songanddancegirl

WHO

WHO WILL PUT IT BACK THE WAY IT WAS?

Morning rituals:  newspaper  sport’s section 1st   to see

Jewish obits   Did you ever notice that fewer Jews die on

holidays?   Take Passover for example  a mere 3   Then 2

days after final matzoh fried  10 Jews die   Maybe Yaweh

keeps them in a holding pattern  pulls the plug on plug

pulling day  quite randomly

 

Worship only impermanence  if you want to leave here with

a shred of sanity   Yesterday a 20 yr. old man in Thailand took

his 10 mth. old baby to an abandoned hotel   There he hung her

+jumped out a window   This  reported in those little sidebars in

the newspaper   The ones they use to jolt you out of your caffeine

induced preparedness to seize the day!

 

Why do they do this to us?   Carl Jung counselled against reading

the news   Ditto  flying    Both giving us the false sense that we have

risen above the fray  the war  the cancer   Depressed Thai dads are

faraway   You are untouchable up there in the clouds   Where in the

blink of an eye you can put it back the way it was    Then you land

with a thud  +your Ativan-daze fades

 

The people who are the most hopeless know  that even angels declare

bankruptcy  +if you want to avoid a plane crash sit beside one of these

folks   For stamped on their foreheads are the words: this one stays until

the bitter end    When  previously unbeknownst   all debts are forgiven!

(As long as you never land)

 

Up there  even the Thai dad is put back together again!   In this poem  a lyrical

thing   all false hope  +all false cheerfulness in the face of your fear  is a recording

Hang up +try your call again   Then punch the smug bastards in the nose    +run

Or better yet  flap

__

REDEMPTION

MY ROCK & ROLL REDEMPTION

One day  from 60  +then I stop counting  permanently

Our family Rabbi said  at the Atkins funerals I’ve

attended   Every year past 70  is an extra   70 sounded

ancient  now it doesn’t   It already has a tentacle around

a mottled ankle

 

Maybe age  is  just a number?   I used to think espousers of

this philosophy  shallow   But now that my number is up there

I care  less   +soon I will care  not at all   Ditto  petty bullshit

Do not wax poetic re: your cousin’s hernia surgery   My eyes in

permaglaze from 6 decades of nodding politely

 

These days I’m just as likely  to get my shotgun out  +send you

packing  light a fire under your greasy bonhomie   Approach me

carefully   Target practice yesterday   Shotgunned 1st beer Sunday

Husband+brothers: You don’t have to tilt your head all the way

back   Just tilt the beer!  Now they will feel buckshot  nibbling at

sagging butts   +wish they’d never messed with pretty little me

 

Do I sound angry?

 

It’s just that when you read  say  Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography

no matter how bad things get  you know who he will grow up to be

In my story is there no rock & roll redemption in sight?   Show a little

faith there’s magic in the night  I ain’t a beauty  but hey  I’m alright!

 

Go quietly   railing is for pussies  +face it  your story will never end with

you growing up to be  Bruce Springsteen   But these poems  full of darkness

at the edges +flights of baroque  are the antidote to believing  too much in

anything   So  jilt all saviours  +commit the 1st rule of immortality to memory:

This flesh is highly overrated   OMG!  Maybe I did grow up to be Bruce Springsteen

__

 

You can hide ‘neath your covers and study your pain

Make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain

Waste your summer praying in vain for a saviour to rise

from these streets.   Thunder Road   1975   The Boss 

 

 

Spring 2017   onedayto60

AWAY

GIVE IT AWAY

There’s a theatre company I frequent  The

audience is beady-eyed  +hungry  There in

the dark  teeth gnash  +a lung is coughed out

with regularity   Right now there is a play highly

recommending the virtues of life over decay in a

water filled grave

 

Is your soul alive?  they cry  (audience member:

I’m cancelling my subscription they don’t project) 

Once again save me from my demographic  I heard

them LOUD+CLEAR  though only 40% hearing left

in my right ear

 

If you’re not as alive as you might be  you sorely need to

hang around the cemetery  or think about the 20 yr. old girl

who hung herself in my niece’s dormitory  The latches to her

sadness/madness  ennui on a good day  not secured tightly

Now all the girls will need an extra dose of Ativan to sleep

 

