songanddancegirl

PONY

WILD PONY RACE

up on a horse at 4  long before a bike

no saddle  father’s cowboy boots gleaming

annie oakley-girl screaming her chuckwagon

heart out

fearless up there  horses like mountains   make

sure your hand is FLAT  for sugar cube after

Big Yellow Teeth graze her fingers   August sixteen

approaching  day they took Elvis  +cowboy father

girl left to wander at the pony races  her phone #

fades  drops things on the floor  forgets to lock the

door   but she will tell you with certainty: NEVER

WALK BEHIND YOUR HORSE!  

And please: DO NOT RESUSCITATE

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Summer 2015  RIP cowboys+crooners

FLAG

LET YOUR FREAK FLAG FLY

What deep symbology does the Confederate

battle flag represent? armadas of ships+chains

+whips+cages   In the forest where one woman

was kept for generations  tortured daily   Children

birthed long after she believed in  maps +oceans

circumnavigation   the Cape of Good Hope

South Carolina senate vote on Monday  Take Down

That Flag  cried Reverend Clementa Pickney  from

the otherside   Bullets lodged for eternity in face+chest

He thought he would never die (maybe like you+I?)  That

life is made of iron  +never ends

They gave us Casper didn’t they?   The little whiteman’s

ghost  An already-dead friend   Took decades to realize

you’d never lose him   If the racism in a place runs so deep

they want to segregate Heaven   you know it’s time to burn

that flag   Time to place a plaque at the forest cage  where the

Civil War never did rage

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National Association for The Advancement of Coloured People:

That battle flag is racist+stands for white supremacy

Supporters of the flag: It’s a benign symbol of heritage +genteel

social traditions

Summer 2015

AIR

CASTLES IN THE AIR

Sally Mann wants to photograph the air!

I want it to waft up from the page  dust motes

dancing toward your eyes   Cool against your

July cheek   Breath of departed brushes past

your ear    Hello in there!

Inhale  Exhale   Scent of sperm trees augurs

fertile Fall  when your alt-country hero brings

his BIG ASS BLACK BUS TO TOWN

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Summer 2015

STOP

STOP THE CRYING+THE LYING+THE SIGHING+THE DYING

His son took his own life  yesterday   The last time I saw him was

20 yrs. ago   Then I sat beside him at the funeral of a friend’s son  

who took his own life     Will the circle be unbroken?   If aging is

enlightenment at gunpoint   parenting unfolds before the firing squad

Unrelenting  always fearing  persevering  un-enlightened    Did you

know that blood is blue?   Baby smeared   drenched +tired   paper-thin

skin    oxygen ignited   blue to red    At once familiar +alien

Mcfate grabs a small hand +leads him down a garden path   Past shipwrecked

daughters+marauders    Path too narrow for you to follow  wail on wail on sailor

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Summer  2015    RIP   boys of summer

WINE

WINE FOR THE WOMEN WHO MAKE THE RAIN COME

Sometimes the forest was so thick you needed a machete  but

used your legs +feet   at 8   large blades beyond your reach   +what

you learned about fiercely kicking chaff from wheat  would stand you

in good stead  50 yrs. on    Beyond them hills lay the-rest-of-your-life

+from this vantage point a few things are clear   one day the ravine

will call you back   show you a new river     You will wave to the

never-were children  who live with the Giant  in his cabin   He made

their beds of barley rice   +everything emptying into white

The vine tatt snaking up your arm+onto cheek  a conversation piece  at

the home   Your brother predicts: they’ll think you’re insane   Tatt falling

away as bone turns to ash  +the last resident claps    With your winning

personality you made it seem easy   Your vine growing up from clenched fist

toward an eye   Unblinking  half-crazed  wanderlust daze

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I, I love the colorful clothes she wears &

the way the sunlight plays upon her hair

I hear the sound of a gentle word  On the

wind that lifts her perfume through the air

Na, na, na  Do, do do do do  

( Good Vibrations  Brian Wilson & Mike Love)

Summer 2015

FREEDOM

FREEDOM TASTES LIKE

Girls of Summer +their spangly shoes

One on pink park bench   mysteriously

painted under full moons   Now strewn

across our frenzied city  soon to be in

Pan Am purgatory

She an almost-goddess serenely perched

Gold sandals encrusted with jewels   Young

Queen of Sheba reigns over milquetoast boys

in Trinity

One on a uni-cycle with music blaring   Red

Hot Chilis   Give it away Give it away Give it

away Now   I don’t know about you   but I’m

keeping mine   Keep it like the Kaiser  drones

Anthony Kiedis  heroin befriended lead Pepper

Unlike the 80 lb. nine year old boy who caught

a seventy-five year old  600 lb. fish  +gave it back

to the Fraser River: cause if you kill them there

won’t be anymore to catch

The giant white fish  born at the end of   WWII

Mother of all sturgeons   Our freedom fish    But

don’t you be fooled    Ain’t nobody perfect    Ain’t

nobody free  Miss Nina Simone just whispered to me

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Summer 2015

1969

1969  CUYAHOGA RIVER   BURSTS INTO FLAMES

Women with SIAD (sexual interest+arousal disorder) do not   Did you know

that the G-Spot has become the centre of a multimillion dollar industry?

