Syntactic Architecture

            On Tuesday what was left of the little snow storm that had started the evening before gave me my first snowy ride all the way downtown on the bike I’d built last spring. Beforehand I armoured up with an extra shirt layer and my winter boots. The residential side streets that I started out on were the most treacherous. O’Hara was especially slippery and I had trouble maintaining my balance, but I didn’t wipe out, though I did have to stop myself from doing so once with my foot on the ground. I also had no choice but to drive in the middle of the road with a car close behind me.

            Maple Grove was a little better but it had a buildup of snow in the middle with two narrow wheel tracks on either side, so I couldn’t cross over to make a left turn until it ended at Brock. Brock was freer of snow but I took it slow because I feel like I’m getting too old to have any major wipeouts. Car traffic on Dundas was slow as well and it was often impossible to pass them on the right because when the ploughs clear the road they push the snow into a meter-wide bank from the edge of the sidewalk so that it thins the bike lane in half.

            I’m usually at least fifteen minutes early for class, but because of the slowdown I was about seven minutes ahead of the start time. I worked for Greg Damery again but only for the morning this time. He said he would be lecturing for the first ten minutes, so I set up my laptop to do some writing. He couldn’t get the school laptop working to show his slides, so he went to get another one. When he came back though, that one didn’t work either. I’m assuming the problem was either with him or with the projector. He decided to do a demonstration while I posed. After about twenty minutes he moved me to the same part of the room where I’d worked the day before, with a similar setup of me in one long pose with my shirt off.

            I started off having the same problem with drowsiness as the day before, but I splashed my face with water and after a couple of sittings I was able to pose without my eyelids drooping.

            I’d mentioned earlier to Greg that I’d traveled to work by bike. At the end, when I was getting dressed to leave, a tall and attractive young blonde woman started a conversation with me about biking. She said she comes from a small town and she’s too afraid to ride in Toronto. I told her that I was raised on a farm but that I’ve been riding in the city for a long time. I agreed that it can be scary but that it’s mostly dangerous for people that ride like boneheads, which is 90% of cyclists.

            When I got home from work in the middle of the day on Wednesday I went on my computer and opened up the poem that I planned to read that night at Shab-e She’r. At eleven verses it would be too long for the three minutes I would be allowed on the open stage. I timed myself while reading it out loud and found that I needed to select my five favourite verses in order for them to fit the limit. It was an autobiographical poem in which each verse dealt with a certain aspect of my childhood. I picked the opening verse on pretending to fight the devil, the verse about Christmas, the one about playing war, the one about masturbation and the conclusion. I found though that I only really liked the first verse as it was. The others were written in the same form as the first but in trying to it them into that meter and rhyme, I’d made the wording unnatural and awkward. So I rewrote the other verses, throwing style out the window. The whole piece sounded a lot better when I was finished, though I might eventually re-work the whole thing again to give the other verses the songlike feel of the first verse.

            That night I rode east towards the full moon that was hovering above the buildings to the right of the vanishing point of College Street. The expression on the lunar face seemed to be saying, “What the fuck is going on down there?” But as I rode my bike further east and closer to where the moon was, I saw that it was looking down to the right and that its facial mood seemed both pissed off and amused at the same time.

            Giovanna Riccio was sitting at the reception desk when I walked into St Stephen in the Fields church. We chatted briefly about her having been sick the previous month, which I’d known because George Elliot Clarke had mentioned it during his performance. I told her that I’d enjoyed George’s reading so much that I’d gone out and bought the second part of the first volume of Canticles. I asked her if George would be coming this night but she said he teaches Creative Writing on Tuesday nights.

            I went to take a seat but after putting my stuff down I came back to Giovanna to ask if George has ever told her what the format was for the Creative Writing graduate course. She told me that it’s done like a workshop and that three of the seven students read a poem each, copies of which the instructor and the other students have already read. Then everyone offers feedback. The next week the readers have to bring back work that has been informed by the feedback. The week after that, three new readers present their poems and the same process continues. I told her that I hope to take that Masters course eventually if I can get in. She reminded me that one’s grade point average has to be fairly high in order to qualify. My GPA dropped drastically a few years ago because I failed my first French course, but it’s been gradually climbing back up since then to the point where I’m in low end of the B range. Hopefully I can get it high enough by the time I get my degree to qualify for the Masters program. That’ll be several years down the road anyway.

