Inspired by Japan

            Tuesday was another day that the alarm on my phone didn’t sound and this time I didn’t wake up until 5:20, which is my latest rising time in years. About a week before that I reset the battery but it didn’t do much good. It drains very quickly lately so that I have to recharge it a few times a day. Although it still functions as a phone it fails sometimes at some of the smart things a smart phone is supposed to do. I guess three years is pretty old for a cell phone and so I may have to get another in the fall.

            I worked on editing and revising the poem that I planned on reading that night at Shab-e She’r.

            In the early afternoon I had an appointment with my social worker but just as I was about to leave there was suddenly a cloudburst. I really didn’t want to get soaked so I went out to the deck and looked up to see if it was going to be a long shower. From what I could tell the sky had too many textures of cloud for the downpour to last so I waited for five minutes. After about five minutes the rain eased back considerably so I headed out. It was still coming down but I managed to ride up to Dundas and Lansdowne without getting too wet.

            I was surprised after being called to booth #5 to see a different worker sitting on the other side of the desk than the one I’ve had for the last couple of years. She introduced herself as Janet and told me she would be my new worker because they’ve changed things around and now she’ll be handling all the clients that are over 60. Since I’m 62 now we discussed the fact that I’ll be getting my pension in three years and won’t be dealing with social services anymore. That also means I won’t have half the money I earn from work deducted from my pension. I think that people on welfare though don’t have the option to not apply for the pension but to wait until one is 70 for a larger pension.

            Janet seemed nice, but the last few workers I’ve had have been okay. A couple that I had several years ago were assholes, like the guy who told me after my daughter moved out and the amount of my cheque was decreased that I should move out of my apartment. Or the woman who argued that, even at my age, I should be taking training in a career rather than going for an English degree at university.

            On my way home the sky looked like the inside of a leviathan’s guts.

            That evening I rode to St Stephen in the Fields on College for the Shab-e She’r poetry reading. I saw Bänoo standing with her back turned to me and smoking a cigarette outside the church on the edge of the sidewalk. I rode up behind her, stuck my finger in her back and called, “You’re under arrest!”

            There was a post ring near where she was standing and while I was locking my bike I commented, “I thought you’d quit smoking.” She answered that she thought she had too. She justified though that one cigarette or so a day is not so bad. A car pulled up with Matthew and another poet. Matthew told Bänoo that he had a new poem to read on the open mic and then he went with the driver. Bänoo sighed “fresh …” something that I didn’t hear and so I asked her what she’d said. “Fresh poetry!” she repeated. I told her I’d see her inside.

            Hardly anyone was there, and I was five minutes later than usual. I sat in my usual place in the front with the aisle on my left. Allan and Holly Breismaster arrived with Bunny Iskov. Holly said, “Guten tag!”

            My old friend Tom Smarda came in. We hugged and he sat down to chat while playing his guitar as usual. We talked a bit about the performance I did on June 3^rd. Tom had wanted to come but had something else on his calendar. He told me he likes to hear my stuff because I “don’t give a fuck”. I responded that I’m the Donald Trump of poetry. Tom declared, “I vote for you for president!” “Thanks!” “You’d get rid of all the racists!” I told him that since everybody is a racist that would mean getting rid of everyone.

            Sydney White entered the church and came up to chat with Tom, announcing that she was going to be interviewed by a Winnipeg radio station about her conspiracy lectures at U of T. Tom asked if they were paying her plane fare. She explained that the interview would be over the phone just like another one that she did a while ago for a station in Tennessee. They started talking about the world banking conspiracy and Sydney claimed that Justin Trudeau is selling Canada to the banks. She proclaimed that she didn’t care if he takes his shirt off and she didn’t want to look at his little chest anyway. “If I want to look at a man’s chest I’ll look at Arnie’s!”

            Sydney said something negative about Bob Dylan’s singing voice. I argued that he’s a great singer, or has been, and it’s evident if one listens to his first album. Sydney’s only response was, “It’s nice that we can both have opinions!”

