Why Isn't the Joker Funny?

            All through the wee hours of Saturday I tossed and turned back and forth in and out of a dream about an anti-terrorist video found on one of those fake news sites, when I translated it back through two languages, turned out to be a pro-terrorist video.

            I stayed in bed for seven hours, which is two hours longer than usual. I took lying there well past the point of discomfort because I knew it was going to be uncomfortable getting up as well. I finally rose at 4:30 with a backache that was probably partly the result of my cold and of staying in bed for too long. I put some finishing touches on my journal entry from the day before and then just after 5:00 I started my yoga.

I began song practice at around 6:00 and that was very difficult because my voice was so hoarse, with limited range. I got through it though and then moved on to the segment of the morning that I set aside for the memorization of French songs. I got through one by Boris Vian, though it took much longer than usual because my brain was mush. By the time I moved on to another Vian song my mind was exhausted and so I stumbled back to bed. The dream I had was a reproduction of my effort to memorize the Vian song but my brain couldn’t handle it in REM sleep either. I got up again at around 9:30 and ate the first food I’d had in about eighteen hours. I ate two oranges and then posted my journal entry. I had a couple of other things to eat but then felt tired again and went back to bed for another hour.

It was essentially a yo-yo kind of day, spent going to bed for an hour or two and being up for an hour. The only food I consumed when I was up was about a glass and a half of the jug of orange juice that I’d wisely bought the night before at No Frills.

During sleep in the afternoon I was searching for the one, the witness, the one person in me that stood apart from having an illness. When it felt like I’d found him I would wake up.

When I woke at 19:30 I felt like I had a little more brain energy and that I might be able to stay up for a few hours. I made some kimchi soup and cut up some slices of leftover turkey to go in it. It as tasty but it didn’t sit that well in my stomach.

I watched Suicide Squad and was generally disappointed. One can’t successfully have that many characters jumbled together without a better story. It was poorly paced and bad guys were badly designed. Will Smith basically played the same one character that he tends to play. The only outstanding personality among them all was Harley Quinn. Jared Leto’s Joker was not maniacal enough and like all the recent incarnations of the character, he doesn’t joke. What’s the point of a joker that doesn’t joke?

Extraction

            On Thursday afternoon I started to feel a cold coming on. At 14:00 I decided to take a siesta but I felt too uncomfortable to sleep, so I got up after half an hour. When I have a cold I always feel spicy soups help, so I heated up the can of curried cauliflower and lentil soup that I got from the food bank. I felt better after eating it.

            At 17:00 I left for my appointment with the dentist. The waiting room was empty when I arrived. I asked the receptionist if they’d stayed open just for me. She smiled and nodded, but a couple showed up for an appointment a few minutes later.

            There was an attractive, big boned Latin American dental assistant walking slowly down the hallway away from me. When she walked back up towards me she gave me a nice sultry look.

            While waiting I read some of Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red”. It’s the second book on the reading list for my Canadian Poetry course next year. It’s a novel in poetry form told as if it were a Greek myth about a red winged monster, but it’s really the story of a modern boy going through adolescence and dealing with his sexuality.

            The dentist called me into the first little room near where I’d been sitting. He took one look at what was left of my tooth and told me that it couldn’t be saved. He said I had two options: a $500 denture or a $2000 implant but he assured me that my Green Shield insurance plan from the University of Toronto would not cover either one of them. I asked if there was any kind of monthly plan for payment but he said they don’t have anything like that, other than that $250 has to be paid at the start of the fitting of the denture and then the other $250 later. I told him I was a singer and wondered if there would be a danger of a denture popping out during singing. He said it was possible but he had yet had a patient that was a singer, so he didn’t know for sure. I looked this up online later and most people say it’s okay to sing with dentures and that their popping out only happens maybe once to a small percentage of singers.

            I wondered if any harm would come from just leaving the tooth the way it was for a while. He seemed to misunderstand my question and answered that the hole wasn’t going to heal. I told him I was talking about the gap, and I got the impression he was being a bit of an asshole when he told me, “That’s not going to heal either.” I knew I was risking getting a crank dentist when I took an evening appointment. He finally told me that it wouldn’t do any harm just to leave the tooth as it was.

            I lamented that there don’t seem to be a lot of options for the poor. He thought for a second and asked, “Are you on Ontario Works?”  I answered, “Yes”. He said he hadn’t thought to ask before because I always get my work done under Green Shield, but told me I am covered for one denture every five years by Ontario Works. It surprised me that Ontario Works would offer something that Green Shield didn’t, since most of the stuff I’ve had done at Smile City wouldn’t be covered by Ontario Works.

            Although I think I would prefer getting an implant, it looks like the denture is my only option if I don’t want to look like a gap-toothed hillbilly. He said that the fitting couldn’t be done until a month after the extraction because the area needs that much time to heal. I suppose that’s the case for the implant as well.

            So I said for him to go ahead with pulling the old tooth out. He had an assistant whom I hadn’t seen before, a short, Latin American woman in her early middle age. She had a very kind manner that helped to set me at ease. I overheard her tell the dentist about two tests she’d taken that evening and that she’d passed one of them but failed the one about identifying certain instruments.

            The dentist froze my upper mouth and I could feel some of the numbness from the tip of my nose down. He yanked away at my tooth; some pieces of it broke off in the process. I had to pick a small fragment out between my fingers. Finally he pulled the whole thing out and said I was done. His assistant put some gauze in the gap and gave me a package of extra gauze to take home, telling me to change it every half an hour. Then she asked if I wanted to see my tooth. She sort of sounded like a midwife asking if I wanted to see my baby. I said, “Okay”. It was still born, with just the root and no crown. I thanked her and then she thanked me with much more strength. I thanked the dentist and he responded non-verbally in what sounded halfway between a hum and a grunt. As I was unlocking my bike, I saw him rushing out the door and heading up Bloor Street.

            I rode to No Frills at Lansdowne and Dundas. As I was locking my bike I overheard a couple of women say that were waiting to take the every fifteen minutes shuttle bus that’s being provided for customers of the other No Frills at Jameson and King that’s while it’s closed for renovations.

            I wanted to get grapes, but they were expensive, so I didn’t bother. I bought some bananas and a bag of apples. I realized that I didn’t need much of anything, since I still had lots of turkey and bread. I bought things I wouldn’t normally buy like orange juice and honey. The express checkout person didn’t smile of even thank me. I was feeling depressed about the idea of having to get a denture and I wondered if she picked up on that feeling.

            When I got home I pulled out the gauze, but I was still bleeding so I changed it. There were two more strips of gauze in the package. After half an hour the bleeding continued, so I cut a strip of gauze in two and used half, By 21:00 I realized I wasn’t going be able to have dinner because every time I took the gauze out, blood started dripping on my tongue. That was also my last piece of gauze. I remembered though that I had something similar in a small package that had been sitting on my bathroom shelf for at least a decade. It was similar to gauze, but I think it was of a slightly higher quality. It was probably the kind of thing they use as a sponge during surgery. I found it and put it into the gap and it looked like I’d have to keep it there all night.

            I had planned on watching Suicide Squad that night but since I couldn’t eat dinner and my mouth was uncomfortable because of the gauze, I just decided to go to bed at 21:30 and hoped that I wasn’t still bleeding the next morning.

            I woke up at midnight and removed the folded surgical sponge. There was a lot less blood on it than on the other pieces of gauze. I took a pee and looked in my mouth again to find that I was still bleeding a slight trickle. There was nothing I could do about that because I’d run out of gauze, so I just accepted the fact that I’d have to swallow my own blood. I went back to bed, feeling less uncomfortable, I guess, without the lump of cotton in my mouth, but there were so many other things to be uncomfortable about that I didn’t experience any relief.

The Amazing Grouchoman

            I guess my dentist’s office were only on holiday till Tuesday, since they finally answered the phone on Wednesday and gave me an appointment for late Thursday afternoon. It would be nice if they could mould a full tooth on top of what little there is left of my incisor, but I have my doubts.