            A thin guy with spiky hair and a high level of erratic energy came into the church. He had carefully applied devil-red shadow all around his eyes, which made him look like his eyes were stylishly bleeding. He walked quickly around the inside of the church and blurted things out loudly to no one in particular. He then went back out the door, but shouted out “What?” as the door closed. Suddenly he pushed the door back open and called out, “Lying snake says what?” and left. A few minutes later he returned and walked around a bit more quietly. I didn’t see him there later on so he must have left.

            Sydney White came and sat at the far side, against the wall. Tom Smarda arrived and we chatted briefly. When he asked how I was doing I told him that I’ve been spending way to much time on Facebook arguing with Cad Gold Jr. Tom commented that he enjoys my exchanges with Cad on social media, and I’ve heard others say the same thing. I told him that the problem with Cad is that when he is online he doesn’t think before he types anything. He says things that he wouldn’t dare to say in public, especially not at Shab-e She’r. I don’t believe in censorship but we do teach our children there are things that are not appropriate. On social media he seems to revert to mindset of a sexualized child and doesn’t understand why it’s not okay to refer to an eleven-year-old child as a “lying Muslim cunt”.  He thinks it’s delicious to be malicious.

Tom went to sit with Sydney. Norman Allen sat almost next to me, with one seat in between us. He asked Giovanna where everybody was and it sounded like she answered that they were at home watching Trump. I asked him, “What about Trump?” He informed me that Trump was giving his state of the union speech that night. I expressed disbelief that poets would care about listening to Trump and I offered the alternative possibility that people were staying home because of the weather. I declared that after people have been out in weather like this during the day, once they get home they don’t feel like going out again. I couldn’t see what the appeal would be of watching even someone as eloquent as Barak Obama read from a teleprompter, let alone hearing a fumbling fool like Donald Trump attempt it.

            I suddenly noticed that my right boot was on my left foot and coincidentally my left boot was on my right foot. I usually take at least a size 10 and these Kodiaks are size 9 but they are so roomy that I have to wear three pairs of socks. They are so roomy that I didn’t even feel it during the ride in. I switched my boots each to their proper foot before we got started at 19:10 with Bänoo welcoming us to the sixth year and the 59^th event of Shab-e She’r. This was followed by the land acknowledgement, which is usually recited from memory by Laboni Islam but since she wasn’t there, Kate Marshall Flaherty read the text from a sheet of paper.

            Giovanna Riccio kicked off the open stage with “Haikus from the News” (By the way, there is no such word as “haikus”, as the plural of haiku is “haiku”. But I guess “Haiku from the News” doesn’t have the same ring to it) I didn’t catch all of these. I wanted to ask Giovanna for a copy but she left before the end. –

“ … bonds splinter / moonlight / requiem for childhood”

“ … Aleppo / I kiss your rubble”

“ … farewell soul / spring blossoms.”

            Jovan read “Grandma Used to Braid My Hair” – “ … I’d sit between her knees … Her thick Caribbean accent would provide insights to CNN … Now I just let it grow.”

            Norman Allan introduced his piece by informing us that the English conquered India and set up the British East India Company, which was effectively the world’s first corporation in the late 1700s (It was actually 1600 but the Dutch East India Company, which started a year or so later, is considered to have been more like a modern corporation). From “A Letter to My Therapist” – The poem began with some lines from “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and ends with a line from “Street Fighting Man”, both by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – “I went down to the demonstration … The police train their horses … They try not to step on bodies but … You don’t particularly like the working class hero, do you … My therapist asks why I say ‘trampled underfoot’ … My fake news … Why is she creating such a fuss … I asked her why she denied death … She said why the fuss … To speak truthfully … I saw Mick Jagger … What could a poor boy do … Just no place for a street fighting man.”

            Elisha (under the pseudonym of Charlie Chopra) approached the stage carrying a laptop and some kind of colourful display on Bristol board. It looked like she was going to use both of these in her performance. She hesitated at the foot of the stage, looking like she was trying to figure out what to do with the laptop. She ended up handing it to someone in the front row and asking them to hold it. She handed the poster to someone else and instructed them to pass it around the audience while she read.

