songanddancegirl

BUTTERFLY

DANCE LIKE A BUTTERFLY STING LIKE A WOMAN SCORNED

My inclination was to catch it   The last yellow

butterfly known to mankind   There in the park

mingling with hipsters +Jay fans rushing home

for the game   Glorious day  9º above normal for

late October  Sports fans will be trapped indoors

smelling each others pheromones  for hours

Will they take sex breaks?  Stats say most do   1.5

times per inning   Now the butterfly is tucked neatly

into my pocket  more alive than I   Sap-reversed  +

polymorphous perverse  attracted to the sentient +

non  + to last butterflies

Goal being to keep it alive until Spring  +release it in

a world where Hillary has jailed divorced Donald for

finding her too unattractive to grope   One where

Melania  after escaping from Trump Tower  lands a

job with the Clinton Foundation where Bill does not

find her too unattractive to grope

Now look at  crooked Hillary  so full of promise at 23    Why

did she excuse Bill’s debauchery?  Little Tammy Wynette

wife   friend to Melanias everywhere

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“You know,  I’m not sitting here as some little woman standing by

my man, like Tammy Wynette.  I’m sitting here because I love him

and I respect him and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve

been through together.  And, you know, if that’s not enough for people,

then, heck, don’t vote for him.”  

(Hillary Clinton 2015  in response to Bill’s “bimbo eruptions”. )

Fall 2016   20 days to U.S. election

MONSTERS

WHERE MONSTERS DO LIVE

..then rising up again like funhouse figures,

and stripping the clothes from the dead and

seizing them up by the hair and passing their

blades about the skulls and snatching aloft

the bloody wigs, gutting the strange white torsos

and holding up great handfuls of viscera, and

genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with

gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some

fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud

cries to their fellows.  

(Blood Meridian  Cormac McCarthy  1985)

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The only other place such atrocities have been witnessed

has been in the play  of children   Extraordinary acts of

sadism  beheadings  burnings in baths  +rapes    Sex me

therapist   I won’t tell anybody   Too often  mass executions

in the sandtray    Tissue paper blood  splattered on ponies

kittens  +Pokemon

So much to do   So little time  the boy who loved Pikachu

sang   Welcome to my nightmare  the girl with greying teeth

+biker father  said    Thrown against the wall at 3  by Mom’s

new boyfriend named  Cookie

Yesterday in  American Honey  a band of misplaced kids

led by Elvis Presley’s granddaughter  Riley  hopelessly make

their way across Donald’s kingdom  Lord of the Flies-esque

except  in urban wastelands   Youthquake bacchanalia   Post-

millennial debauchery

One cherubic neo-hippie  baptizes herself in a river  +though

we are told she cannot swim  up she rises  Dreadlocked Queen

of abject poverty   Hopelessness crackles through the screen  but

not louder than popcorn man behind us  or some deviant in front

on the phone   Too afraid to confront him  lest he rear up on hind

legs

Baseball cap does not mask tips of red leathery ears   Please allow 

me to introduce myself    We hunker down in plush seats   My seat

mate determined to prove that we have witnessed  an epiphany!  But

then he takes the message of Christ quite literally

One cheek often bruised + bloodied   Hope is God  he has been known

to say  as I cower  waiting for the other shoe to drop    If God is hope

temperament is destiny   +all the children in therapy will live happily

ever after

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Muta Abana, the father of a released Chibok girl said: Some of them

came back with babies, but think about it, are we going to kill the

children?   (Globe & Mail  October 17  2016)

Fall 2016   22 days until Donald rules the land

FREE

BUSTED FLAT IN BATON ROUGE WAITIN FOR A TRAIN

NOTHIN’ DON’T MEAN NOTHIN’ HON  IF IT AINT FREE

Jack hammers jacking   Off my rocker with dogs

barking until 3 a.m.   Unholy Urban Quarter

Even the skunks have been displaced by hipster’s

skunky weed   I’m taking my neighbour to court  +

if I become Prez  I’ll send her to jail   Mark me

Last time I saw her  clouds of skunky-smoke wafted

around her hair extensions   They’ll never take my dogs

away    Today  wedged between a stinking squirrel  + a

dead chickadee  I write these words to insulate myself

from the meek

Now wrathful over Gordie’s impending leave taking

You will not steal the silence  nor wrest the last pink

macaroon from me    Citydweller!  I implore you:

Do not dwell on being free

__

(Peter Mansbridge to Gord Downie re: his terminal brain cancer)

Peter: Does it hurt?