            Then who should show up but Cad Gold Jr., who hadn’t been to Shab-e She’r for the last two years, his excuse having been that there are “too many lefties there”. I told him that I had a bone to pick with him because he hadn’t contacted me about not coming to my show. He defended that he hadn’t known that he was supposed to but that he’d told Nick Cushing to let me know. I insisted that it’s inappropriate to leave messages with other people in such a case. He assured me that he’d come to my next show. I tried to make it clear that it’s not about coming or not coming. Tom suggested playfully that I was just trying to make Cad feel guilty.

            Cad complained that I’m impolite to him because I call him a liar on Facebook. I declared that I only call him a liar because he is a liar, and gave the example of his frequent claim that he has sex with 1,000 women a month. Cad admitted that he doesn’t actually count them. Tom expressed how much he enjoys reading the arguments that I have with Cad online.

            The event started at 19:04 with the land acknowledgement, which I assume will be a regular part of Shab-e She’r now. I’m assuming that this was something brought to the reading series by the volunteer who delivered it the last times I was been there as well. From what I can track down, although similar land acknowledgements have been used for centuries, it looks like this specific statement is something that was initiated by Ryerson University in 2014 when the provost at the time, Mohamed Lachemi, asked the Aboriginal Education Council to create a land acknowledgement statement so that it could be used uniformly across the university. The “dish with one spoon” in the statement is essentially Southern Ontario and part of the acknowledgement declares that we share the responsibility that the dish will never be empty.

            Then Bänoo came to the stage to begin hosting what she informed us was the 52^nd Shab-e She’r since November of 2012. She also let us know that this day, June 27^th was Canada’s Multicultural day and stated that it was appropriate that the most diverse reading series in Toronto would happen on this day.

            She encouraged us to spread the word about Shab-e She’r through emails, threats or other means.

            Bänoo announced that she likes for newcomers to read first on the open stage “to test their courage”. But she decided instead to have a storyteller begin the event and so she invited Natasha Khan to the stage. Natasha shared a story she got from a song by a Spanish music group called Mecano which tells a Gypsy tale about the Moon – “A dusky skinned Gypsy woman had fallen in love with a different kind of Gypsy man from another tribe, forbidden by hers  … She cried to the Moon to let her have him … The Moon agreed but the deal she offered was that in exchange she would take the woman’s first born child because she wanted to become a mother… The Moon argued that she would love the child more than the woman because she would never give it away … So the woman agreed and the Moon granted her the love of the cinnamon man … They had a child whose skin was silver and whose eyes were grey, nothing like the dark eyes of his father. The father was furious. He picked up a knife then stabbed and killed the woman. He then grabbed the child, carried it up the mountain and abandoned it there. He did not see the Moon pick up the child and bring her son to her. We foolish storytellers will still tell you that the Moon is still taking care of her child and when the baby cries she becomes a crescent shaped cradle to gently rock her child.

            I’d say the Moon sounds like a bit of a dick with some serious issues.

            The Mecano song from which Natasha drew the story is called “Hijo de la Luna” which in English means “Child of the Moon”. It was written by Mecano member José Maria Cano and it was a big hit in the late 80s all over the Spanish speaking world. As far as I can find out the song was not based on a Gypsy folk tale but was entirely conceived by Cano.

Here’s a rough translation of the song:

Among the foolish storytellers

there is a very ancient legend

that tells about a Gypsy woman

who conjured the moon to stay after sunrise

and while weeping she begged

for permission to wed

one from the darkest of Gypsy tribes

You will be the bride of your brown skinned groom

came the voice in the sky of the bright silver moon

But in return for that I want

your first-born infant son

If to a child you give birth

and yet that child you would sacrifice

just to save your lust from lonely nights

you’d love it less than a lover

Moon, do you want to be human

so that giving love to a son

will make you a woman?

Tell me moon of silver

how would it fulfil you

to make a child of earth and womb

a child of the moon?

A child was born to a cinnamon father

just as white as an ermine’s winter fur

with eyes of light grey instead of brown like his own

as if he was the Moon’s albino son

Damn you, you cheating woman

it’s the child of a non-Gypsy cur

and I will never give it shelter!

Believing himself a cuckolded man

he ran at his wife with a knife in his hand

Who is the boy’s father?