            From Charlie’s piece – “I’ve been doing a lot of projects … my teacher in school gave me … book reports … the scientific rule … Pa has been keen on telling me night after night … I’m not a dumb dumb … I was the best speller and reader in the class … Ghost rap … Ghost writer, ghost writer … Word searches … before alphabet soup … Thank you Mr. Chandler and friends from the former city of Scarborough.” She announced that she was passing around a compilation of her schoolwork. It never got to me.

            At this point Bänoo introduced the first feature, David C. Brydges. David said he was launching two books that night: a chapbook and a full-length book and that he was donating fifteen copies to Shab-e She’r to sell and keep the money.

            He told us that since Trump was doing his state of the union, his first three poems would be in counter-insurgency to Trump’s address.

            From “Rage” – “Rage in America for draining the swamp … for the stock exchange … make America greedy again … for a sickened health care system … for living in a political zoo … the enemy of autocrats … enemy of real wealth of the truth … voices howling through the madness.”

            From “Ideals” – “They tried to build a wall but didn’t know we were the sky … They tried to keep us in the dark … They tried to make us hear double-speak … They tried to keep us on a sinking ship … They tried to banish us to the desert …”

            David explained that his next poem was inspired by the Grammy Awards and the introduction to U2’s appearance in which the voice of a woman read “The New Colossus”, the poem by Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus that is on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty and has uplifted millions of immigrants. At the end of the song “Get Out of Your Own Way” Bono picked up a megaphone and called out, “Blessed are the shithole countries, for they gave us the American dream.”

            From “Statue of De-Liberty” – “Immigrants’ first welcome to New York harbour … Liberty and lighting the world … Mother of compassion weeps for a new world disorder … excludes non-whites … a wall around liberty … havoc of the heart.

            David’s next poem was about the Olympics and its underbelly of corruption. In the Vancouver Olympics in 2010 we conveniently shuffled the homeless out of public view.

            From “New Vodka from Old Glasses” – “The Olympics give a country pseudo immunity from history … A Gay Italian protester was stopped and driven out of the city … Not like Stalin’s visit to Sochi … the public got a lesson in tyranny … Pussy Riot … voices handcuffed … Thousands of Sochi’s stray dogs were destroyed … Humans treated like dogs will fearlessly fight on the street …” (David didn’t mention that the Gay Italian protester he’d referenced was Vladimir “Vladi” Luxuria, a trans woman who is a politician and actress in Italy.) (Also, about the stray dogs of Sochi, the Olympic committee insisted that only unhealthy dogs were being destroyed. A Russian billionaire donated a large amount of land to be used as a shelter for the dogs and as of March in 2014, 200 had been saved.)

            David’s next poem was inspired by walks he has taken in Toronto.

            “Bizarre on Bloor” began with a quote – “I’m a girl from a good family who was very well brought up. One day I turned my back on it all and I became a Bohemian” – Brigitte Bardot. From the poem – “In the pool hall a schizoid is trying to snooker his double self … At Bay and Bloor a short lady in a high chair scats … The shopping district … Hare Krsna devotees appear … In the heart of the Annex, aboriginal drummers… The black coated philosopher with Einstein’s hair …”

            David began his next poem with a quote from Lawrence Ferlinghetti that began with, “I saw in the city …”

            From the poem – “I saw a man sleeping by the homeless wall … I saw spiritual lepers outside the Scott Mission … an indigenous man intoxicated with chaos … a young man and his dog at Union Station, both going o the dogs … a shirtless poet … the Jack Layton statue … Lake Ontario whitecaps … crack in the city waiting for new light.”

            Honey Novick joined David on stage.

            David recommended the Leonard Cohen exhibition at the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal.

            From Museum of a Contemporary Heart” – “St Catherine’s Street … his beggar’s Styrofoam cup is empty … A crack in everything … Cohen’s ghost puts on a black toque … He sings” Then Honey Novick sang Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” – “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded / Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed / Everybody know that the war is over / Everybody knows that the good guys lost / Everybody knows that the fight is fixed / The poor stay poor and the rich get rich / That’s how it goes / and everybody knows …”

            Honey left the stage.

            David shared that ravens have been a large influence on him. He held up a feather as he read “Dawn”, though I don’t know if it was a raven’s feather – “Crude moon, we have forgotten how your cruel tongue licked our souls alive … (behind the last row in the audience, Kate Marshal Flaherty was hitting a hand drum) Above the war zone summit … more troops.”

