Month: February 2021

Ericka’s song

This is Katie’s fave song of mine. Well it was the last time she told me. My oeuvre is large enough at this point that I have to say MY favourite is ‘the next one…. and the one after that, and who cares anyway, it’s all about how it lands.’ So here’s something for bisexual gals errywhere.

For she is a healer
who sees to the heart
a friend who has always
taken my part
though miles lie between us
I knew from the start
Her voice will sustain me
her love is now part of the home that is feeling
and not just a place
for me to park my belongings
and rest from the race
our home is the earth as it circles in space

we lovers have learned to escape from our words
to nourish the peace and attend to the hurts
to know who we love and will never desert

I long to be with her, and never let go
but life isn’t simple, or we’d never grow
to most of life’s longings, the answer is ‘no’
I treasure the mem’ries we made out of the
snow that is transformed by the weather and nature’s design
from crystalline enchantment to something as fine
as the mist on the mirror that once framed your face

we lovers have learned to escape from our words
to nourish the peace and attend to the hurts
to know who we love and will never desert

I wrote this for a friend and her lover and they promptly broke up.

long distance relationships I tell ya

She had the most beautiful tie dye outfits! and anything else gets under the zip of lips.

kaossilator notes

This won’t mean anything to anyone who doesn’t have an early model yellow Korg Kaossilator

new tune:

L06/G09/C_/120bpm/5ths

Play starts in the exact middle. Slide fingers between the top right and bottom left corners of the touch screen. Describe acute triangles with your finger. Go wild. After a couple of minutes park your finger just to the right of the top middle and leave it there til fadeout.

‘cheerful cheerful movement’

Not a lazy day

It’s just coming up on one pm. I worked on the letter for Alex; three loads of laundry including the washcloths (Jeff and I dry our hands on separate washcloths now, both upstairs and down, and will maintain that after this pandemic lifts) and the kitchen rugs; watered the baby yoda plants; went for a walk and got my bloodwork done (which I should have done Monday, but there’s nothing like finding out you have brain damage to put a fucking crimp in your week, god knows how long the CT will take), and now, if Jeff feels like it, I’ll get him something takeoutish for supper. I want a burrito but he’s into something a little less gaseous.

Called Katie last night. She was so glad to hear from me, we had a nice chinwag. She may bring Alex on Sunday, depends on what he wants.

Paul called and wanted to go for a walk because it’s gorgeous, but I been already….

I guess I never felt this way

Well I’m never at a loss for something to say
but a strange thing happened to me today
I may know every word in the dictionary
but all of a sudden they are all very
inadequate to convey
what I want to say
and I guess I never felt this way
and I guess I never felt this way

Isn’t it romantic
isn’t it a thrill
just to watch you walking
just to catch a smile
Day and night I pray
for the perfect thing to say
and I guess I never felt this way
and I guess I never felt this way

Isn’t it romantic
isn’t it a joke
that I never feel things
like ordinary folk
let this be a lesson
for those who like to talk
you’d better keep your mouth shut
if you can’t walk the walk
Cause after all the hormones
after all the play
you gotta do the work
so the FUN won’t go away!

I know how I feel
but the words run astray
I can look at you now
and I can honestly say
that what I feel is true
and I mean it from today
and I guess I never felt this way
I guess I never felt this way

wrote this for a crush in Montréal, so 1995
The other thing that’s important about this song is that I yelled at the kids to leave me alone so I could write it and with sad little faces they brought me paper and a pencil so I could write the words down and did I feel like a shitheel. IT IS NO FUN TO LIVE WITH SOMEONE CREATIVE when they are in the throes and cranky with it. I’ve thanked them both for it since.