You have brought me dishonour!

and his wife he did murder

Then he climbed up the mountain

with the baby in his hands

and there it was abandoned

And on those nights when the Moon is full and complete

it’s all because her son is happy

and if her little baby cries

the Moon will then wane and rise

as a cradle to rock him through the skies

            Next came Simon, whose poem was called “A Kiss” – “On my eyelids a kiss is the news of the day … The deepening world, that which is not but is destined … From the distance of a café patio, here comes trouble in the form of my imagination … I still speak to her … in my absence … The tourists who are satisfied … surprised all the others have gone home … How are we finding you to take our pleasure … Fluid she is … the spectrum she is … She is not the face of the innocent young prostitute … You can learn a lot from a person’s gate or a person’s wheels … That’s what now really is … Those few who have come out to protest the regime … I am like an anthropologist letting the behaviour breathe … but the vestiges of hurry have not entirely disappeared. My mother remains.”

            Then we heard from Sheila Tucker, whose first poem was called “Should Have Been a Triceratops” – “The leg bones completely whole … lying in a steamy swamp … Heavy lumber weighing down … More silt … Embedded those bones lying under a rock hard hump … and those ice ages and still they get found … I trip over a three inch curb and fracture my tibula …”

            From “Fish Life” – “Living in a fishbowl aint easy … Pondering the fierceness of spiky teeth … Attempts to look the other way … Forced to see all without the mercy of a blink … fake money, big cars and big fishbowls.”

            Sheila was followed by Naseem. From his first poem – “Why dally my love when I wait for you? What turns your feet from their ordained route to me … A vision, a reflection of heaven … and what of me?”

            From Naseem’s second poem – “Rough appendages fly … Outlast our friends … Hear a note repeat … forever … Wax taper points away.”

            After Naseem it was my turn. Without using the mic I read my poem, “The Rat” – “A rat ran across Bathurst / making its nightly rounds / nose like a dagger / spotted like a heifer / belly to the ground // Its back was so much higher / than its scavenger’s beak / it had that rat-slant forward / though much more enormous / than the rats that I’d seen // When I got home I wondered / if it was really a rat / so on a web searcher / I wrote “Large rat shaped creature”, / and then I found out // It was up here from the southland /

risking frostbite to be free / of political conundrums / so it skipped passing customs / and is now playing possum / where it’s not known as good to eat.”

            Moving right along there was Sarah Crookall – “The plastic rose can scratch my skin … In a marble vase, not quite ugly … Its fabric petals creased like denim …”

            Jody’s offering was entitled “This is an Offering” – “Not a complicated love story … My uncle, who taught me to write my name in Chinese … My people are not your novelty, your mistranslated tattoos … The Pacific Mall … Karaoke queen … This is not a complete history … This is a love story.”

            Then it was time for our first feature, Bunny Iskov. Bänoo noted that Bunny had a very short bio and then added the declaration that the “test of a good poet is if they are better than their bio”. That statement doesn’t make much sense. Since poets write their own bios it would mean that all they would have to do is write shitty ones and they would automatically be good poets.

            Bunny began with “Trapped in a Universe of Ultimate Possibilities” – “ … I am a one-time winner of greatness … I composed a restless psalm made of onion skin and stiff cadavers …”

            From “My Universe” – “Green and white sculptures … Swollen fingers embrace the silver needle … I sit barefoot in the picture like a gardener in a tropical oasis … never to be forgotten like a tender lullaby or a kiss …”

            From “Summer Folly” – “A lawn so perfect it is mistaken for a landmark … The empty prey is hungry for shadow … The exhausted sun knocks on my front door … The cool of the air conditioner.”

            Her next two poems were about her brother, but she changed his first name.

            From “Martin’s Childhood” – “Martin had a penchant for guns … All the gold in the world could not match … those revolvers … He was no longer the cherished baby … His new start was that of sheriff … His capable hands already filled with comic books … burdened with a baby sister.”

            From “Martin in Mexico” – “ … Down in Mexico Martin relaxes by the pool … He shoots the breeze about his shooting the deer … After a few months pesos and sunshine turn tedious … He heads back to where he belongs … Relaxes on his front porch and watches the sunrise.”