            David told us that “Word Temple”, his last poem would be one that he’d never read in public. He explained that the Chinese characters for the word “poetry” are “word” and “temple”. (This is wrong. The word “shi” wouldn’t have indicated a temple because the word “temple” did not reach China until Buddhism, whereas poetry goes back much further in Chinese. There are several meanings for “shi” or “zhi”, but using it to indicate “temple” probably comes from a previous word that stood for a government building. It could also mean “stop” or “foot” and perhaps several other things. So maybe the combined Chinese symbols that convey “poetry” come from “word building” or “word something else”, but not “word temple”).

            From “Word Temple” – “We are morphing words … a young fraternity … primal ancestral arteries … a tower of babble … concise crowns … sages of satire … the library sanctuary … an eternal circle … a rhythmic trance … dazzling constellations … houses homeless … witness to the fate of our putrefying planet … sharpening pencils … audacious … a poetry temple.”

            David C. Bridges has some important messages to convey with his poetry and he is often thoughtful and introspective but he is rarely innovative in his use of language or his word arrangements and often stumbles into cliché. That being said, there were a few poetic moments that stood out in his work, such as the line, “Crude moon, we have forgotten how your cruel tongue licked our souls alive”.

            Bänoo called a break.

            On my way to the washroom I saw Elisha getting a cookie from the tea and snack area. I stopped to tell her that when I heard her, as Charlie Chopra, say the line, “ghost writer, ghost writer”, it had reminded me of a song called “Ghost Writer” that I’d heard in the 70s by a guy named “Garland Jeffreys”. I remembered hearing him a lot when I lived in Montreal from 1975 to 1978 and then he didn’t seem to get any airplay anywhere else that I lived. I said that it was often that way with Montreal, in that English performers that one wouldn’t hear anywhere else in Canada would be popular there. I told her that “Ghost Writer” was a reggae song. She asked if he was something like Jimmy Cliff. I answered that Jeffreys wasn’t specifically a reggae singer but that he wrote in a variety of styles, including one song that I liked a lot which had been done in an old Latin American style. She inquired if it was fusion but I didn’t know if that was it. She apologized for being a nerd and said something about having a photographic memory. I told her that I thought Jeffreys was from the UK, perhaps with ancestry from the Caribbean. When I looked him up later though I found that he’s actually from Brooklyn, African American, but from a mixed race background. She said she’d check him out. I asked if she wanted me to write his name down for her but then corrected myself, “Of course not, because you have a photographic memory.” She informed me, “Short term but not long term. What was his name again?” I told her again and asked if she was sure she didn’t want me to write it down. She said she’d get it later.

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odl3jCbVAic

            I went to the washroom. I noticed that someone had left a black jacket that looked like what would be normally be sold in the women’s section of a store. It had little cushion-like puffs all over it. When I came back I went up to the microphone and announced that it was there.

            I went to chat with Tom and Sidney. I told them they looked like they were waiting to sit on Santa’s knee. Tom said, “Only eleven months to go!”

            We talked about Donald Trump I declared that Trump’s followers don’t care what he does. As he himself said, he could shoot someone on the street and his base would still support him. Sydney disagreed that people follow him in that case. I countered that one can see it demonstrated every day. You can point out Trump breaking promises or contradicting himself and yet they are still behind him. I gave an example of a meme that Cad had reposted on Facebook in which Trudeau was criticized for selling arms to Saudi Arabia while at the same time giving money to Yemen, which was attacked by Saudi Arabia. I posted a response that pointed out that Trump sells more arms to Saudi Arabia than Canada and gives more money to Yemen, but Cad just said, “So?”

            Sydney said she keeps telling Cad that he should do research. I told her sarcastically that there is a fat chance of that, since Cad goes by belief rather than understanding.

            The conversation stayed with Cad as Sydney mentioned that she’d bought a couple of his collages and she really likes them. I argued that Cad’s collages have no flow and very little aesthetic, since all they are is just a bunch of pictures that follow a theme, like for instance, his collage on the Jewish mafia. They aren’t really works of art because he doesn’t do anything creative. Sydney insisted that they are great, so I guess Cad has finally made somebody happy.

            After the break, Bänoo encouraged us to go out and listen to poets that are outside of our experience. She shared that if on a given night there are two events, she will always go to see the poet that she’s never heard of.

