyqueen

tripping on lysergic  at 14   the Blind Faith Virgin

holding an airplane  launched my  OBE   veinous

breastbuds     beyond alarming

6 am  hydroplaning along suburban blacktop  gotta find

my house  where Mephistopheles lives  a.k.a. blacksonavitch

the non-faustian poodle     where now most loyal friend?

yea tho i made the devil’s bargain  17 yr old pusherman   goddamn!

i shall fear no evil  we threw said spawn off the bridge  up on Choctaw

Ridge  later Dave jumped  (they’re always named Dave or Cheech or Lu)

but then..

at dinnertime mama noticed i hadn’t touched a single bite  she’d

been cookin all morning  gribnez  flunken  and the like  my fugue

so deep   my jeans smeared   all sacred substancey+sticky

vague murmurings   Rabbi Kelman

Lee  can you pass the apple pie?

Baruch ata Adonai

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Winter 2024     ..can’t find my way back home..

the afterlife?

what comes after cancer?  is there a cancer afterlife?

one could ask  The Boss  whose wife often spends

3 months at a time in bedsores  with multiple myeloma💣

or ask   Chuck Prophet  who has recently risen from

metastatic invasion  +ensuing enslavement  to chemo

and radiation     unprophesied+shock

as old Epictetus proclaimed 2000 yrs ago  don’t seek

for all to happen as you wish it would   rather wish

that all happens as it will   then your life will flow well

face it  there is no grand plan  no universal design  it’s

chaos in the trenches  and we are all subject to the same

forces  despite all the shit they feed us  re heaven+hell

btw  (..hell is other people.. J.P. Sartre)

good+bad things happen to good+bad people  why me?

why NOT you!  being free  really fucking no holds barred

free  means accepting  that you have   zero control

that your animal body will grow old +die  that your luminous

spark  your spiritus mundi  will lead you to the otherside  where

the light at the end of the tunnel lives

how much better would human life be  if they taught you+me

to believe that   impermanence  is not the enemy  grasping and

clutching at the mast of an ever sinking ship  is

(..the bad news is nothing lasts forever..  

..the good news is nothing lasts forever.. H.I. Atkins)

real freedom is diving in   courage is allowing terror   peace is

revelling in your abandon  said Tom Petty  who at 66  sat on his

couch  dreaming of retiring

with wife+grandkids  in an Airstream   💥massiveinfarction💥   

from 67 substances used to dull the pain of various excruciating

animal-ailments    so REVEL!    for chrissakes   REVEL!

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Winter 2024  ..this little light o’ mine  i’m gonna let it shine..🔥

trailing horny cherubs do we come

birth is way more mysterious than death  we have a shelf life

+death appears gestating  +oh so patient  right from the first

breath     you will  NEVER  be that fresh

decompose  bred in the bones  the stoics will tell you to meditate

on death every day  befriend the blooddrunk Reaper  who creeps

thru walls  doors  floors  + fancy cotton sheets   dampgrotty

now bestained with  a dot of blood  from inserting the port  for the

morphinedrip  the one you begged a dwarfish nurse for   you finally

won Olga over   with tequila  charisma  +your lipstickrictus

birth is a different story  created by 2 humans  coital+biblical  sometimes

in a tube  you the imperfect clone  chip off the old block head  you will never

be as exalted  as pure  or as wretched

all primalscream + what the fuck?  10 minutes earlier you lay among horny

cherubs  +there’s the rub  you never asked to come here  now chained to the

body of a human-animal    you  with your weak chin  +hottentot apron

in April i will be my father’s age

when he died  and i no longer know

if i am   dead  or alive

__

..angels it is said  often do not know whether 

they’re  moving among the living or the dead..

(Rainer Maria Rilke  The Duino Elegies  #1)

November 2024   ..now buzz off..

silence of the lambs

they’re eating the dogs!

they’re eating the cats!

they’re killing the songbirds in Afghanistan

women barred from praying  reciting poetry

singing +speaking loud enough to hear eachother

be careful what you ask for bros  when the last

songbird falls  the sound of high fives  of beer jingles

of soccer jeers  of mine’s  BIGGER  than yours  will

ricochet thru temples   emptied of the fairest sex

who birthed the beasts  now wreaking revenge

for coming

from  that place

vagina dentata + mucosa

so

MAN UP!    boys

__

..in Iran women can be stopped by the secret police

and subjected to body cavity searches on the street

at the whim of ultra religious men.. 