            I finally found a full version in French of Boris Vian’s book of short stories, “Le Loup Garou”. I found it on a Russian site. I also noticed recently that the other Russian site, Gen Library, has lots of other Boris Vian books. The Russians seem to appreciate the French literature a lot more than Anglophones do.
            That night I watched “Captain America: Civil War”. It had a much simpler and less interesting story contrived to set up a situation in which the heroes would be battling one another than the Batman Versus Superman movie did. The film introduced The Black Panther to the Marvel film universe, and his portrayal was not too bad, except that they decided to make his suit bullet proof. As for the character, “Bucky”, I have never liked him. He shouldn’t have existed in the comic book as Captain America’s version of Robin in the first place, so there was no reason to rewrite him as an adult best friend of Steve Rogers.

            The only really cool part of the movie was the introduction of the new Spiderman. He kind of stole the show, from his first scene, even when he was a dork. He’s got to be the youngest Spiderman ever in a movie, but the original Spiderman in the comic book was a high school student, so that’s a nice change. He told Tony Stark that he’d only had his powers for three months. There’s a funny scene when he’s fighting the Falcon, who says, “I don’t know how many fights you’ve been in, but there’s not supposed to be this much talking!” In another scene when he’s fighting Bucky, who’s trying to punch him, he exclaims, “Oh, that’s so cool! You’ve got a metal arm!” 

            They’ve got to make Spiderman’s one-liners funnier though. They should get the guy that wrote Deadpool’s lines. In the comics, Stan Lee wrote some hilarious patter for Spiderman, like when he used his webbing to pin The Vulture's wings and Spiderman was sitting on the villain’s stomach as they were falling through the Manhattan sky. The Vulture began to babble and beg Spiderman to save him but Spiderman just asked, “Are you sure you weren’t vaccinated with a phonograph needle?” But I just discovered that Stan Lee stole that from “Duck Soup”. I’ve always thought though that there was a lot of Groucho in the original Spiderman. 

            The only major problem I have with this new Spiderman is that they’ve given Peter Parker a far too young Aunt May by having her played by Marissa Tomei. She has to be old because Peter has to be constantly worried about her. She’s supposed to be one of his many problems. 

Warrior Crabs

            I was working as some kind of walking escort for sex trade workers. I took a woman to a nightclub and was waiting for her outside with this other guy where there was a little rectangular glass casing in the sand. Crabs were in the sand and crawling inside where they lived but inside they were all fighting each other in a free-for-all. One could hear their claws clicking and the also of tiny metal swords striking against each other.

            Every other day I do song practice entirely in English. While on Monday I had found that there were not a lot of songs in French with the letter “f” in them and producing that slightly slurpy sound as I pronounced them through my missing tooth, on Tuesday I realized that almost every song in English has a lot more “f” sounds. I really have to get this problem fixed, but when I called Smile City there was still no answer. Hey have nothing on their website to indicate that they are closed the entire week after Christmas, but I did notice when I looked that many dental clinics do take the whole time between Christmas and New Years off. I have observed that a lot of the employees of my clinic are Hispanic, so I assume they are also Catholic.

            I had to do laundry on Tuesday for the sake of my underwear and a couple of other items.

            I watched this year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special. It aired on Christmas day but I downloaded it the day after. I think last year it took a week for someone to upload the Doctor Who Christmas special. I won’t reveal the story but it’s set in New York City and very entertaining. The Doctor’s companion was an alien named Nardole who’s head was removed last Christmas but somehow he’s whole again. He’s played by Matt Lucas who was one of the stars of hilarious British comedy series, “Little Britain”. He played several very funny characters on Little Britain, including Marjorie Dawes who is a somewhat despicable person who runs a weight loss group of which she is the only member that doesn’t lose weight. There’s a member of East Indian descent who speaks perfect English but whenever she talks Marjorie keeps asking her to repeat herself because she can’t understand her accent; another character is a fast talking teenage girl named Vicky Pollard who is always in trouble and begins every explanation by rapidly arguing, “Yeabutyeahbutyeahbut” and then she very quickly says a bunch of gossip about other teenagers; another is Andy, an apparently wheelchair bound guy being taken care of by Lou. Whenever Lou isn’t looking Andy gets up and does things like gets into a fist fight with someone or any number of other things one would have to be abled to do; the funniest character though is Daffyd Thomas, who thinks he is the only Gay in his village and goes to ridiculous lengths to deny that his town is actually full of other Gay people.

Wonder Woman

            During song practice on Monday morning I found that for the most part, my missing lateral incisor does not limit my singing, except for one sound. Whenever I sang a lyric that had the letter “f” in it there was slightly too much wind coming through that hole, thus making the “f” sound a bit less smooth than the other letters. I was relieved to discover how few of the songs that I sing have the “f” sound in them.

            I tried calling my dentist’s office but it looked like Smile City was closed for Boxing Day because no one answered. I guess it was just as well, since it was a very rainy day and what was left of my tooth was not in pain.

            I took a two-hour siesta in the early afternoon and then finished my journal about what happened on Christmas.

            That night I ate the other leg of my turkey with some of the stuffing and cranberry sauce while watching “Batman versus Superman”.             I was impressed by the complex screenplay that juggled several storylines at the same time and a lot of which turned out to have been part of Lex Luthor’s plan all along. I was impressed with Jessie Eisenberg’s portrayal of Lex Luthor and with Gal-Gadot-Varsano as Wonder Woman. Holy crap she’s beautiful! I’m looking forward to the Wonder Woman movie and I hope they don’t screw it up.

            I don’t like Batman using guns. One of the main things that impressed me about Batman when I was a kid was his ability to take on gun toting thugs without using them himself. He used his brains and his agility. Another problem with the film version of Batman is the armour. They are really missing the point of Batman in turning him into a dark, angry version of Iron Man. I’m okay with the dark and angry, but Batman is supposed to have an animal grace. He’s supposed to be light on his feet and be not some clanking, cumbersome metal man. I think he was meant to be kind of a cross between The Shadow, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and maybe a little bit of Doc Savage.

            As for Alfred, I have no problem with Jeremy Irons’s portrayal, but I do have a gripe with how he was written as not only Bruce Wayne’s butler, but also Batman’s weapons and communications expert. That’s way too much!

Deadpool ... Wham!

            After yoga on Christmas day I only practiced some of my songs, then I played “The Old Revolution” and “Stories of the Street” by Leonard Cohen and the only verse from any Christmas carol that I consider to be good poetry: “Myrrh is mine, it’s bitter perfume, breathes a life of gathering gloom. Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, locked in the stone cold tomb …”

            There was very little activity on Queen Street, but outside of my window, the dishevelled panhandler with the uncombed curly brown hair was making her rounds, or literally making a square. She crossed from under my window to the east side of Dunn and Queen, then crossed to the west side, then back to the north side in front of the CUBE Chinese restaurant, then back under my window to begin the cycle again. She was wearing a pair of dark grey sweat pants, which, though secure at the waist, were several sizes too large for her so that the crotch area was hanging down around her knees. There were more cars than people and she tried to go to the driver’s side windows of every one that was stopped as she crossed, but they all drive on. This day she was crying loudly as she walked in emotional turmoil, perhaps because it was Christmas.

            I started learning a song with music by Serge Gainsbourg and lyrics by Boris Vian called, “Quand jaurais du vent dans mon crane” or “When I Will Have the Wind in My Skull’. It’s about dying. I really like the words and the melody, so I’m going to particularly enjoy learning to play this one.

            I made bacon and eggs with toasted English muffins and started watching “The Man of Steel”.

Superman has become such a problematic character from the perspective of plausibility. I really think they should reboot the original Superman that couldn’t fly but could jump high because the Earth compared to Krypton was like the Moon compared to the Earth. He was in the beginning only as strong as several men combined, faster than a train, only indestructible to the extent that bullets tickled him while a bomb could potentially kill him and he just had extremely good hearing and vision. The only really far-fetched power that he had back then was x-ray vision, but that was kind of cool. I really think they could more interesting things with a less powerful Superman. Get rid of heat vision, super breath, flying and absolute indestructibility. Get rid of Kryptonite. Meteors from a planet that exploded in another star system would just orbit the sun of that system. They wouldn’t make it to Earth or even our system.

The movie spends a lot of time retelling an origin that everybody knows. The baby Kal-El is saved from the destruction of Krypton by way of a small spaceship sent to Earth. It’s really kind of a space age retelling of the Biblical story of how Moses was saved from the baby killing army of Pharaoh. One thing I liked was the idea that Kal-El was a the first live birth in one-hundred years on a planet that had come to depend entirely on test tube babies grown in the lab and designed for various societal functions such as to be scientists, administrators or warriors. But then another implausible situation infected the story. General Zod, a genetically designed warrior, trained after birth to serve that function, in trying to physically prevent Kal-El from being launched into space, meets his physical and martial match in a battle with Jor-El, someone that has been genetically designed and trained to be a scientist. They should have had Russell Crowe’s character fight Zod off with scientific means rather than have him be such a good fighter.