            As a warm-up for the second feature, Bänoo decided to read a translation of a poem by the Persian poet Shams-i- Tabrizi – “And that calligrapher wrote three scripts. One he could read but no one else, another that he could read and others too and a third that neither he nor anyone else could read. I am that third script.”

            The second feature was Canisia Lubrin, who started off by giving an example of how tirelessly Bänoo promotes Shab-e She’r. She noticed that Bänoo had sent out emails promoting this event a few days ago at 3:00 in the morning.

            Canisia’s first poem was about the death of Erica Garner, who became an activist after her father, Eric Garner was killed by a chokehold from a New York City police officer.

            From “Savage Interior” – “First son … then the children who ripen … Give age to the ravenous dog … pushing the silence of a broken storm back … particle wave of theory … mothers safe to defend their dead.”

            From “Sons of Orion” (for Alton Sterling, Andrew Loku, Philando Castile, et al [all unarmed Black men that have been shot by the police]) – “I wanna live, son. But which son are you? … Move by the music of the dealer’s bootleg CDs … What still lingers by blood, the bulk of wound / in your ghetto sonata? What bites the freak / off by its defiance of bandages? There may never have been / a summer too sacred for this … given the body’s exotic architecture … the creeping / catatonia passing for touch and air – on the studied shade of night … Who were you before … do not try to pull or remove your stitches on your own … Sun like mountains turned … black at night … How far would you go / to make sense of sunburn … pray too, this light is yours.”

            Canisia introduced her next poem by recounting her niece’s experience of her worst day of school, which was the first day of high school. Teenagers were drawing each other’s most outstanding physical features on the blackboard and Canisia’s niece happens to have voluptuous lips. A boy drew a caricature of a massive set of lips on the board and wrote beside them “Apocalips”.  From “Give Back Our Children” – “Our boys with shackles on scrotum … We need no deep cut postures … still fractured … Our children are born / with mouthfuls of cotton / hands full of plantation / dirt … We’re still walking … singing in immigrant schemata … Give back our children … with mouthfuls of love … for the cosmic bulk of their lips.”

            Canisia asked for a random number from 1 to 99 and someone behind me called out 77. The 77^th poem in her book “Voodoo Hypothesis” is “Long Wreckage” – “Plus or minus children … crusting at the perimeter … a crisis of rhododendron … One day to bite the children’s gaze … and what life exists beyond … indivisible DDT … roast in the maw of this abandoned government … chewed through … rusting the humming sea … The psychopathic wings that hauled Africans … No grand commonwealth tastes…”

            Canisia announced that her next poem, “Children of the Archipelago” was in honour of the lives lost in the last hurricane season. The poem begins with a quote from Derek Walcott – “For us in the Archipelago the tribal memory is salted with the bitter memory of migration” – “Nursed out of miracles … in a house that schools the uneven mercy … the state / of hatred the morning after … to learn again the primal / dance / of our bodies on pomme d’amou trees… rumoured melted rhizome … What bittersweet voodoo … music we shackled to the streets en mas … the wrecked bacchanal … the tongue – Mongrelian / a twisted road to re-walk mizi-maladi … we collapse in a room bound up in grey matter … hold the glass in our spine … Transubstances of all our doubt inviting the universe’s mothered things we’d mount with sapien luck … the seaward inchoate in our iris’ dents … figment that is ours to keep … What’s in a name but the pirated exhausts of our departure …Our address still rests in the vivarium slipped disks of everywhere … in the work of lightning – epiphanic … could console any blessing to dust … we are still a grief at ease … remember the centrifuge of hammock … Hoards of cotton in that sun strip cunt / bruises of Mecca looping dwol tongues … On a seabed trail of islands … in cannibal froths of sea …”

            Canisia’s last poem was written after the Mars Curiosity Rover mission, the purpose of which was to figure if Mars is colonizable – “We stay in and become god … become Curiosity … kindness of anti-gravity … Millions of small things that seven minutes of success were hinged upon … Where else is a pocket of air more deadly … Her crazy blooded plains … Even though the Viking missions have no conclusive pulse … I am Curiosity … She’ll take us deeper … They won’t ever come back … The alien we think we know is the alien we dream of … traveling on space dust faster than a bullet … Wish you were here … You never should have said goodbye.”

            Canisia Lubin deftly and insightfully makes sophisticated and creative use of adjectives, patois, quotidian and scholarly vocabulary to construct poetic phrases that she weaves into layered works of exquisite syntactic architecture.