(Reading Lolita in Tehran  Azar Nafisi   2003)

Fall 2024     ..bearing witness to the return of hate..

duckdreams

ancient river bed  behind suburban house

pagan wanderings  of heathen children  find

sittingduck family  hysterical catching   running

screaming    duck-ecstacy

catching a bird my childhood dream  hasidic

salting of bird’s tail    a girl’s first meditation

how close can you get?  asked winking father

dishtowel trembling   in 7 yr old hand

these days  silverbuckled cowboy belts  wet look

pleather  baubled   bangled  decorative-bitch   near

taxidermied   hits of dopamine  no longer from duck

slaying   zarabird in 67 yr old hand  of tarred+feathered    fashionista

__

Fall 2024     ..ouccccch!..

deathbed blues

my parents were born in different beds  but they died

in the same bed  old mother 98  wouldn’t sleep in  that bed

for several years   pre  The Reaper  (father taken 35 yrs before)

and though a man sang tantalizingly from beneath the

sheets  she insisted on the living room couch  narrow +

facing the door    (they’ll take me feet first!)

her future death beckoned  from the big brass bed   always

visible  the bedroom un-doored  mother un-moored   father

a ghost  dressed often as a giant hawk  waiting for his wildbride

mother lay like Nefertiti  father like a fallen angel   no longer

football  +jazzcat   in the corner Ella+Loius whispered the words

to   April In Paris   setting the mood for   Le Grande Ascent 🖤

Frances & Lee  November 14, 2022

__

Fall 2024     RIP Mummybird+Daddybird…..don’t be strangers!

ratatat

she was gnomic  +rat   small with 4 teeth +5 hairs  maybe 8

prettysweet  in a Chuckie kind of way   she was the security

guard at what might have been   a brother’s new home

except that while visiting the cemetery earlier in the week

he and i were cruised real low  by 2 giant hawks+their hawklet

this while visiting our parents graves

these very same hawks had carted mother away   snatched her

from the balcony  one fine autumn day   now a talon  glint-swoosh

amidst feathery clumps of LSU shell   +there was brother  lifted up  up    +away

all very Mary Poppins if i do say    these days i visit RatLady  who confides

she’d had a moist-on  for he who flew the coop  to live among the giant Raptors

where angels fear to tread     they’ve made him their leader

(all who are faithful  follow me!)

nowadays he divides his time  between swooping  +inserting talons into the soft

fleshy arms of old ladies on the street  soon he will come for RatLady  +lay her down

across his big-grassbed   +play with those 4 teeth   which appear to be quite loose

__

FALL 2024  ..what would Zimmy say?..

don’t tell me what the stoics are doing

each day is a life  

Seneca

we tell ourselves stories in order to live  

Joan Didion

you can get new toilets  but if you put the same old shit in them

they’ll still overflow  with the same old shit  

Aprill Atkins Cameron 

amor fati  (love your fate)

Nietzsche 

__

i remember when they lost their parents  mother wore black well  taffeta gown

Jacques Fath  Paris  1952   black velvet hat  with netting  i kept these all my life

in bags stained yellow   time colours moistcotton   skin too   where cigs held

where liver spots dwell

mother wore black  at what would become  her mother’s deathbed  +NEVER

again  the opposite of widow’s weeds   reversefuckingsuperstition !  a death

not pretty   old Sarah’s stroke  witnessed by 5 yr old poet   mother went all

Clytemnestra   pulling her hair out  running back+forth

bitchslapped  by a cousin in the garment industry   boy did mother grieve

HARD  for the rest of her life   (just like me  for her softhands+beauty )  mum

do you think your mother would have liked me?  she’d get down on her knees

and worship you    mother a gorgeous drama queen

father lost his mother  to brain cancer  she’d had a premonition  pre her

final Florida sojourn  if i die  don’t let your mother come to my grave  or

anywhere near me   this our final goodbye   i didn’t tell anyone   mother

visited her everyday

sat by her side  combed the hair  of her now demented mother-in-law witch

who’d hated  her Paris past   father wept  enfrailed+yellow  he’d caught his

mother’s  Hepatitis C   deathbeds germy   father weakened  +died soon after

a shadow of his former  football-self    she took his manhood to her grave

who by slow decay?   now i have lost both my parents  orphanpoet  who among

you will remember me  from this time in the veil of tears?  in the crucible of gutted