After I’d finished my bacon and eggs, I paused the movie and toasted a couple more English muffins, over which I poured pancake syrup. I started watching the movie again but suddenly I bit into something very hard. Did a pebble somehow end up in the muffin flour? I pulled the hard morsel out of my mouth and saw that my right lateral incisor had broken. That tooth has been repaired many times and it’s always been the artificial part that has broken, but this time most of the entire tooth was gone. It was probably the Granny Smith apple that I’d eaten the day before that had weakened it. I do try to eat things that hard on the left side but sometimes I do bite with that tooth. I should really have considered it entirely cosmetic rather than functional and just cut up apples before eating them. I would have to see my dentist as soon as possible but I didn’t know if there was enough tooth left to reconstruct it. Thinking of that possibility, I looked up those screw-in implants but they cost thousands. Apparently one can get a bone graft from cow bones much cheaper, but no less than $250. I guess there’s always a denture. I’ll have to see what my dentist says. It only hurts when I look in the mirror and see a hillbilly’s gap.

So that put a damper on my Christmas, but I went on with my day and finished watching the way too long movie.

Another problem I have with the plausibility of Superman is the possibility of him having a sexual relationship with a human from Earth. Even if Superman’s body was only bullet proof he would not be able to feel the sensation of being touched by someone like Lois Lane, let alone if he was immune to nuclear warheads.

After a siesta, I started making homemade cranberry sauce and also stuffing for my turkey. For the bread part of the dressing I used corn bread that I made from a mix and some pretzels that had gone hard in my fridge. I cooked the rest of the bacon and fried a couple of onions, then several zucchini and some broccoli flowerets. Then I added thyme, sage, poultry seasoning, paprika, salt, and the cartons of asparagus and sweet basil soup and butternut squash soup that I’d gotten from the food bank the day before. When I got the turkey ready to stuff it, while trying to pull the severed neck out that had been placed inside the bird, the turkey ripped open a bit at the side, making it more difficult to stuff. I’d never experienced a turkey tearing apart while raw before. I stuffed it as best I could and put it in the oven. I roasted it for about four hours and basted it every half an hour. It turned out pretty good despite the problems. The cranberry sauce, sweetened only slightly with brown sugar, also came out great.

I watched Deadpool and that was a real Christmas surprise. It was one of the most entertaining superhero movies I’d ever watched and it was hilarious from the opening credits to the end. The text of the intro does not name the producers but just refers to them as “asshats”; the movie said to be directed by “an overpaid tool”; rather than naming Ryan Reynolds, the star is called, “God’s perfect idiot”; and the female lead played by Morena Baccarin, is just written as, “ a shorter person used as a sex object”.

There is a lot of metatext in the story as Deadpool sometimes stops in the middle of the action to address the audience. When his girlfriend is kidnapped he goes to the X-Men mansion to enlist the help of Colossus and Teenage Negasonic Warhead. As Deadpool is standing in the doorway he notes that the mansion seems empty and comments that it’s almost as if the producers were too cheap to pay for more than two X-Men.

Deadpool definitely cheered me up after my tooth fiasco earlier in Christmas day. It was an off coincidence that Deadpool is shown to be an enormous fan of Wham and that the final song of a movie I watched shortly after hearing about the death of George Michael was “Careless Whisper”.

I highly recommend Deadpool to anyone that hasn’t seen it yet.

Hearing Voices

            The driveway behind the food bank on Saturday was an uneven sheet of ice. As I made my way carefully over it to lock my bike, I was pleasantly surprised by how few people there were waiting. “Quite a crowd!” I commented sarcastically as I arrived within earshot of everyone.  The nearest person to me as I spoke looked at me as if I’d just said something suspicious in a foreign language. She was bespectacled and wearing a white toque with green trim over longish wavy and mousy hair. I stopped to enunciate my joke more slowly and though one or two people beyond her smiled, she reacted the same.

I went to lock my bike and then came back to find out who the last person in line was. The woman with the toque looked at me and said, “Why are you even talking to me? Do I know you?” There was something un-present about her manner though and her initial reaction to me was starting to become less of a mystery. I ignored her question and asked the group in general to let me know which person I was directly behind. The older, friendly looking, short man over by the fire escape, who’d smiled at my joke, pointed to himself.

As I tried to find a foothold on the ice, I commented that someone needed to salt the driveway. I walked over to the food bank door to ask about salt, but it was locked. I walked back to the area where the woman with the toque was standing and could hear that she was continuously making comments. I could also see that she wasn’t actually talking to any of us there in the driveway but perhaps to voices in her head.

I pulled Michael Ondaatje’s “The Complete Works of Billy the Kid” out of my backpack and began reading, grateful that the temperature was above zero this time, so I could turn the pages without my gloves on. I read one of the poems and then the food bank door opened. The volunteer that I’d argued with about his smoking the week before, I think his name is Wayne, came out with some garbage. I asked him if they had any salt. He answered that they had “SOME salt”. I told him that somebody has got to salt the driveway or else someone was going to break their neck. He turned and walked back to the door, but called out in a bored voice, “I’ll get right on it!”

A couple of minutes later he came back out with a half empty ten kilo bag of Sifto sidewalk salt and using a Styrofoam coffee cup, began scattering it along the south side of the driveway where the line-up tends to form, as far out as the sidewalk. When the cup broken, he put down the rest with his hands. As he headed back inside I called out, “Thank you!” He nodded. Then I asked, “Do you have any pepper?” He turned to look at me and I smiled. Half, annoyed and half amused, he answered, “No, we don’t have any pepper.” And then he went back inside.

I continued to read while the woman in the toque kept on talking to herself. It was clear that when she had earlier said, “Why are you talking to me? Do I know you?” that it had just been a coincidence that she’d been looking at me at the time. There was definitely an argument with at least one voice going on. She demanded of the other on several occasions to answer, “What’s with all this Scooby doo?” and frequently offered the challenge, while assuming dominant body language, “Who’s gonna come out on top this time?” The man who’d arrived before me felt the need to walk across the ice, come up close to me and explain in a quiet voice, “Ah, she’s a little bit …” and then he finished his sentence with the gesture of drawing circles near his temple with his index finger. I matter of factly told him, “I understand” and went back to my book.

An SUV arrived, driven by a young man, but the person that emerged from the passenger seat, a heavy set, middle-aged woman in braided pigtails, was clearly the one in charge of the delivery that was being made. She opened up the back of the car and it was packed with several milk-crates filled with three-litre bags of Sealtest 2% milk. Several male volunteers from inside the food bank came out to help carry the crates in, including the big guy with the prematurely white hair. The woman in pigtails stressed to her driver that she needed the crates back.

After the back of the vehicle was unloaded there started bringing in from the back seat several boxes full of a very wide selection of packages of name brand cookies such as Christie and Dad’s. Milk and cookies? I was beginning to suspect that this delivery was not intended for food bank clients but rather for a certain Turkish bishop with a fetish for furs of white and red and who as far as anyone knows lives entirely on milk and cookies.

Once the car had been emptied the white haired guy stayed outside for a cigarette and talked to no one in particular but to everyone, as he often does. He commented in reference to this most recent delivery that Christmas Eve is the only day of the year that anyone remembers the food bank. Before the woman with the pigtails left, her driver took some pictures of the back of the food bank with an expensive looking camera.

The woman in the white toque started speaking in a mocking little girl’s voice to whoever it was in her head with whom she was arguing. When Joe, the manager came out she broke from her argument and asked him if the coffee was ready. He said, “Yeah, go ahead Michelle, and behave yourself this time!” Then after she was inside and out of earshot he said, “I don’t even know why you’re here today! You’re not gonna get any food because you were already here on Wednesday!” A few minutes after she came out with her coffee and got back in line, Joe came out and told her that she wasn’t going to get served because she’d previously come that week. With surprise, she asked, “You mean I’ve got to come back next Saturday for it to be a whole week?” Joe confirmed that she could only come once a week. She finished her coffee and her internal conversation and then left.