            We returned immediately to the open stage with Lawrence, who introduced himself as Larry and announced that this was his first time. He asked, “Who knows what tomorrow is?” and then almost immediately answered himself, “It’s mental health talking day.” This was a segue into his first poem:

            “Healthy tall men / Ma ma ma mental / Man tall health / Ma ma ma my / Mama mental health.”

            From his second – “I’m 19 and taxes she says with a smile … Sometimes she wonders if something is being missed … The shelves … all have labels … Look at this kitty cat picture I brought … ‘What should I be doing?’ she asked with a start … ‘Don’t forget’ she whispers …”

            Sydney White’s first poem was “For the Rob Ford Fans” – “Paris has the Louvre / Rome has the pope / We’ve got a mayor who smokes dope … You won’t know fear till you meet the mayor on crack.”

            He second piece was “No More Nice Girl” – “Men in white lace and red slippers who divide us into hookers and virgins … Men who slither through academia … Men who make bombs to kill my children … Fuck you shima!”

            Next was Gao An, but I could not understand him very well, so I didn’t catch the whole poem. This is what I got – “ … Green leaves / My whole life is just a root / The root is silent.”

            Catherine Thomson read “Chronological Geology” – “I am Anishinaabe … I am French … I am of the Acadie …  I am Germanic … I am united empire loyalist … My forefather was a Prussian missionary … I am Metis … I am Franco Ontarian …I am Scottish … I am Canadian.”

            Before introducing the next reader, Bänoo announced that the next Shab-e She’r will be on February 27^th.

            Li read “This is the Sound” – “Let’s say the world is ending … apocalyptic destruction or maybe a flood … a tsunami … drowning … Now let’s say there was a child you were caring for when the world ended … What would you do? Anything! You loved your child … you would take them to learn to be ashamed … How did one movement lead to the next? This is the sound of heartbreak … To be a part of diaspora is to always have something to lose … Living is the life lesson … always trying to recover … I am crying …I am trying to heal … When I see you my mind blanks … The silence is too heavy … Even if we tried we couldn’t reach each other … I want to build a love that is so safe and secure … I would break the world to have that …”

            Susan read “An Agreed Upon Time” – “You know, my beloved, I don’t mind your grey hair falling over your shoulders … I do mind the slurring of your words … I thought it was the perfect time … It’s time to lift the pillow and push it down over your smile… One month three days and twenty-two hours … I think I will go to the corner store and buy some milk for both of us.”

            Susan’s second poem – “Life is like a black canvas with streaks of yellow full of many contractions … How is it possible that she led … The tightness of the canal … What did I miss … Maybe the arrival is never anything … another contraction … Thank god for the yellow streaks …”

            Without the microphone, I read the poem I’d shortened earlier that day, called “Autobiography” – “Out on the fields of youth the bravest hero / challenged Satan to a fight to the death. / As he stood with legs apart and clenching fists / the Devil rose from the frozen furrows. / The boy’s battle cry rode out on steamy breath, / then he let Lucy have it with a flying kick. / He spun, he rolled, he dodged the sharpened tail, / and gave Old Nick his best Sunday punch. / They battled furiously, tooth and nail / and never gave up / until it was time for lunch. /// On Christmas mornings I went down early / And though most gifts couldn’t be opened because / our parents wanted to be there to see us, / under our always magnificent tree / were the unwrapped presents from Santa Clause / whom I’d long before secretly stopped believing in / but I wanted my parents to still think that I was that naïve / so they’d continue to be generous …”

            I’ve included here the first half of what I read. It seemed to go over well.

            When Bänoo returned to the mic she said she wanted to tell people a couple of things about me. She told the audience, “Christian has come to Shab-e She’r more than anyone else, since the beginning.” Even I didn’t know that, but I wonder if it’s really true. I’ve probably missed almost a third of the 59 Shab-e She’r nights. But then again, I don’t know who was or wasn’t there when I wasn’t there, so maybe I am out ahead after all.

            The other thing Bänoo mentioned about me is that every time I come to Shab-e Sh’er I write about it and then publish the review online. She said that reading my reviews help her to become a better host.