The Splendour of the True

this got written on the same day as Catnip on my Shoe. I had the date written down somewhere and I imagine if I tear my room apart I could find it but it doesn’t seem that important candidly. I was making fun of Bob Dylan’s writing style all the way through this. That no good lousy son of a seacook Dave Dowker (/s) said BUT ALLEGRA YOUR SONGS NEVER HAVE BRIDGES and I thought I’ll fix you, you fucker, (Dave, man, you *know* I love ya past the edge of time and words) so note the bridge. IT’S A LITTLE ON THE NOSE but that my dears is a feature of the true Allegra style.

Please also note that the line about ‘gave me all her money’ IS TRUE. A friend was experiencing mental health problems and she gave every dime she had on her to a street musician. She had no way to know that he was about to be evicted; she prevented him, his then girlfriend and infant child from being thrown into the street. YEARS LATER all three of us met in the friend’s apartment – he was now an IT wrangler in Vancouver – and I GOT TO PLAY THIS SONG FOR HIM. That is one of the many extremely spooky song magic things that’s happened to me over the course of my life (you would NOT BELIEVE some of the strangest of it, but this example is nice and family friendly) but it’s amped up since I moved to MST country. My song magic is powerful enough to reach into the future and be there waiting for unforeseeable events.

He left me in a dimestore
with a book and half a shoe
I said I can’t believe this
it’s so very good of you
and we’ll have some words before we’re through
Oh I bless the man who wastes no time debating
the splendour of the true

The truth is broken furniture
you can leave it in the street
right next to the newspapers
the hoboes need the heat
I’ll lay my empty pack at your feet
Oh I bless the woman who gave me all her money
and made my set complete

I’ll be to hell and gone before I find another friend so good
she went to the dictionary and tore out the word should
Half a paycheque gone, just to be misunderstood
Oh I bless the woman who listened to me
Just because she could

A bridge, a bridge is what I see
no more analysis, one more river to cross
A bridge, a bridge is what I see
no more analysis, one last river to cross

Sometimes I’d rather sit in darkness
than see a single light
and see so much that needs healing
and being put to rights
better to be broken than never to have tried
and now the dawn has come
and the dark gets swept aside

I’m just going to come right out and say

I think this is my favourite picture of myself currently. You can actually tell my eyes are green. Why would it be one in which I’m wearing a false moustache? I don’t think I’m trans.  I have actually thought about it, have thought about my relationship to my own body, my own gender, my own self-conception as a woman. I am very interested in trans issues, and have been for decades, but I’ve always felt quite comfy in this body, so no dysphoria, and no soul deep awareness of there being something misaligned between the  frame and the spirit. I am repelled by the requirement for female bodies to wear certain kinds of clothes and makeup (for the convenience of men, and policed by other women BLEAUGH)  and to be accoutred in very specific and specifically socially harmful, dangerous and infantilizing ways, so I’m a gender non-conformist. I might have thought I was non-binary at some point but not enough to have public opinions about it, or any ability to hold that idea in my mind as possibly true for longer than it took to acknowledge that as a cis white gal I really do have to question all this stuff since I may believe a bunch of colonial bullshit that just is not true. And no matter how hard I pull at the big ol rubber band known as reality I’m still a mostly straight cis white woman, coasting on my privileges to a strange old age.

I just backspaced over the next two sentences, and the world is a safer place. I have started taking a lot of hair off my face and I’m quite liking the results. I’m rounding out my hairline and keeping my eyebrows quite policed. Both men and women mess with their facial hair. Is it a gendered thing? oh yes.

Paul took me for a walk today and I got letters to Mary and Barry into the post, finally. Pork chomp and coleslaw and broccolini for dinner.

I am not Wilford Brimley

I AM SO WILFORD BRIMLY

Allegra wisdom for the day “Peace of mind is harder to find than the outhouse on Gilligan’s Island.”

on learning that Rush Limbaugh had departed this world

Speak nothing but good of the dead? I shall certainly oblige you in this instance, goodsir, most directly, by ejaculating: “He’s dead? good!”