Gord: No

__

How is it that we mortals get bright eyed

because a dress is blue and has a bow?

I take a sip and the water is bitter,

and I think: Sex is frail,

even the sex of men.

(Adelia Prado 1978  Poet Laureate  Brazil)

Fall 2016  smell that smell the smell of snow surrounds you

NOBEL

BLOWIN’ IN THE NOBEL LAUREATE BREEZE

Idiot Wind

Blowing through the buttons of our coats

Blowing through the letters that we wrote

Idiot Wind

Blowing through the dust upon our shelves

We’re idiots babe

It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

(Bob Dylan)

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Idiot wind  Blowing through America

The lowest have gone high  +the highest

have gone low  Cover up the truth with lies

Idiot wind   One day he’ll be in a ditch   Flies

buzzing around his eyes   Idiot base   It’s a

wonder you still know how to breathe –

Aprill Atkins Cameron + Bobby Zimmerman

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Dylan is not an entertainer. What he is, as the

Nobel committee just recognized, is the greatest

popular poet of the past 50 yrs. He is spoken of

in the same breath as Keats, Shakespeare, and

Milton.  (Globe & Mail October 14, 2016)

Fall 2016

Bravo! Robert Zimmerman the Jew from Hibbing

2016 Nobel Prize for Literature

‘PHOBING

‘PHOBING AT THE MOUTH

He loomed over Hillary like a monkey  in heat

Was this a grope-able moment?  What if he’d

grabbed her by the pussy?  “Grab them by the pussy.

You can do anything.”  (Donald Trump on women +

the perks of fame)  Jane Goodall  expert on chimp

behaviour   studied his non-verbals   the chimp-man

body language: naked aggression  loud squawking  throwing

feces   thrusting of chest + pelvic region

It seems that under the ill fitting suit +santa-red tie  there

resides an un-evolved iteration of humankind    Before

agriculture  +religion  +standing up on hind legs   This lowest

donald-denominator has always been lying in wait  Think  Il Duce

Think Idi   Think about America as sleazy reality tv  How will the land

of the free ever be taken seriously by the short men in the East?

One  baby faced +chubby  wielding missiles +Dennis Rodman    The

other beady eyed +perpetually flexing flaccid muscles  often wrestling

with a bear   Soon the echo of laughter from terrorists in caves  will

ricochet through Aleppo  which will cease to exist in another 90 days

(Globe+Mail October 2016)   And Hillary’s perma-smile will deepen as

a strapping young man in a blue suit crouches beneath her desk  –

O America  land of equal opportunity

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Fall 2016    for big bro M.A.  who generously donated the title of this poem!

BEFORE

BEFORE THE FALL

to die of the beauty

of this light

of these reds + golds

of these flickering pods

of shadow

of these greens

oh the sound of this

autumn breeze

crinkling   swish

+ birdsong

__

October 21, 2000

FALL  2016

FARM

PARCHMAN FARM

the barbed wire

the smoke stacks

the chains on the gang

the railroad cars in line

the line of Humanity

the guitar wailing out

the cries of the lost ones

on Parchman Farm

on Parchman Farm

when we were young

__

September 24, 2000  

for Illinois

on his 42nd

*(Parchman Farm is the oldest prison, and the only

maximum security prison for men in the state of

Mississippi)