            Then Bunny shared what she said was her first prose poem. From “Getting Ready” – “I wore a double-breasted trench coat so that I could be mistaken for a CEO … The papers were eaten by a dog … I squandered my money … My head flew in two directions … I raced until I was squandered … I was something gentle on the wind … I ate a hero sandwich … Shrivelled and spent like a Canadian dollar … I wait for my own business to open.”

            She told us that her next poem was in memory of 911. From “The Art Building” – “A dream of new wonder for the world … Shiny marble floors … The most colossal art building … between two towers … far from completion … Post mortem landmarks.”

            Bunny showed us a picture of herself posing with Stephen Harper. She confessed that she likes Stephen Harper but added that she also has a picture of herself with Justin Trudeau. From “Poetry and Politics” – “Imagine, politicians debate, wearing turtlenecks in coffee houses … Emotional repetition every four years … Every time another politician stands another poem constructs the truth.”

            From “Looping for Art’s Sake” – “I delve into that place … nebulous and cultural … Imagining myself an artist, I spiral my pen … Looping can be very beautiful … Never fracturing the naivety … Stylish looping is an acquired skill … I want to be in the loop.”

            Bunny’s last poem was called “Air Show” – “Mid afternoon / mid January /mid sky … Joyfully coast back and forth in formation over the intersection of Finch and Yonge … Entertaining a crowd of cars.”

            Bunny Iskov’s work is conventionally suburban and middle-class. Although there are moments, as with most poets, when Bunny Iskov’s poetry rises above mundane forms and subject matter, it never breaks new air in the poetic sky.

            At this point Bänoo called a fifteen-minute break.

            Cad told me that he was writing a story about a Jewish Elvis impersonator who is also a rapist. Tom came over to chat again and asked what was happening. I repeated that Cad said he was writing a story about a rapist who imitates Jewish Elvises.

            Cad stated, as he so often has, that Elvis was Jewish. Tom said that he’d thought that Elvis was part Cherokee. I offered that Elvis had a tendency to claim he was a little bit of everything just to cover all the bases. Cad informed us that Elvis’s mother was Jewish while his father was a Nazi. 

Elvis’s great great grandmother on his mother’s side was Jewish, so by Halacha law he was technically Jewish because Judaism is matrilineal. That would mean that he would have probably been able to claim a right of return to Israel but would have still had to go through an orientation process just like any goy that decided they wanted to convert to Judaism. Genetically though, Elvis would have been only 1/16^th Jewish. But then again, maybe even less, since most Ashkenazi Jews are only about 70% Middle Eastern in their DNA.

Tom told me that he couldn’t hear my entire poem because I wasn’t loud enough. He advised me to use the mic next time. I was disappointed to hear that I didn’t get through to everyone, but I think I can be louder than I was without the help of the microphone. I was surprised by Tom’s view that the acoustics are not as good in the church as they were at previous location, which was an art gallery. My perception is that it’s much easier to hear performers now when they don’t use the microphone. Tom insisted that the sound is swallowed up by the high ceiling of the church but my impression has always been that churches like St Stephens were designed to enhance sound.

Sheila, who had earlier asked Tom, Cad and myself if we were in a band together, came up during the break and said she wanted to take a picture and for everybody to scoot down a couple of seats beside Sydney. When I got up to move she said, “Not you! I already took your picture when you were on stage.” After she took a shot of Sydney, Tom and Cad together she showed me the picture she’d taken of me.

After the break, Bänoo announced that the next Shab-e She’r would be on July 25^th.

As usual, before the second feature, Bänoo threw a sacrificial open stage poet so that the feature wouldn’t suffer from the audience’s unsharpened post break attention span. The victim Bänoo chose was Lida Nosrati. From Leodona’s first poem – “Narrative answer to question 2-A … I appear to be 24 … and 1372 … I have no distinguishing features … Does that count as a tattoo … I cannot remain silent as a mainstream economist … I have not sought assistance from my country’s authorities … For all these reasons I seek your country’s protection.”