Those who found her will find no peace  +wander through life

with a deep seated fear of thresholds  +getting too close  +besties

who are in excruciating pain   I had one once  +her recurring dream

was: being in room filled with water  water that meets the walls

I will never know the outcome of her story

 

She gave me the finger in an Indian restaurant  when I said: Your

ennui is drowning me  And I see now that this was one of the best

things that ever happened to me   Finally free of her membranes

of sorrow+want   +a well pruned borderline personality  masquerading

as creativity    I was left free  +forever weary of hiding malignant narcissists

from psychiatrists   +giving it away for FREE

__

 

 

 

SPRING 2017    7daysto60

PSYCHIC

PSYCHIC SPIES FROM CHINA TRY

TO STEAL YOUR MIND’S ELATION

The woman at my drug mart is cryptic  in an

East European way   One might take it for hard

heartedness   Today my new spontaneous laugh

burst forth  +bits of protein bar sprayed her face

Lips a sublime MAC GASHPINK  moved back+forth   back+forth

A quick mimed: Stick it where the sun don’t shine

 

Most of my epithets involve buttocks’  as I approach the

penultimate week of my 59th year   She’d told her sister:

Just stop it!   At 50 stop the clock!  It’s downhill  In faded jeans

+push up bras you’ll look like a funky old lady  Does she wanna 

kiss my ass too?    This time not mimed    Never funky  only iceycool

 

I’m sick+tired of: moored in one’s bullshit diatribes   Dogs+older

boys followed you down quite regularly   +push up bras  +ripped

jeans clung like Dani California’s (think Red Hot Chili Pepper’s young ho)

Why Anthony Kiedis himself once fell to his knees at your feet (+not viceversa)

WHO YOU CALLING FUNKY?

 

Later  when you took him home  dreams of Californication dancing like

sugarplums  you fell asleep on his piratical shoulder   Nowadays you reflect

on how soon you will be going   Billie left at 44  cirrhosis of the liver  Voice of

a drunken angel     God bless the child who has his own    

 

Yes  do   Soon a bitter niece will want you to de-clutter  Downsize  Fuck you  little

darling  With the grace of the last hawk  you will resist stasis  Spread funky old wings

Never abandon poetry    Find old Anthony +his son Yogi  (Bear)   Seriously!

And light out for new territory

_

 

 

 

SPRING 2017  13daysto60

 

 

REASON

EVERYBODY DIES  WHETHER OR NOT YOU EAT

6 ALMONDS A DAY  SMOKE 2 PACKS A DAY   OR

BELIEVE IN GOD   AND EVERYTHING DOES NOT

HAPPEN FOR A REASON

Take the Cochrans   A Utah couple walking on the London

bridge last week   Last day of 25th anniversary trip   Melissa

now a widow  is  getting stronger  according to brother

Clint Payne   Broken leg  +rib  cuts to head   When I recounted

this to my husband of 25 yrs. he said:  Well what are the chances

of that happening?  i.e., the world is pretty safe    My point: No

it ain’t

 

We did not meet terrorists on our 25th    Just a snotty hostess:

We never take reservations  (except they did)   +2 Scottish toughs

cursing in a booming burr  at the bar  where we ended up snivelling

into comped champagne   Hotel owner: Come back later! Renew your

vows!   Fuck Off  George Freedman   Bollocks to you +yours

 

Yesterday on a freakishly warm Aprill Fool’s day   a still little girl  with

electric blue eyes  +dark circles  took my hand  +began  to stroke the fur

of my vest   I had never seen her before  I suggested to my paramour that

this was strange   Not really   he noted    Contrary + Scottish  to the core

 

But I maintain  when unknown children follow you in the park   They see

what you see   Smell that smell  of sewage+spring  +old dog shit exposed in

melting snow   They know  that you have crossed over the great divide   Ready

to face Hill 70 at Vimy   Let go of all expectations of immortality  of being granted

immunity  mostly from telling those you never did   to kiss your skinny white ass

Your face no longer covering your disguise

 

Today again  the ever so faintest scent of sewage   Wait  it cannot be dog excrement

in yellow snow  No  It is you  learning what it means to help make God conscious of

what he did to Job  that wretched stand-in for EVERYMAN   And as your flesh ripens

in the Putrefacto  innocence is transformed into throwing babies onto bayonets

Warsaw ghetto 1942   And the certain knowledge that you  are finally brave enough to

stop caring who rattles your cage

__

(Is that spittle running down the chin of the chortling man you just passed?)