 

I have to add, because I am a fucking asshole, that he leaves no children to grieve him, so either he was sterile or the women he married were smart enough not to breed with him. Sometimes a heavy hearted world catches a break.

she’s on that poetry thing again – The people they chose

the endearing fascist is everywhere

o,O

the words are a smear of nice, a pretend of nice, a klieg light of nice that burns everything
that’s good and makes it nice, nice, nice
everything orderly

this is a map and these are the lines
and inside these lines we are nice

and I with disrumption have come
have come, and ev-e-ry niceness is glum, was glum.
Tripulations and farkakte derivations of bad things
are apiece with nice,
bakelite
worked
into
one of van Meegeren’s canvases

hanging in a steady machine tic of nice
nice
nice

(THIS IS A CULTURAL TREASURE)

but if you test it, it is not

so apt is my example

Nice is a mill that grinds little Black girls into powder
or tries, and fails to succeed in a vale of Death
just so she doesn’t forget what she’s up against
Nice is the good white girl with almost perfect teeth
who has Done Something Nice
in a perfectly recursive way,
at this point it hardly matters what ; those
people on the receiving end of nice
normally do not get
an opinion

Nice is the nun
educating Cree boys

into a nicer understanding
of their true place in the real world

It’s not for me to say which way is nicer
I already know and you don’t much care, being at the end of the poem

but as for me and the tirelessly nice and
clueless gallery of my colonial foremothers
whom I am pressed to carry now that I have grandchildren
I will choose the lands, and the people they chose
and stay out of your very nice heaven

An evening of serious drinking

An evening of serious drinking
that we have so long planned
an evening of serious drinking
at last at last is at hand
o fall on your knees to the porcelain god
as into the temple you crawl
and pray for the strength of your liver
as into a stupor you fall

An evening of serious drinking
that we have so long planned
an evening of serious drinking
at last at last is at hand
aaaaammmmeeennnnnnnn

Written for Jerome R (whom I brought to my mother in Victoria many moons ago to advise her that I stood in sibling relation to him) on the occasion of his 25th bday a solid 2 decades ago, and it was a fucking awesome party, thanks.

No mOm, you’re not expected to remember meeting every random stranger I’ve dragged in front of you.

Spare a thought for Jeff who occasionally gets this song as an earworm. Man, what a life.

Spoke to Mike

The letter to Barry is stamped, but I hope to accompany it with at least four more letters, I’m quite behind after my weeks of inertia. Mary, gAlex, mOm and pOp are all in the queue. I like looking at a spray of fifty stamps on the kitchen wall, and every time I send a letter, it erodes away, showing that pandemic or no, I can brighten someone’s day with a few scraps of paper. hope Barry likes his, it’s almost 1500 words long, lol.

Mike is not great, but who the hell is. He gets to prepare the orientation and training documents for the people that he’s going to be training to replace him, isn’t life nommy. Learned from him that there is a global shortage of breakers? weird.

I wrote 700 words in the UPSUN universe to day on one project and I’m still having fun with the conlang – poor Dave, bent his ear off with it the other day.

I am not doing all that great, but as long as I’m writing contentment is in arm’s reach.

Anybody talk

I see you coming
there’s no place I can go
You’ll sit beside me
mouth moving to and fro
I’d like to go somewhere
maybe go for a walk
’cause I’m not really in the mood to listen to anybody talk

I’ve heard of places you’re not allowed to speak
Think I’ll check into one, I sure could use it for a week
I’ve been so busy, I’ve had no time to take stock
And I’m not really in the mood to listen to anybody talk

Cancelled the party, maybe you think it’s rude
there’s no excuse for it, I’m just not in the mood
Did it really come as that much of a shock
that I’m not really in the mood to listen to myself talk
Not really in the mood to listen to anybody
Not really in the mood to listen to anybody
Not really in the mood to listen to anybody
Not really in the mood to listen to anybody
Talk

I was childless and living in Amedeo Garden Court in the back building when I wrote this. It was for a woman I should not have attempted to befriend. More would be rude; I certainly wish her well, wherever she is.