A little later, one of the guys that works reception came out and wished everyone a merry Christmas as he walked down the driveway to leave. Then he turned and walked backwards as he told everyone that the food bank would definitely be closed next Saturday, but if we couldn’t come on Wednesday or Thursday we could come on Friday. Friday is the day set aside for the elderly and the disabled, so I guess they were making an exception in this case. But then again, he’s not in management and I didn’t hear anyone else say that it would be okay to come next Friday. Then again, again, if he’s the one checking people in he’d be the one in control of who’s eligible and who’s not.

The big Jamaican woman who sits by the door arrived and was very carefully trying to negotiate the ice. I offered my hand to help her across and she gratefully took it.

I assumed my place in line behind the friendly older man. He looked at my book and said, “I assume it’s poetry”. I confirmed that it was and he indicated that he wanted to look at the cover. He said that he recognized the author’s name. I told him that Michael Ondaatje is very rich because his book, “The English Patient” was made into one of the most successful movies of all time. He exclaimed, “That is a fantastic book!” Then he wanted to tell me who his favourite poet of all time was, adding with sadness, “He’s no longer with us, but he wrote beautiful poetry and songs!” I guessed he was talking about Leonard Cohen. He nodded. I affirmed that Cohen had been my hero as well. He bragged that he has all of Cohen’s records and I mentioned that I did too, as well as all of his books. He informed me that he was from Poland. I pointed out that Cohen’s family came from Russia originally, but for some reason he disagreed. When I looked it up later, I could see why. Cohen’s paternal grandfather had been a Polish Jew and his mother’s family were Jews from Lithuania. I guess I’d always that it had been Russia because the mother of Breavman, the Cohenesque character in his novel “The Favourite Game” had come from Russia. My Polish friend also didn’t seem to want to allow that Cohen was very Jewish.

Then he made a comment about the Muslims, insisting that it was a horrible, violent and hateful religion. It’s funny; you meet the nicest people, but if you talk to them long enough some kind of bigotry will reveal itself. I started arguing that Christianity has killed millions more people over the course of history than Islam has, but he interrupted me, “Don’t! Don’t try to say that Muslims are good! It’s a BS religion!” I was about to ask him if he actually knew or had spoken to any Muslims or had ever had any personal experience at all that would have confirmed his opinion, but he was one of the next five to be allowed in the door to get a number. I knew that the answer would have been “No” and that he’d never had any real interactions with Muslims at all. I’ve had that kind of conversation in the comment threads of fake news sites online more times than I can count. One guy responded to that question with, “The first thing I will ever say to a Muslim will be, ‘Enjoy eternity in hell!’ just before I blow him away!” And these are the people that voted for Donald Drumpf. 

I got number 11, went home for fifteen minutes and then came back. They called numbers 1 to 10 and about ten minutes later numbers 11 to 20. I went inside and sat down. There were one or two people standing. Joe came up to the doorman and said, “What the fuck!” Then he started asking each person that was sitting down what number they had. I was sitting in the middle of the row of chairs against the wall and when he asked me my number, I said “eleven” in a voice so low that he asked me again. I really should have asked him what fucking difference it made what my number was since when my number was called I would get up and go to get my food. But I repeated that I had number eleven. He was about to tell me to move down to the front but he saw that there were no seats.

My number was called by an attractive woman of East Indian descent who was wearing a tiny top hat about the size of a teacup. The top of the first set of shelves was brimming with items and as I was hesitating she said, “Oh! I really like these!” and she reached for a package that turned out not to be what she’d had in mind. The foil bag said, “Potatoes with gravy”. How do you get potatoes and gravy into a package, the contents of which are obviously dried? I took a can of turkey gravy.

Below that were the crackers and cookies, though I didn’t notice any of the cookies that the woman in the pigtails delivered earlier. I picked a box of Vegetable Thins, noting that this volunteer, unlike the one form last week, let me select things with my own hands.

From the bottom shelf she gave me a few small packages of rice crispy squares, a bag of peanut Glossettes and a chocolate peppermint stick Luna Bar. I noticed later that the Luna Bar said that it is “for women”, so I had to look it up. It doesn’t contain anything men shouldn’t take but rather just some stuff that women’s diets are frequently deficient in like calcium and vitamin B.

I skipped the pasta and sauce as usual and was about to skip the canned beans when I noticed a tin of Bush’s honey baked beans. It’s rare that canned beans would have a label that actually says, “baked” because they usually aren’t.  My helper offered me another can of beans because I hadn’t taken very much of anything so far. She seemed almost concerned, but I said I didn’t want any. From the soups I picked a carton of Campbell’s Everyday Gourmet Asparagus with Sweet Basil, but she said I could have another so I took the Golden Butternut Squash soup of the same brand.

She gave me a little bottle of lemonade and then I picked a bag of Cheerios with flax.

In the cold section, Sue was back in her old spot. I had run into her outside while parking my bike and she told me that she has a full time job now but was just helping out the food bank for the holidays. She had two boxes full of a wide selection of various personal care items. She gave me a couple of little flat cans of Vaseline lip care, but I asked if there was any dentil floss. She dug a bit and said there wasn’t any but then dug some more and found some. It usually takes me a while to remember to buy floss when I’ve run out and I ran out a week ago. She also pulled out a bottle of conditioner, which I accepted. She told me, “You have nice hair.” I noticed later that the conditioner is for tinted hair so I had to look that up too. Since it simply retains colour rather than adds it, it shouldn’t do anything bad to my hair.

Sue also had some cottage cheese, a litre of milk, a package of frozen ground beef and a bag of five eggs. She gave me an extra bag of eggs.

In the bread section I noticed a bag of blueberry bagels, so that was all I took. I noticed later that the blueberry bagel was just on the end of the bag and that the rest were cheese.

The vegetable lady was serving the Polish guy who hates Muslims and she called him “Pops”. I’ve only noticed this since I’ve been coming to the food bank, that people from the Caribbean, or at least those from Jamaica, often address older men as “Pops”.  I’m glad I’m still considered young enough to get the “my dear” or “my darling” treatment. She was in an extremely upbeat mood this time. She kept saying, “Take! Take! I want you to have as much as you want!” There was a bin of broccoli flowerets and another of zucchini. She gave me almost a full 4.5 kg bag of potatoes, declaring, “You can’t have Christmas dinner without spuds!” She handed me a few mandarin oranges and granny smith apples. There was a box full of bags of raw cranberries, so I asked if I could have some. She said, “Of course! You can’t have your Christmas turkey without homemade cranberry sauce!” I noted out loud that I’d have to buy some sugar. As I wished the vegetable lady a merry Christmas, I asked her name as we took each other by the hand. She told me her name is Sylvia.

I immediately went to the bank to take out some money for the supermarket. The guy after me at the bank machine thought that I’d forgotten my cash because the “please remove your cash” sign was still up. I said, “Thanks for looking out for me!”

I rode to Freshco. This time I’d brought an extra, extra-large shopping bag because I knew that I wouldn’t have a lot of room in the two bags that had just been almost filled at the food bank. I picked some bananas, grapes and raisin bread. I already had a turkey thawing so I didn’t need any meat. I took two litres of 3.25% milk, a can of mixed nuts, a bottle of hot salsa a bag of tortilla chips and some zero fat yogourt.  As I was looking for sugar and salt, who did I see but Michele, the woman that was talking to herself at the food bank. I assumed she was shopping, but all the while she was still using the mocking high voice as she referred to “Parkdale crackheads and Scooby doo.” The guys that stock the shelves at Freshco seemed to find her amusing and they were talking about her and laughing after she passed by. I bought some brown sugar and some sea salt, as well as a bottle of Scope that was on sale.

I still had three things to do before I settled in for the rest of the weekend but I had a lot of stuff that I didn’t want to be carrying past my place, so went home and dropped it off. Then I rode to the post office and picked up the package my sweet daughter sent me. Then I went to The Cattlemen butcher shop because on the way home from the supermarket I’d remembered that I’d forgotten to buy bacon. I hadn’t been to The Cattlemen for years. There were women behind the counter and they were friendly. It’s not like the older guys had been unfriendly they just weren’t as personable. I asked if the place was under new management. She said, “No” that they’d just renovated and the only way that you got get him out of this place was if you tied him up and dragged him away. I offered that maybe he’d like being tied up and then she called to the back, “Dad, do you have any change?”