Producing both the Rabbit Vibrator +the G-Shot (chemical orgasms)   It was

Dr. Beverly Whipple who coined G-Spot  Named for it’s inventor Ernst Grafenberg!

Much of this early work has been de-bunked by Dr. Lori Sabia  among others

who encourage humans to look no further than the B-Spot  that largest of sex

organs: the human brain    Now cast your eye at: online pornography +ponder

Grafenberg’s redundancy   Which brings us to the imminent: singularity    The

point at which machines become human  sans a conscience

What if the singularity has already occurred?   Did not the B-Spot evolve

out of Nature?  Did not the brainy-sapien turn on its Creator   the Great Mother

Nature?  Havoc has been wreaked    This week  Pepper – The Emotional Robot

sold 1,000 units in 1 minute   for $2,000 a piece

Pepper will try to make you happy whether for domestic help or sex    Pepper

can read+respond to emotions   Ominously  she may make mistakes    And

somewhere in a cave perhaps in the badlands of Pakistan  a synth-terrorist is

applauding

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The development of full Artificial Intelligence could spell

the end of the human race.  Stephen Hawking  BBC  2014

Pepper mourns humanity

Summer 2015

STAIRS

THOSE AREN’T CLOUDS    THEY’RE STAIRS

He remained innocent +teeming with desire

He later saw the captain who had given them

orders layind dead, a half-naked body with a

bare chest and dark, swollen woman’s nipples.

After WWII he vowed never to be afraid of

anything again   Bonfires of words being lit all

over America   Great man of letters died June 25

90  collapsed at his gym in elegant Sag Harbour

Born James Horowitz    Died James Salter

He was the purest form of himself   3 word sentences

Some 2   Some more  The daughter was a soft, seductive

color, six or seven years old. He was holding her by the

waist, half woman, half vase.   Like Sylvia Plath   James

believed in magic until the age of 9

Both had seen sharks wash up in their grandmother’s

gardens after hurricanes   There was a two-headed toad

in my own Bubbie’s garden   +I squashed it with wild

abandon   Sylvia a suicide +mother of a suicide   James

father of 5

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There comes a time when you realize that everything is

a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have

any possibility of being real.   James Salter  2013

Summer 2015

DOG

DOG DAY AFTERNOONS   WEST QUEEN WEST

Did you know that Einstein’s penis was 1.5 inches?

Or wait  was that Napoleon’s?  Einstein explained

relativity  which explains gravity   Yet I have not the

gravitas to explain the hipster’s penchant for my park

Today Trinity Bellwoods is filled with boy-lugs  (+the man

who photographs women’s crotches)  Les boys brought a

little bit of everything: neon frisbees  2 eagle kites  badminton

bubbles+rollerblades      O un-holiest of clichés

One guy with chains streaming from his jeans  bare-chested +

foul-mouthed  cannot fly his kite worth shit   Hands it over to

granddaddy (in chains)   now dragging eagle along the ground

Astute aboriginal man shouts: Hey that’s no eagle!    Frisbees

hitting trees  + paisley clad Poet   Albino squirrels run for cover

Cool people are to parks as parks are to dogs  as dogs are to

parks: noisy interlopers who shit where they sleep

#savemefromtrinitybellwoodsparkinsummerplease

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I become very raw emotionally when I’m writing. A good steak

can bring me to tears.  (Nic Pizzolatto  True Detective  June 2015)

Summer  2015

APOLOGY

STEPHEN HARPER ALL BUT ASKED THE POPE FOR AN APOLOGY*

Stephen went to Vatican City recently +acted somewhat

cowardly   Even Emily Carr came up against a wall of

indifference to indigenous suffering    She became a

landlord & dog breeder for a time

She who painted trees in their wedding dresses   In deep

greens  forest majesty   careening+dancing next to totem

poles   chopped haphazardly   Hacked by haters  colonizers

Now truth+reconciliation is everywhere

With much quibbling about semantics   whose genocide was

the real-deal   cut the deepest  hole   A few floors below the Carr

show  A.G.O.   hang the Warsaw ghetto photos    There the man

who saved the Torah!   There the bloated children  laying on the

streets

There is a certain kind of spotlight required for truth+reconciliation

from which most shy away   An x-ray of the human heart  circa 1942

showed lesions +rot so advanced that the Pope among others still can

not fathom it

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at the Mohawk Residential School in Brantford Ontario: they were

confined to cells like animals for days on end   fed only slimy oatmeal

+they powdered the children’s faces too   by any other name   a genocide

Summer 2015   *& the People’s Pope did not volunteer one