            That makes me want to suggest to Bänoo that the three-minute open stage time limit should be a standard allotment for every open mic reader, so that if one only reads for two minutes on a given night they should get credit for one minute. If they only read one haiku every month for three years they should have amassed enough credit at the end of that time to allow them to read an entire novel on their open stage set.

            Jerome read “Health / Centre” – “ … snow falls … These birds, sculpted in memory of a receptionist … a curve of wing … to fashion their semblance of flight … below another grey body … A final, secret pair … too far for words … The receptionist does not speak any more … the look of all creatures fossilized … The body is always in the way of its going … He was a monk, a priest … He switched religions, looking … It is only stone … Who could say what Eros did …When they asked Artaux … I have an appetite for non-existing … He looked like a caged bird of prey … To take up arms … To be defeated … Outside pathology … smears the ash of words … The face … coiled violet … a sounding wave … The shadows of the flock pass.”

            Mohammad Omar read “Moonlight Ragas Chasing Violence” – “The art of burning love called letting go … There is a non-existent place where contradictions meet … behind the mind’s seeking eye … The unlimited place where the you and I come together.”

            Alexandra Seay, who was the most stylish person to touch the stage that night, started out with no mic and asked if everyone could hear her. Some said yes but one said no, so she went to the mic to read “Sastruga” – “Who rescued this word? I said it sounded Russian … The prison of shadows … Do not turn like Orpheus, lest I fall back into the underground … Do not say I love you … Sastruga – a wavelike ridge of hard snow … We learned a word together my dear.”

            Tyna Silver read “Dream or Reality” – “I float bodiless … I am a giant eye … watching featureless faces … I feel softly rooted …steeped in eons of history … I fly to a nest … My young son … I erased him with my mind … A growing rumble …Glaring awareness … Panic grips … I feel myself lifted … I fight to remain in fantasy’s grasp … I succumb … hypnotized eyes … Now body burdened, I experience in stillness a persistent whisper …”

            Tyna’s second poem was “Word Games” – “Words, like pick-up sticks … The slightest wrong touch will end the game …”

            As usual, Tom Smarda, the last performer of the night, was onstage before Bänoo had a chance to introduce him. One of the microphones had lost its erection and so he had to position the one remaining mic halfway between his mouth and the mouth of his guitar.

            From Tom’s piece – “It’s a nice day for sitting around … watching a hat on the sidewalk … and when people throw in money you can say ‘God bless you’ … It’s too nice a day for sitting around … waiting for your court case to come up … The giver is the one who is blessed / the taxman gets the money / and you can be like all the rest / and so god bless you … The giver is the one who is blessed / the boss takes all the money / and you can be like all the rest / and so god bless you … The giver is the one who is blessed / the banks take all the money / we’re really just like all the rest / and so god bless you …”

            Bänoo riffed off of Tom’s song when she said good night, “God bless you, unless you don’t believe, and that’s okay too.”

            As Norman and I got up from our seats to start getting ready, I told him that his poem’s reference to police horses being used as weapons reminded me of an Alice Cooper concert at the old Varsity Stadium on Bloor Street. I was standing outside and listening to the music, which was loud enough to hear on the street from the roofless stadium. I saw a guy trying to climb the wall to get into the concert. His body was stretched out as his hands were on the top of the wall and his feet were a meter off the ground. Just then a mounted cop swung his horse’s flank around and slammed the young man hard against the wall.

            Norman Allan told me that he loved the poem that I’d read.

            Catherine Thomson approached me and commented, “You’re too tall for the microphone anyway.” I asked if she’d been able to hear me, and she said, “Absolutely!” She asked if I read a different piece every time I come. I confirmed that I do. She said she doesn’t have enough poems to do that. I suggested, “You could always write a poem tomorrow.” She told me that she’s mostly a songwriter. Before saying goodnight she said she liked my poem.

            I waited around until after Tom finished talking with Li about her poem to say goodnight to him. I told him that the song he did was one of his better ones. A lot of his compositions seem more like message rants with musical accompaniment, but this one had a melody and a hook. The repeated but slightly changed chorus ending with “god bless you” was very effective and I suggested to him that it was the kind of song that could get radio airplay.

            While we were talking, Canisia said to Tom, “Thank you for the melody” and turned to me and said something nice about my piece as well. I told her that her writing was both beautiful and elegant. We said goodnight.

            I gave Tom a hug, left the church, unlocked my bike, sat down on an ice sculpture of a bicycle seat and slid home.