On the way home I stopped to get six Christmas beers at the liquor store. The line-up wasn’t as bad as I expected. When I was unlocking my bike a guy with an African accent said to some people, “I want to marry Christmas!”

When I got home I unwrapped my present. My daughter had sent me a cast iron bean pot because she’d read me write on Facebook that I wanted to recreate her grandmother’s home baked beans. What a nice gift!

That night I watched “The Amazing Spiderman 2”. I’d say that the only thing really good about the movie was Andrew Garfield’s acting. He is definitely the best actor that has ever played Spiderman. That being said though, I found the movie disappointing and prefer the very first one with Toby McGuire. I don’t like how they changed the background story. They just don’t get that the thing that is appealing about Spiderman is that it could have happened to anyone. They made it like Peter parker was the only one that could have become Spiderman. They handled the death of Gwen Stacy well though.

A Librarian is Someone that Only Eats Libraries

            On Friday I actually woke up by myself for the first time in days.

I finally finished my review of Shab-e She’r and posted it. It’s very relaxing to get caught up on things.

            There was a slip indicating an attempted delivery from Canada Post hanging up downstairs. The guy had knocked on the door of my building, but of course I hadn’t heard. My wonderful daughter Astrid sent me a parcel, but I can pick it up down the street on Saturday, after going to the food bank.

            I didn’t remember to start thawing my Christmas turkey until evening, so it might not be ready on Christmas day. I might be wrong though.

            I started downloading Batman versus Superman and Captain America: Civil War.

            I’ve almost finished reorganizing my books after many years. This time the order will be on a database so it won’t be so hard to get them all back in place if the need arises. It was all those many times of having to clear my shelves for the exterminator that got my library in such disarray. Recently I’ve gone weeks at a time without seeing a cockroach, though sometimes it’s every couple of days. I wonder if the Library of Alexandria has these kinds of problems anymore. Is there a special spray that keeps at bay history’s armies that are bent on destroying libraries?

Gangs of the West

            On Thursday I finally got an email from my Aesthetics TA, Melissa Rees, confirming that I got an A on my applied essay.

            Her note said, “This is a very successful essay, which weaves together analysis of a complex work of art (Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers) with a cogent discussion of a complex theory of high versus low art. Very well done. It is persuasive and insightful. Further discussion of literary tropes in particular would have been illuminating, but that is supererogatory”. I think she was saying that me erogatory is super! Supererogatory is how one would describe the first erotic experience of Superman when he was a boy; either that or the name of his pet frog. It looks like what it really means is that it would be beyond what was required.

            It’s been quite a year. Back in November I got the first solid A I’d ever gotten in Philosophy, so that was shock enough, but then I got another A for my second paper. It almost seems like the secret is to just crunch essays on the same day they are due because it prevents one from over thinking them. It’s also weird that I would get a solid A in Philosophy and only an A-minus in English, considering that when I write an English paper I actually know what I’m talking about.

            I spent most of the day writing my review of Tuesday night’s Shab-e She’r poetry reading. These reviews are very time consuming! I still wasn’t quite finished by the end of the day.

            I watched an interesting episode of Johnny Ringo, though it wasn’t interesting for anything other than the guest characters. There were two surviving members of a family of train robbers called the Reno brothers. The opening segment showed them in action and they were like superheroes in their acrobatic gun fighting, but also comical in that they had this catchphrase when they were trying to decide which one of them would go out into the open and draw fire: “I died last time! It’s your turn now!” The way they were showcased it looked pretty certain that it was on the producer and writer, Aaron Spelling’s mind to promote these characters towards having a show of their own. Perhaps if Johnny Ringo had continued past one season it might have happened. They looked like they would have been much more interesting than the other thirty western shows that were on television at that time.

            It turns out that the Reno Gang were a real life and very notorious family of criminals in the old west and they not only staged the very first train robbery in history, but the second one as well. The last of them were hanged in 1868 when Billy the Kid was nine years old and when Jesse James and his brothers were two years into their bank-robbing career. The difference between the Renos and the Jameses is interesting and is most telling in how they lived during the Civil War. The James boys were brutal bushwhackers working in the service of the Confederate Army while the Reno brothers were bounty jumpers who would enlist in the Union Army to collect the bounty offered, then immediately desert, change their names and then enlist somewhere else to collect the bounty and desert again and on and on throughout the war.

Time Does Not Exist

            On Wednesday I didn’t wake up at 5:00 as I’d hoped, but my new alarm setting woke me up at 5:07. Yay! It only makes a difference for two of my morning routines. Those few extra minutes are divided between my song translations and writing projects but it does make a difference to have that little bit more time.

            Even though I still had quite a bit of chilli in a pot that it would take me a few more days to finish, I had a small outside round roast in the fridge that had a best before date of December 21^st, so I had to cook it. I preheated the oven to 260, then I rubbed the meat in salt, paprika, Worcestershire sauce and grainy Dijon mustard and then seared it for ten minutes before lowering the heat to 120 and cooking it for an hour. I sliced off the end when it was finished and it tasted amazing.

            During the holidays I like to catch up on my Doctor Who and my superhero movies, so I decided to start some downloads. I discovered though that there hasn’t been any new Doctor Who episodes this year and that the newest one since last Christmas will be airing on Christmas day. That means I won’t get to see it till a few days after that. I started downloaded a couple of movies from franchises that I fell behind on: Spiderman 2 from the reboot (I’m pretty sure I saw the one with The Lizard and I don’t recall one with a Black Electro, so I think I must be on track) and The Man of Steel, which feels like a second reboot, though Superman Returns technically was not a reboot because even though the cast was different it was supposed to take place after the original Superman 2 and ignore the rest of that series.

            I also started downloading Deadpool, which actually looked pretty good in the previews I’d watched.

            Waking late, best before dates and no Doctor Who travelling in time this year. If time existed there would be a connection between these three!

Swayed by Icons

            On Tuesday I woke up late for the last time. My phone alarm was set for 5:30 but it’s only there as a backup since I’m almost always up by that time. There’s a flying saucer shaped clock in the living room that crows like a rooster at 5:21 because it’s nine minutes fast. It’s been running for more than a decade on two double-A batteries and its alarm is quieter than my phone both because it’s in the other room and because it’s quieter. I usually hear it though but this time I didn’t. 5:00 is when I like to get up but I don’t mind awfully waking up a little later than that. 5:30 is way too late for the things I want to do every morning, so I finally made the decision to change the time on my phone alarm. It took some thinking though to decide exactly what time I wanted it to ring. I prefer to wake up on my own either at 5:00 or before and I also prefer not being woken up by outside influences, so I didn’t want to set the alarm for 5:00 because I wanted to give myself a chance. I settled on 5:07 because it’s not a too tragic time to lurch out of bed and still get my stuff done.

            Around the middle of the day, my classmate, Matt Wu, left me a comment on Facebook to let me know that our final Marks for Aesthetics had been posted on the U of T student site. I found out that I got an A minus for the course. I was still very interested though to find out my mark on the final essay, but since the papers have only letter grades it’s not possible to exactly figure out the percentage on each one. I was pretty certain that my participation mark would be ten out of ten; my lowest marks were 58% of 15% for the first quiz and 63% of the same for the second; I got eight out of ten for the weekly writing assignments. That left me with the two essays that were worth 25% each. I calculated the lowest percentage I could have gotten on the first essay to have earned my A, but working that into my overall mark gave me 90% on my second essay, which would have placed me just inside the range of an A-plus, which is probably not likely, since my TA, Melissa told me she didn’t give out A-pluses on papers that didn’t break philosophical ground. Unless my idea that no novels can ever be absolutely fine art was such a breakthrough, I doubt if I really kicked things up a notch in my paper. I assumed then that my second paper was a solid A like the first, which I’m pretty happy about.

            I got an email telling me that I wasn’t one of the fifteen poets chosen for the January workshop being run by this year’s writer in residence, Murakami Sachiko. It made me a little angry, not because I wanted to workshop my poems but because I wanted to win. I looked up her poetry to see if I was missing anything. I found five but I only liked one of them. Her imagery is not all that strong and she doesn’t really go to new places with language.

            That evening I printed up my poem then bundled up my body and headed out to Shab-e She’r. The roads were still a bit slushy so I couldn’t ride without getting a little splattered.