Fall 2016

PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE

PLEASE DO CONFUSE THE END

WITH THE BEGINNING

She is gorgeous +dark skinned  speaking

a singsong French   Pneumatic breasts ride

high +bounce  Mesopotamian goddess material

in urban jungle  devoid of horizons  +round

feminine hills   of magic +deep wells

When God was a woman thighs+bellies  buttocks

+breasts  were worshipped   The age of uroboros

No shortage of fecund   Great Round  now extinct

Numb citydwellers uncertain where end begins +

beginning ends   Not realizing  that they do not

The whole point of the uroboros is infinity  but if

you have been programmed to believe in straight

lines  +greying male sky Gods  poor you    Perhaps

the Rabbi who stopped at Gethsemane before being

nailed to a tree  knew  that: the vertical + horizontal

can be dangerous in the wrong hands  And that no one

has ever been  or ever will be  crucified  on a circle

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October 6, 1998:  21 year old Matthew Shepard  a buoyant,

diminutive, openly gay Wyoming student, was found bloodied

and comatose in a field, strung up in a manner later described

as a crucifixion. 

Fall 2016   ere of Thanksgiving   RIP Matthew Shepard

WORLD

I LOOK AT THE WORLD AND I NOTICE IT’S TURNING

Have you noticed the bizarre quality  of today?

Not 1  but 2 men with pizza boxes  bumped me

The 2nd fell to the ground  his box crushed by

my left breast   I don’t know how  he was diverted

Pepperoni perverted+torn  on pavement  Pizza man

inverted +gently weeping   What story have you told

yourself  about today?  What connects you to history?

I look at you all   + I see you should be   stripped of

your phenomenology   of your politics  +phobias   of

your performances

When the existential nakedness  to end all nakedness

will lead you directly to your inner-most selves  And not

in the opposite direction  like say  the world wide web

It will be a little like birth  a little like death  when the

sound of your name echoes  + fades    How many mirrors

must you look in to know  that the wall you see behind  is

the trueblueyou    With  nothing  in-between   And no one

alerted you    Until now

I look at you all   your bodies: a cypher  acting out your spirit

No guru  No teacher   Only exiled poets+cows   lucky prostitutes

+ old sidewinding men

__

I sleep a drunken sleep,

judging the beauty of the world negligible,

craving something that neither dies nor withers,

nor avoids meeting my hard, ravenous look.

(Adelia Prado  1990  Alphabet In The Park)

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About Adelia Prado: She says to herself , I am a simple

person, a common housewife, a practising Catholic. Her

family were laborers; she was the only one to see the ocean,

to go to college, or to dream of writing a book. At 81 she lives

in Divinøpolis, Brazil, a landlocked state of rugged mountains,

mines, and baroque churches. She began publishing her poetry

at 40.

__

Fall 2016    First day of 5,777  lunar Jewish Calendar

RACE

DOES THE RACE CARD HAVE A PLACE IN DAY SURGERY?

the pretty activist of colour  with a mesmerizing

fuchsia lip  skin a lovely coppery sheen  head partly

shaven   chastised steve paikin for saying that much

of the new assisted housing  is so nice you would

never know  low blow steve p   a man who usually

with one eyebrow askew  skewers  the man   though he

is a successful white jew  wonder if activist knew?

where we come from you don’t want to draw attention

to yourself  especially while travelling in much of the mid

east  or any neo-nazi hot spot  i.e.,  parts of france  + yes

germany   somehow the mind finds a circuitous route back

yesterday as we huddled around our soon to be surgeried

sister   all 5 of us    yes 5!   in a small waiting area  where the

rule was 1 family member per patient

but then we’re stereotypically pushy   a holocausted people  who

in 2016 dare you to: grab the baby from our arms  +catch it on the

tip of a bayonet   May the bones of the dead be resurrected  enfleshed

+ may the year 5777  be one of miracles

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I saw an officer make a flinging movement with his arm, and

something rose up into the sky like a fat bird. With his other

hand he aimed a pistol, and the bird plummeted to the ground 

beside its screaming mother, and the officer shot the mother too.

But it was not a bird. It was not a bird. It was not a bird.

(In My Hands   Memories Of A Holocaust Rescuer  Irene Gut Opdyke  1999)

Fall 2016    Rosh Hashanah