 

He can kiss my ass.

 

 

SPRING  2017

 

DOG

THE MORE I SEE OF SOME PEOPLE

THE BETTER I LIKE MY DOG  HE SAID

First 6 months of grey mornings   coming slowly

to consciousness   Merciless   Remembering around

the edges   He’s dead   Gutted  pulled back into the

gaping hole   More vast than the one they put him in

With antechambers  tunnels to arteries  clogged with

freshgrief

 

Then on a full moon night  February 1990  the 6 month nadir

After which  you rise up from the bed  bloody+splayed  like

the sacrificial lamb   Griefempty+skinned    Shot back into life

Perma-soulhole    You slide through decades  learning the

secret meaning of:  immortality

 

It is: your father’s voice   His laugh   His phraseology:  Don’t

argue with a fool   If you have one true friend in a lifetime

you’re lucky   Don’t spend other people’s money   He’s full

of shit    All of it  alive +well  in the deepest caves of memory

Unaccessible to the ravages of aging   Growing deeper +more

resonant with time  (your 93 yr. old mother  hears her mother’s

voice almost nightly)   

 

Until one day  almost 30 yrs. since the grave was fresh   There is

a transmutation of: your father + a bird    It screeches loudly at

the cemetery  as you + a brother  re-visit line and verse  old sorrows

The family curse   This father/bird will have none of it   He bomb dives

your head  with beating wings +a rush of air   +the ever so faintest

scent of  Aqua Velva

__

 

 

Spring  2017   for Daddybird   aka Harry Lee Atkins  1921-1989

 

CODE

I’M SPEAKING TO YOU FROM THE HEART

BUT IT’S COMING OUT IN CODE

An ecstatic confession?   My mother saw her 1st sunrise

at 93:  It was orange  NOT  yellow!   emphatically     2

lines of orange light  just over the buildings  far off in the sky

It was so beautiful!   I didn’t know quite what it was   

 

What is the name of that place in the States where they

covered up a UFO sighting?  I thought this was what she

was telling me   A fire breathing dragon in the east!   A burning

bush on Sinai    1947  Roswell:  the flying disk in the sky    Or

perhaps like that hard shelled bug   the one we kept in a jar  +

batted around for an entire summer   A visitation?    Be careful what

you torture      The Gods will likely arrive in disguise

 

Build a shrine to your innocence    It will return with a vengeance at 80

+be all you have left at 90  when the firsts + the lasts  areoneandthesame

 

We came upon ducks    It was 1963     Wild with wanting one  I trampled

them   They fled from said child  who trembled  with a future  approaching

unabated     Maps entirely futile       Never to be fully navigated

 

An unshaven holyman crouched by the bullrushes   A river flowed through

our ravine  carrying the bones of ancestors  +those not yet born  all the way

from the burbs to Babylon    New forms  both strange +familiar   alighting

like an old grief  about every 10yrs. or so   Crouching on slow thighs  waiting

to be born

__

 

 

I must clear the house of my head,

I must make room for a shrine before they all die,

With fireflies and starlight.  

(Walcott   White Egrets   2010)

RIP  Derek Walcott  87   Nobel Prize  St. Lucian Prophet  

..my muse on a very good day..