            I didn’t remember exactly where on College St. Stephen in the Fields Anglican Church was, though when I’d recently looked it up I saw that it was west of Kensington Market. The gothic revival edifice is hard not to notice once one gets past the clock tower of the Bellevue Fire Hall. I parked my bike in the snow at the west corner of the building and went to the nearest door, only o find it locked. Further east I found the entrance.

            Bänoo Zan was just inside chatting with someone else near a greeting table. I walked into the nave and took a seat in the front row by the right aisle. I’ve always liked the simple and unpretentious Victorian Gothic design of the old church from the outside and the dark look it has because of the old bricks and the very low black roof. I don’t find the inside as nice to look at though. They have sacrificed aesthetics for symbolism in this church. The nave area is remarkably small while the sanctuary stretches far to the back and soars very high and it frankly looks a little awkward. The little country Anglican Church that I attended as a child had a larger portion for the congregation, as does the Christ Church Cathedral in Montreal. But as for a space for Shab-e She’r to have its readings, this church is certainly visually more interesting than what they had before, which was a gallery, which is really just a room. But they’ve gone from a place full of images of Palestine to one full of crosses, so I wondered if they would attract the same crowd.

            On the right side of the sanctuary, multicoloured pipes that look like giant whistles take up more than half of the wall. I figured that the organ must be on the other side of the brick wall and since the wall also has tall, arched but darkened windows, I assumed that they used to be just inside the back of the church but that an extension had been built for the organ. The priest corrected me on my observation when I voiced it at the end of the night. She told me that the church has always gone beyond those walls.

            At the southeast corner of the nave, in front of the last chair on the right side of the front row, where Mind the Gap was sitting, was a little old table holding an incomplete nativity scene, with just a few animals lying in the straw. I got up to go and get a closer look and Mind the Gap, with a chuckle, echoed my thoughts that it was, “a little sparse”. I suggested that maybe the baby Jesus and his family had gone to a Christmas party and would be back later.

            Nick Micelli took the seat in the front row just across the aisle from mine and proceeded to eat a double slice of pizza. For some reason I found the odour of his dinner overwhelming. I’m sure it was just an ordinary slice, so perhaps the room carried or contained the smell differently or maybe it was how the odour mixed with the background smells of the old church, but I found it almost sickening and was glad when he’d finally finished it.

            When Bänoo kicked off the event, she began with the usual introduction, that Shab-e She’r means “poetry night” in Persian and that her event is the only Shab-e She’r in the world that is held in a language other than Persian. She added that on the night after this would be a solstice traditional celebration in Iran and that people stay up late, eat Persian delicacies and read poetry to one another.

            Bänoo told us that when she landed in Canada and started going to poetry readings she noticed that there were many that were separated along lines of ethnicity, sexual orientation and politics, and so she started Shab-e She’r with the intention of introducing the poets of Toronto to one another.

            She stressed that Maggie Helwig, the minister of St Stephen in the Fields, who is also a writer, has assured her that we can feel comfortable any words we choose and that there would continue to be no censorship at Shab-e She’r. I had intended to use any language I wanted to anyway, but I guess it’s nice to know that it’s okay.

            Bänoo introduced her team as the people that help keep her crazy, and I think she meant that they help keep her crazy dream alive.

She urged open stage readers to keep their time to three minutes or less out of respect for the other readers, but added that she wasn’t going to physically drag them from the stage if they went over. I suggested that maybe the human sized cross that’s suspended from the ceiling and looming about ten meters above the stage would fall on those that read too long.

            The first reader on the open stage, which is for the first time more like an actual stage, was Shaheen, who read a poem entitled “Ashes of the Phoenix” – “Rise god damn it, rise! This is the day of your atonement! The day of rage, the day of retribution … Pay your dues in dust and debris … Mark your doorstep, this is the day of wrath …”

Next, Banoo invited me to the stage. I read my recently written piece, “Parkdale Amazon” – “Out of my window I saw a woman busting out all over. Out on O’Hara an Amazon wearing black all over. In greed I tried to read her ingredients. From the curly hair and a certain air of body confidence she looked a little Black, felt a little First Nation and had that not uncharming twitch of genetic colonization …” The applause was polite, with no whoops of appreciation like I got the last time I performed at Shab-e She’r back in the summer. I wondered if some of the explicit language in my poem made listeners think on a subconscious level, “Should I approve of this too loudly in a church?”

After me was Mama (it was pronounced more like Momo), who was there for the first time – “I want to strip you … priest habits … Aging delayed … Society reminds me scornfully my duties as a wife … I remain with this aching pestilence … when I look at your beard.”

Then we heard from Luciano Iacobelli, who Bänoo told us will be a feature at Shab-e She’r in 2017. He expressed his fear as a Catholic that if he were to share one of his poems with swear words that the cross would fall down on him, so he read a piece called, “Language Abhors a Vacuum” – “Empty virgin spaces are victims … Language fears for its continuation … Fights the silence no matter what is said … It’s not necessary for words to have matter … That’s why the voice in the head never stops … Voice in the head abhors the vacuum in the head … Run on repetition language … How language pacifies its anxieties … Vanquish the vacuum … Nature abhors silent spaces.”

Megan Hutton followed Luciano, with a poem that I remembered hearing her read before at Shab-e She’r. She explained that it was inspired by a man she’d met at the St Michael’s Hospital emergency room. She had watched him try to talk to two women there but they had blown him off. She had initiated a long conversation with him and it inspired a poem entitled, “Fast Eddy” – “My eyes dance on his words … A dishevelled stranger … The risk of opening up to two unlikely participants with matching purses … Loneliness … Lives everywhere … ‘My drinking, my downfall’ he confides to me … ‘I blew the trumpet at Woodbine and played honky tonk piano in Yellowknife … His eyes flicker with hope, believing for a time in a future he can still imagine.”

Bänoo returned to the stage to tell us, “When poets speak, people listen, because poets listen well”. Then she asked if we were ready for the first feature and I assume that everybody but me said yes, but Banoo wasn’t satisfied. She asked again, “Are you ready?” and the response was, of course louder and more enthusiastic, but still apparently not enough because Bänoo asked again, “Are you ready?” They were so ready that they began to fight among themselves to argue who was more ready than the other. Fistfights broke out and guns were drawn. Four people were driven to such ferocious eagerness to hear the first feature that they died of heart attacks right there in the church.

The first feature was Kate Sutherland, reading entirely from her book, “How to Draw a Rhinoceros”. She told us that it with a little 18^th Century porcelain rhinoceros named Clara, which inspired her to do research for the book. Kate began with the longest poem of the book, which was called “Rhinoceros Odyssey” – “August 1738 – Raised in the home of the director of the Dutch East India Company … An occasional puff of tobacco … The horn stands upon the nasal, not on the forehead and provides no evidence of the existence of unicorns … Set up a booth, admission price, six sous … February 3^rd, 1749 – She’s smaller than the poster claims … The beautiful marquise had not seen a rhinoceros before … Death report number one: Lonely and un-sated, she died of rage … Death report number two: Drowned … Death report number three: Lost at sea, her captain went with her … Death report number four: Killed by mysterious ailment … Death report number five: Slipped into the lagoon. Efforts to keep her afloat failed … Startled to see in the hands of its master the horn that fell off last year … 1754 – Warsaw. She is the warm-up act for an Italian comedy … Thirty pounds of bread, wine … Six feet high, twelve feet long … Death report number six: 1758. Died unexpectedly. May or may not have been stuffed …”

Then Kate read some shorter poems about her imagined Clara – “Favourite drink, a carafe al fresco, but she’s on the wagon now …”

“Clara the Collector” – “The eggs of rare birds … Odd toes clicking against tiles …”

“Clara delights in her status as muse … She goes head to head with Dolly …”

“Clara is ready for her close-up … She chafes at being upstaged … A ship rids low with a lovesick rhinoceros …”

“Her vision is poor … Grinds her teeth nights like any beast in captivity …”

Kate’s last poem was “Clara in Space” – “She skywrites a message: ‘Wander alone, like a rhinoceros’”

If Kate Sutherland’s “How To Draw A Rhinoceros” were illustrated then it would probably work as reading for young adults. The history she presents is interesting and people, especially children, like rhinoceroses. But when the history and the subject matter outweigh the writing it does not make for a good book of poetry. This is often the problem with poems written based on research. I’m sure that Kate has a very interesting life she could write about and which would inspire her to find imagery with which to enrich our language.

The last time I was at Shab-e She’r they had 104 people. This first night in the new space had a much smaller turn out.