how i howled over their bones  their dust  how i healed  will heal  am healing forever

because i was given to them   because i was with them at all      LUCKYGIRL

they loved the shit  out-of-us  despite  maybe because of  their woundedness  every

Saint   broken a little   my young child clients   abandoned at birth  or kept  what’s

the difference?  starved  hit  raped  burned  +on+on   and you cannot make up for

these holes   you wanna be slipped  the answer?    you just were

__

Fall 2024  ..that was Paradise! +we were kicked out of Paradise..(husband #3)

..stay just a little bit longer..

deardiarydeardiarydeardiary

what do  Anne Frank  Marcus Aurelius +Thich Naht Hanh

have in common?  all diarists  Anne only 13   i too was a child

diarist   Ashkenazi   un-holocausted

my diaries were hidden  under my bed  and later inside the giant

hole  a crazy bitch poodle  (father’s designation for Dilly)  carved

into the side of the bed

also in the hole  my stash of black hash  a fair-sized piece nibbled off

of a giant slab  belonging to my BIG BRO  i was given the  smell test

by father  who unwrapped the  tarryblackblock  oh so carefully

BIG BRO’s bestie  Howard Cohen  had brought it back from an African

safari   pre-law school   what is it Ape?   father queried   i sniffed

i gawked   my druggie friends had ounces   NOT  keys!

gee dad what is it?!  looks like liquorice   OK  she doesn’t know what it is 

it was that easy!  my mattress hole a cornucopia  where mother regularly

found my diaries   and thought the hashish liquorice   she a true innocent

until winged   at 98

mother read said books in horror  and i was often pistol-whipped   in the end

i needed to invent a code  each letter of the alphabet turned hieroglyphic  with

pilfered pics  from same bros Playboys  illuminating my manuscripts

there was  Barbie Benton  lushboobs  brown verdant venus  +Dorothy Stratton

later murdered by a sadist   simpler days in the bosom of my family   jazz wafting

reeferburns  on Art Shoppe couch

giant mastiff beside father

often teaching him to speak

my parents walk on water

my bro on golden cleats

__

Fall 2024  ..for Anne .. June 1929  Frankfurt – February 1954  Bergen Belsen

rabid scavengers of care thesickthelonelytheafraidtheold

Virginia Woolf in her essay  On Illness  said: ..illness is the great confessional

a childish outspokenness..truths blurted out which the cautious respectability 

of health  conceals  

she was right  i spoke in tongues of pain  to anyone who would listen

the man who washed the filthyfloor  the woman who brought the tray

of  rubberchickens+greaseymash

hey anyone in there?   you look alive   but you are not  nervesfrayed

too many scalpels to speak of   do they really use scalpels on virginskin?

one doctor shouted:  has she signed the releases?!  

he knew i’d sue his doctorass  if he killed my husband  or worse  maimed

him   whose Viking splendour all heldentenor  he should probably have been

an opera singer   not a hockeydangler   part-time wrangler   friend to buffalo

illness has had its way with my repartee  people run away when i enter a room

or act so weird  i start blithering about disemboweled cats    hey reader  

you still there??

Virginia knew a thing or two of illness  she walked into the river Ouse with

stones in her pockets  all Ophelia +streaming hair   dead at 59  her husband

Leonard at home with a pickled brisket  waiting for his brilliant bride

and waiting

and waiting

    not

__

Fall 2024  ..human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way..

..there is a virgin forest.. tangled.. pathless.. here we go alone.. (Virginia Woolf 1926)