November 25, 1993: I blew everyone away with my poem "Phallus in Wonderland"

Thirty years ago today   

            On Thursday I worked at West Toronto Secondary School until 15:00 and went home for a while. That evening I went back downtown to pose at the Harold Uplis studio. Angeline didn’t show up. Then I went to Eric Britton’s show at his studio near Dundas West Station and had a couple of beers. It was a great show. Then I went to the Café May on Roncesvalles and blew everybody away with my poem “Phallus in Wonderland”. Then I read “Scat Has Nine Lives”: 

When I was a little bitty baby

they fed me cow's milk out of a dildo 

that was hollow with a nipple on the end 

It was a mother-father composite 

with a tit to suck and a cock to grip 

and so my mother's breasts failed to be my friend 

So when her milk dried up and parted 

I couldn't be broken hearted 

When you ain’t had none then you don't know how none feels 

Then for years her breasts were vacant 

till they were rented out by Satan 

and turned into cancer-terminals on wheels 

Then there was that other fake nipple 

although it gave nothing for all of my sucking 

but they plugged it in whenever I cried 

I guess they couldn't handle the purity

(Because there's nothing purer than a baby's scream) 

'cause soon all that scat wonder-jazz died 

Then while my vocal act was frozen

my young ears were left wide open 

and they poured in words until my head was full 

so that when they pulled the nipple-plug out

the words came tumbling out of my mouth 

and my crazy scat-jazz-riff turned to the blues

But Scat has nine sweet laughing lives 

It'll slide out from under piles of jive 

and rusting metal heaps of angular sound 

With a body made of crying, laughing and breathing 

it'll slither through where the language ain’t even 

and those cracks abound in every language around 

Then as soon as I could swallow 

their instructions grey and hollow 

they hooked me up to another instrument 

whose psycho electric machinery 

kept me spinning constantly 

and they called it 

reward and punishment 

            Angeline showed up at the end and later she read some great poems of her own. Afterwards we went up to The Range and split some chicken. We got on the subway and she got off at Yonge but came to my place later and we worked on a collage together.