Bänoo called a break and so I went looking for a washroom. I poked my head through several doorways until I saw a woman that looked like she was on the same search, so I followed her around a corner and down a corridor hoping that there would be a men’s washroom nearby the one that she would find, but the door she closed behind her had that image of the silhouettes of two genders standing together in a police line-up. In the next room down the hall though I found another unisex washroom.

I went back to my seat. Cy Strom came up to the front and was approached by Norman Perrin, who began to tell him a long travel story. Cy nodded with interest but made slight movements in my direction and made some progress but then the break ended and he said he’d talk to me later.

As has been her new tradition this year, Bänoo sandwiched one open miker in between the two features. This time she invited John Portelli to be the palate cleaner before the second feature. He read a poem on Palestine entitled, “Tears of Gaza” – “I wait for wisdom and perception … for the rain of bombs to end … A donkey brays into the void … How many more dead children?”

Our second feature was Scribe and in the long introduction that he’d provided for Bänoo to read, we learned that he is one third of a performing collective named “The Uncharted” and we also were told that he would leave the place with more energy than there was before he started.

Scribe told us, “When I stepped in I knew it would be a church but the last time I was in a church reading poetry it was the worst experience. I haven’t written the same since then. I haven’t been able to go to the same place. Who restricts my voice? It’s weird being in a church reading poetry. It’s like now I’m coming home and now I’m not.”

He admitted that he’d intended to read a different poem but had chosen a different piece after stepping into the church. It was clear this night and in this space that not only Scribe was allowing himself to be swayed by this symbolic “spiritual” environment.  Some people on the open stage seemed to have deliberately brought material that they felt was appropriate to the pretensions of the location.

From his first poem – “We are the barely audible apology … Fools return to their folly as dogs return to their vomit … Secrets we stuffed away in our chambers … Stained glass mosaic windows … Forcefully ignored … Condemn the woman we are too busy blaming … So absorbed in the idea of being lost, we forget …”

From his second poem – “I wasted my potential … I didn’t have the words … Bent read and dead … assassination … my cardiovascular chambers … These bars are more like golden rods … come to those who aren’t afraid to be god … waiting to penetrate wrists and feet … Satellites as kites … The sky … my playground … I think it’s time to climb off the monkey bars and press play.”

Scribe told us, “I write poetry that is 98% personal stories. I like to share elements of myself. Thank you for listening to me talk about myself. It’s a weird kind of vanity. I can’t step in front of the mirror without dancing.”

From his third piece – “I am cloaked in a leather jacket … A man with a face pale as the full moon, his right hand clutches a badge … tells me to have a good night …”

Introducing his fourth piece, Scribe said, “This is an ode, to Lea Shy” – “This is for soul, beats and poetry … This is for good cooked food … This is for inside jokes … This is for Black barber shops … This is for barbers … Sounding like we are speaking in tongues … Heavy duty run downs … We are mistaken for masochists … This is for every pair of arms … This is for coco butter kisses from your grandmother …”

Scribe told us, “I don’t do love poems. I like reading love poems … I fell in love … It’s impossible to read love poems that aren’t clichéd …” From his love poem – “I am terrified of heights but I love the sensation of falling … A sensation of surrender … I wonder if my body has arms that are strong enough to hold my expectations … The rest of me lies parallel to the sky … Drilling into my emotions … Smash the GPS called my conscience … When I’ve forgotten where I am … When I was younger I never hesitated from my feelings … I scraped the skin clean off my back … As the water dropped … I drew a deep breath … Having lungs filled with lake … I trust my lover … The weight of trying to be the first … Love is the ocean … We know more about space than we do about the Atlantic … The lake sized love I had as a boy … I think it’s time I leave the pool deck and head for the shore.”

Scribe informed us that he didn’t have any merch with him but that he has an album available for downloading and that he would give the code to anyone that wants it and if they wanted to give him money that would be great.

Introducing his next poem he said that he grew up in the hood but now his neighbourhood’s becoming gentrified.

From “Babylon” – “Blowing bricks of our buildings with dynamite … How you gonna turn this place into paradise …”

From his next poem - “There is only one person that can wake me up … Love would be a cheap way to describe how I feel about his laugh … He says ‘Hi Josh! I love you!’ I try to go back to sleep and then he tickles me … He calls me a princess … I told him I couldn’t be a princess … Do you want to be a prince? He says, ‘I can’t … cause I’m brown’ … This bullet of racial inferiority … Price, who told you that? He wouldn’t give me an answer … I felt every ounce of that same bullet lodged in my skull …”

Scribe’s next piece was addressed to Martin Luther King Jr. – “You and I are separated by three generations and the borders of our nations … You are the dream … Rip tides … Black royalty … Wearing a black suit … After centuries of violence … ‘protest peacefully’ … Doctor King … Each molecule of your make-up is anti-violent … Did you ever feel this tense … When I remember being called ‘nigger’ … Tell me to be like you … They murdered you … My coronation or my crucifixion … I’m not sure I’m prepared to die … Afraid to live and afraid to die at the exact same time …”

Scribe spoke very briefly into his phone, saying, “I love you.” He explained that it was his partner. He told us that he switched to the iphone but has regretted it ever since.

Introducing his final piece, Scribe told us, “I like babies! But I don’t want one right now.” The poem, “My Joy” was to his imagined someday in the future child – “My dear little one, at this moment you are more fantasy than idea … I’m unsure whether I’ll be able to write poetry for you … Let me teach you about your smile … I took a picture of your great-great grandmother  … her grin is so many miles wide … When your mouth splits into two rows of crystal sunshine … Our joy does not know how to die … When you are being spoken to about your potential … ten thousand African war drums … Every time you doubt what you are born for … It bothers me that I am terrified of greatness … Every bloodlust of my body … Greatness isn’t always beautiful … I will set myself ablaze … His fist over his heart, a thousand African war drums must excavate themselves from the ashes … I already am greatness, ready to fly.”

Scribe’s writing has some very strong poetic moments and he is sometimes quite good at putting words together with the sound of their musical flow in mind. I think he has a lot of potential, but would suggest that he rework pieces with both a literary and spoken word mindset, and not be so sure that they can’t be improved. 

After the feature, as usual, Bänoo immediately continued with the open stage.

First up was Mind the Gap, who introduced her poem by telling us; “My friend died this time last year. He needed the kind of help that he was giving to others.” The poem was called, “The Solo Gangster” – “He may not roar like a lion, but he will bite your head off … He could drive you up the wall but he would also drive you anywhere you want, for a price … In memory of Adam Zawaski.”

Before introducing Simon, Bänoo informed us that the next Shab-e She’r would be on January 31^st.

Simon read two poems.

The first was entitled, “The Dim Light is for a Separate Truth” – “I obey the thing that I have been taught … There is so much to remember … Joan Armstrong needs my constant attention … To truly love an older woman you have to know them when they are young … Women from the youngest age eat well … The chaos of wealth … The anger of acceptance …I render it larger than life … It is not the damned end result of anything.”

The second was called, “The Boat Dying Within Full View of the Shore” – “The villagers in their simple huts … The unwillingness to die unseen … Something like a miracle occurred … The boat appeared as if from nowhere … Mare Nostrum … The boat dying … Their fear of what they ahead … They sow nothing overhead.”

Then we heard Nick Micelli, who informed us that this was the neighbourhood that he grew up in and so coming there brought back memories. The poem he read was his take on the solstice, entitled, “The Longest Night” – “My soul goes down deep … The swirling emotions all bubbling and bright … I’m enveloped in peace … A blessing, my shadow! As the gloom fills with light there’ll be none left but me.”

Then, with great enthusiasm, Bänoo welcomed to the stage my Canadian Poetry professor at U of T, sporting a new haircut, “George Elliot Clarke! Canada’s Parliamentary Poet Laureate!”

George informed us that he would be reading from his new book, “Canticles Number One”, that he had one copy with him for sale and that it was only twenty dollars. Then he held his hand to his ear, palm out as several people shouted back the traditional response, “Only twenty dollars?”

He announced that the poem he would be reading was “Discourse On Pleasure, in the voice of Alexander Pushkin”. It’s hard to describe in text the powerful reading style of George Elliot Clarke, who could probably make a page from the telephone book sound epic and who even sounds like he’s reading a poem when he calls out our names for roll call in our class. George also sometimes spontaneously decides to repeat certain lines a second time, louder and more dramatically as if he thought people hadn’t heard them.

