Dancing Tonto is silver spoon fed by Goverment Grants? Why?

Life on the road is tiring, one is always on,  listening to people is like a constant barrage of feedback, and it starts to sound like @$#^#%@%@&#, after awhile.  It's one of the best things to hear from a person that got up on stage for the first time and said "your performance helped give me the confidence to do that"! It's not the seasoned local poets that come out to see who is in cringing on there turf, and they are the tough critics, but last night was the opposite. They could not relate to the Poverty, the homelessness poems, the gay poems, the debauchery drunken poems.  This spot here in Canmore, AB was not fully aware of who I was I think? They looked shocked, stunned, and the young man kept his distance from me after the show, After he yelled  "Government Poet Sellout" was that a Shaming thing? or just young anarchist blindness? That's not for me to say, or care about, I was young once, and had "ideals" of how I thought I would like to live, but reality slaps you in the face and says" WAKE THE FUCK UP! I have been on the road long enough to know that one has to take feedback with a grain of salt. I am relieved that the tour dates are done. I can relax and sit in the mountains for the last few day and write, read, and just be. Gone are the Antichrists, the crazy-makers (energy suckers), the day unfolds, and Sam Bailey is the reason maturing Government poets travel to high schools to empower the voiceless.

Loss Is Part Of Life.. For Every Parting is a Teaching.

After a break up a sense of fog shrouds ones mind, like walking numb, eating has no taste, conversations all sound like that teacher from the peanuts cartoon $&^$@%$%#&%.. When I was in my 20's, living in East Vancouver with a house full of butch dykes. It was the early 90's cocaine was the medicine of choice, a joint was a cigarette one had on a break at work, and nobody thought different.
This house was shared  with seven Queers, not close , put together by circumstances.  I walked in one morning into the bathroom to find Jodie still in the tub, after taking a piss, I looked over, she was dead of an overdoes.  I was not surprised.  Went to work. left it to one of the other dyke's to deal with, since I didn't really know her, she was a "roommate" of circumstance.

This was later in life I experienced the loss of a cat named Grace(the most clumsy cat on earth all left feet.) I remember our last day together in Whitehorse, YT before she wandered off into the bush to die "Gracefully". we walked the cliffs above the house , sat on the bluffs looking over the city, then as time came to go down, she just stood there. Looking in a different directions. I said  "You got to go". I picked her up, kissed her, and let her go wander off into the bush to die. Grace had a feline cancer, she came to me tthe way she went.. a stray.  In the north they gave me the injection to administer when I felt the time was right. I never had to make that decision. A few weeks later on my walk up the bluffs I came across graces eaten body, ravens chowing on her.  I thought "what a beautiful way to go." Now she is flying high, where she used to spend hours on top of the house watching the skies and birds. now she was in the belly's of them. beautiful.

The late 80's early 90's saw myself land in the middle of the Aids crisis in Vancouver. I remember dropping off food baskets to dying men, sitting with men that's families have shunned them, and I was a stranger to them, an  "Angel" as I was named by the men whose faces have become a skeleton, ravaged by the disease. I held the hands of more than sixteen men, as the last gasps of air, saying "Just let go babe", the memory of hollow eyes staring at me haunt me till this day.  It was not until 2008 I would loose my dearest friend Jeniffer to the disease. The planing of her funeral on the beaches of Tofino, BC. She planned it all. She left with Grace and class.

I have seen death, and it's not all bad as people think. It's humans "ownership", "attachment" that makes it hard to let go.... Let go... So long Ms. Vivian thanks for the time you spent with me. Your teachings are to many here in this shelter of lost souls whom remember you and you provided comfort to many. Bye.

Ms. Vivian
2007-2010