 

Spring  2017

 

HELMETS

GIVE US A CRACK IN OUR HELMETS

SO THAT RAY CAN GET IN

First day of Spring  5 degrees  grumpy+grizzled

I realize that I have no allegiance to my demographic

Maybe even horrified that I belong   Dead stares   bad

hair  mostly   I am not a joiner  more (pussy) anarchist

Thought I’d be one  when Trotsky’s moustache beckoned

 

Then seduced by service for 10  Ashley’s registry for bougie

brides  Platinum ring around white bone china  Never used

them   Marriage stalled   Mermaid spirited young husband

away

 

47 yrs. ago when Leonard sang dirges to Suzanne +Maryanne

adulthood beckoned   juicy+sexy   Real thing: motherlode of learning

curves pile up  until you’re the Einstein of the universe   Poet of pain

Collar bone aches bitterly today   Spring breakers stare at your frothy

pink coat   +your unconscious is really unconscious

 

It’s time to run away from home   Barbie suitcase packed every Sunday

as father +jockstrap boys watched sports   Where’s that Barbie suitcase

when you really need it?   Throw in a few bottles of: Clairol Light My Fire Red

a MAC: Ruby Woo  +hit the road

 

And dontyacomeback no mo  no mo

No mo

__

 

ANGELS

THEY WERE LIKE ANGELS

RUNNING AROUND IN FLIP FLOPS!

Said someone not in the habit of waxing whimsical

Quite the contrary   Usually a diehard Schopenhauerian

with a penchant for down: you don’t get me  I turned 

the lights out 5 yrs. ago  I’m not pretending to have a 

life    Yet today there he was tossing out limericks on:

Grace does Lace   He even used rainbow twice  in the

same sentence

 

G does L   2 blonde Australian girls who can fly  when

they’re not seducing middle-aged depressives with their

pent up joy   I hate them already   One will likely have a

cameo at my next wedding  (they sell 150 wedding gowns

a minute!!)  Trust me an exclamation mark has never found

its way into his syntax

 

So what’s different about today?  His friend’s brother lay in an

upstairs room slowly dying of Legionnaires Disease   In a dream

he called out: Save me!  Save me!    Too late  the ambulance carted

his ghost away   In real life he lives  to fight another day

 

In his youth  a legend in the shetl   A tough Lenny Brucer   Introduced

phony Beatlemania boys to Springsteen+Lou   He’s 68 yrs. old  never kissed

a girl    Tomorrow eve  Grace does Lace  will do his ghost in Shopey’s dream

Small town hero will wake with a smile   There will be a rainbow  Full umbra!

#wouldntshitya

___

death, he said, let it come,

it was after the races,

zipper on pants broken,

$80 winner, he vomited

and got back into bed with her.

(Charles Bukowski  1972)

 

 

Almost April  2017   RIP DEREK WALCOTT   87  poet  Nobel Prize laureate  muse   died today  my copy White Egrets stolen from car  along with 6 mths. of poetry  2011

YEARNING

A REMINDER OF LIFE’S WILDNESS +

UNASSUAGEABLE YEARNING

It looks like a scene out of Heidi today  everything

covered in white   Slow-mo flakes cascade   A crazed

cacophony of tiny screams as they melt    Last blast

Surely

 

People tired of poet’s obsession with weather+ references

to cancer   Stop reading now: if you are looking for answers

sunshine  or daffodils  (you know who you are!)    Yesterday’s

news brought us sisters   97 yr. old twins  who died within

minutes of each other

 

One of natural causes  as they approached the other’s car   The

2nd of hypothermia (supposedly gentle; a quiet shutting down)

as she waited +cradled twin #1   Zillions of stars overhead  Reports

of several hundred falling to earth!  Celebrating the twins    1st

responders found them in co-joined fetal position   Just as they came

 

Something beautiful  +cruel in this   I’ll give you that   Though it occurs

to me that I wouldn’t mind leaving on the same day as the boys I knew

first   We who rode wild our bikes until dusk  +the biggest one held off

police as we 3 pulled every flower on the street    Mother’s Day 1966

 

Now old goats  marching side by each  dragging one another from the brink

when necessary   Said a friend whose brother suicided 25 yrs. ago: may you

die the same day as your brothers

__

 

Who understands the world, and when

will he make it, make sense?  Or she?

Maybe there is a pair of them, and they sit

watching the cream disperse into their coffee.

Like the A-bomb. This equals that, one says.

They exchange smiles.  It’s so simple, they’ll be

done by lunchtime.

 (Tracey K. Smith  Life On Mars  Pulitzer Prize)

 

 

 

Almost April  2017    for my bros  M+H+J       RIP  Jean+Martha Young  Barrington RI