From the poem – “Her face less Nordic and more Asian … Smoking salmon on white bread … Scores of iced vodka, pleasure makes comfy my heart. Scores Of Iced Vodka! Pleasure Makes Comfy My Heart! Her speech drips acid …She’s as fickle as a tyrant … Demeanour of a dead nun … her mumbo jumbo, her incremental dementia … She goes violently violent … Looking like eggplant I hate to eat. Looking Like Eggplant I Hate To Eat! Incoherent and inexplicable … My luxuries become liabilities … I take my muse … happy in the joggling tray … She’s atavistic, mirthful, a smouldering odour at her breast … Her soft mildness … the kisses … the climax each night and then the prize!”

When Bänoo returned to the stage, she declared that George Elliot Clarke is the best poet laureate ever because he still goes on open mics.

After George was Norman Perrin, who told us, “I was listening to the poems but my thoughts keep churning. He said he was going to tell us a story but that he had to tell us a story first. He said he had gone to his place for telling stories but there was a drummer there who insisted that it was his spot. Norman told us that he didn’t want to argue with someone that hits things for a living. He went someplace where he made a circle of stones with a space for an entrance and he sat inside. Children came but he told them that they had to enter through the door, so they did and he had a space for telling stories. He said, “Over the thousands of years we’ve been telling stories, we tell stories in the light to remind u of the darkness and we tell stories in the darkness to remind us of the light.”

From his story – “Once there was a hunter … He shot the animals and terrorized the entire forest until one day he could not find a single creature except for one little yellow bird that said, “Nya nya nya clap clap clap!” He shot the bird but the bird was still there saying, “Nya nya nya clap clap clap!” He broke the bird into a hundred little pieces, but still heard, “Nya nya nya clap clap clap!” He buried every little piece of the bird, but he could still hear the slightly muffled sound of “Nya nya nya clap clap clap! “He dug it up and threw it on a bonfire then he scattered the ashes to the four winds, but when he turned around he saw millions of little yellow birds simultaneously saying, “Nya nya nya clap clap clap!” The hunter smashed his gun and then ran to the Himalayas where he became a vegetarian.”

Following Norman was the minister of St Stephen in the Fields Anglican Church, Maggie Helwig. She almost apologetically confessed that she’d forgotten to take her collar off before the reading but then thought, “What the hell!” She told us that what she had to read for us had been written a while ago because she doesn’t have much time to write anymore.

Her first poem was written about her involvement with Occupy Toronto and it was called, “St James Park, November 2011” – “The city imagines itself existing … The smoke and mud … The city imagines that the desire for god is the knowledge of god … We live in the sweetness of absence … Sound of a wave over shell and stone … Trust in his art … Out of lake and dark valley the city … The small self whispers … The desire is the knowledge … This the winter’s heart, a city out of time.”

In introducing her second poem she reminded us that there are many lost rivers in Toronto. The one that ran through the neighbourhood where the church was built was Russell Hill Creek. Her poem was inspired by a dream she’d had that the river came back – “A thin river curls behind Dundas Street … the air is falling sweet … In the dreams there is always water … A waterfall clear as the air … The scent of smoke and memory … The only and logical promise: ‘I will be accurate and uncertain’  … Night blooming jasmine …”

She asked Bänoo for permission to read one more and of course Bänoo said it was okay.

Maggie told us that the poem was about the thief that was crucified beside Jesus. She said that she grew up near the Church of the Good Thief and that informed how she thought about god. From the poem – “Knowing this, nailed to the side of god … Perhaps she learns it then and near to another shore the trinity suffers … Pin us against god’s heart … Oh holy three, dying at the curve of the skull … find us at the end loyal to our stories.”

Next was Mizan, who told us that he accidentally started writing poetry and that thanks to god he recites most of them.

From his first poem – “There is someone. We don’t know how great he is. Goes on and on. He’s the one who planned this universe. Have to reach his destiny.”

From “Blessing” – “Human beings are the blessing of god. Life is too short for those who realized.”

He finished with a song that he’d written that reminded me in its melody and beat of many of the Hindu songs that I learned when I was studying yoga in 1975. There were a lot of repeated phrases in Mizan’s song – “World lured by so many systems … hypocrisy, domination, we don’t care if climate change …”

Then came Chai, who said, “Merry Christmas” but pointed out that we could see from his t-shirt that he’s not much of a god-fearing type. I couldn’t read his t-shirt. He announced to cheers from the audience that he’d just bought George Elliot Clarke’s book. He also told us that he was in Buffalo recently, canvassing against the Drumpf.  Chai, as usual, announced that he is the poet of choice and gave us a choice of two poems, but unlike previous times he made it clear that the choice was between which poem he would read first rather than giving people the impression they were choosing the only poem he was going to read and then reading the other anyway.

The poem chosen was, “iphone and I” – “I phone anyone in the world but me … Why is knowing everyone’s business more important than knowing myself … How much can one know … Who does not know iphone … Why do you expect my response right away? I still want you as my friend … Not the same as back slapping conversation … I long for my friends’ friendly touch and hugs … How do we get knowledge from data …”

Chai’s second poem was one I’d heard him read before, called, “Skyline is Rising and Tree line is Falling” – “As my village turns into town and town turns into city … long shadow in the city … Help our mother by digging up our slow motion parking lots …”

The final open stage reader was Allen Weiss, who read the opening to his story called “Making Light”, about a Jewish wizard – “Eleazar’s brain fooled him into thinking he was a healthy man again … he relieved himself … The constellations had hardly moved … Why is the sun trying to rise at the same time … That was a theological question … Winter was coming, Hanukkah was not far away … Melik kept his pace …” While Allen read but people were starting to leave and I saw that George was packing up as well. I was disappointed because I’d been hoping that he’d be around to chat at the end. I was also hoping that he would leak to me the grade for my paper on Confessionalism. I think that he and others might have stuck around if Allen had read a poem, but there was no end in sight for what sounded like a novel. Allen continued – “Where could the light be coming from … Eleazar climbed down … On a low rise in the distance … What was a giant menorah doing in the middle of the desert?”

Bänoo returned to the stage and reminded us of what she’d said before about how Iranians celebrate this night by staying up, eating nice things and reading poetry. Banoo read a translation of one of the traditional poems that are read on Yalda night. I think it was by Hafez. I couldn’t make out the last line of her translation so I’ll add one from another that I found – “With a jug of wine in hand … last night at midnight came and sat by your bedside … Oh my lunatic lover, are you sleeping … The loner is infidel …Go away hermit, don’t fault the drunk … Whether heavenly wine or the drunk drink …” … this wine on the face of the cup has broken many vows.

When we were done, I went looking for Cy, but he was doing something in the kitchen, so I just started getting dressed. When he came out we chatted about a French song by Serge Gainsbourg that I’d asked him to transcribe as a favour to me. Then we talked about the new space and he offered the view that Bänoo needs to colonize the church for Shab-e She’r and maybe put up a banner so that people are not staring at the cross behind the poets when they are reading or feeling it stare back at them. We had clearly had the same observation during the readings that despite Maggie’s permissions about language, poets were being swayed by the crosses, the icons and by the very fact that they were reading in a church.  Luciano Iacobelli in particular, despite assurances that it was alright to use any language, made it clear that because of his religious upbringing he was not going to swear in a church. I think this is one of the worst attitudes a poet can possibly have. If you wrote it you should read it to an audience. The church has been offered not as a church but rather as a neutral space for poetry readings.  If a poet were invited to a religious event that is being held at the church, then as with any themed event, it would be appropriate to bring writing that fits the atmosphere that the theme is trying to construct. This is why when Barack Obama, for instance, gave secular speeches at churches he had the cross behind him covered and when he spoke at religious services in churches the crosses were not covered. I wondered if Maggie would go along with the covering of the cross. Cy felt pretty sure that she’d be okay with it. He said that he’d be more comfortable if the readings were just held in the gym area at the west end of the building. Certainly if the readings are held in the worship area, even if the cross is covered, people like Luciano would still censor themselves and that is a problem. Maybe it’s their problem though. If a lot of poets think as Luciano does, or change what poetry they would read based on the location, the church is clearly a limitation. I’m glad that it doesn’t affect me. I’ll read whatever I want wherever I want to read it.