From her second piece – “I have sometimes been described … I was told my telephone calls were becoming obsessive … I suffer retinal detachment … I walked slowly and deliberately … I was unable to draw the hands of time … and stared at the paper.”

Our second feature was Takatsu, who began by taking a surprising and tedious amount of time up with acknowledgments and a long explanation as to what his poetry is about.

From his first poem – “Strangers who you are hear the same name when our lips sag together … A café where there is no café … In Yokohama we crumpled those cans, threw them over the harbour and made a wish …”

From “Anoshima Island” – “We rang the chimes, rang the locks until we fell prostrate … Snaring cigarettes and memories … Red bridge, bring us good fortune … It touched our feet with ancient prayers.”

Takatsu informed us that he had dabbled at being a musician but was not very good. He recorded an album years before and on this night he had copies of his CD to give away but urged people that wanted to take one not to listen to it. From “What Happens to Music” – “The wall hung full of glossy albums … The guitar and the math book sounded tinny … Makeshift inkjet cover … She also has a copy … 350 people around the world held a piece of me … I wonder what happens to music when it’s no longer yours.”

From “Things We Love” – “We all keep CDs of made up things and fling them like Frisbees … Some of them are good … Especially the girls … But I don’t get to see her tonight … She divorces herself and dies to the world … Fill the pages of 40 songs … searching for a conquest.”

From a poem about anime called “On the Far Side of the Sea” – “No scientist can formulate equations from multiverses … now framed by the cameras of middle-aged men in glasses … Fetishized schoolgirls … A dash of paprika to heal.” Takatsu said anyone who got any of the references could have a free book. I assumed “fetishized schoolgirls” referred to the old series Sailor Moon but a little research shows fetishized schoolgirls are pretty much a staple of anime.

From “We Are All Cities” – “We speak in tongues … Watch the JR go dark … canals etched into the skin … I have watched the silence suffocate silence … I have opened my mouth and swallowed the … magnetic city … The Sargasso sea circulates these gates that rise dead to the exoteric, dead to the esoteric … Pandemic fires rage beyond … the middle of it disturbed.”

From “The Same Rise and Fall” – “The same beat … the same tides and empires smoked out with propaganda’s flesh … Stand on the hill and shout whoa, whoa, whoa … You do yourselves in … Black matter eats man … Darkness is your pride … War your beat …”

From his next poem – “Just down the street I grew familiar with a café with no name … I was taught to listen to the fat teacups … speaking to the frying pan … Minute variations … a quiet part hears.”

From his penultimate poem – “From Singapore we walked to Tokyo … We took a selfie from below … The pixels could not crystallize time …”

Takatsu’s final poem was entitled “A Few Words in Retrospect”  “Love is for the unannounced … the passion of high pitched youth … Not the loud voices … Love is for the high frequency thoughts … Love for the leaves of grass.”

Takatsu’s writing is very strong and he has an almost courtly approach to dancing with language.  He shows an eloquent grasp of the moments of his experience and presents them in such a way as to convince me that they came to him as poetry before he wrote them down.

We immediately returned to the open stage, with the first poet being Melissa.

Melissa read – “I failed metaphysics … Understood nothing … I stand outside … He approached the text to explain ‘therefore I am’ … The tree grew over the window … We should learn the lesson outside.”

I can identify with that one. I just barely passed “Knowledge and Reality” at U of T and found it to be more like math than the kind of philosophy I prefer.

Melissa’s second poem was called “Reincarnation” – “ … I was rampaging in circles …”

Matthew Johnston read a poem that he had written in Hawaiian and then translated back to English – “It is the grass beside the pond … They drop like whips and dangle … It is for these fallen plants to taunt the water … Wind makes contact … What a perfect way  … for circles run in every direction … The circles are made of ridges of risen water … We are too full of bone and arguments.”

Justin Lauzon reminded us that last month he had read the first half of a poem that was too long to fit into the three-minute time limit. This time he brought us the second half – “He stepped off … quick and formatted by slanted degrees … where in the myth of her blood he inseminated adjectives … awaken by melodic light through throat and long, coral tendons … I know all your words are stolen from the dictionary … When she spoke she might leak a dripping stream … Lake water on rock … Spend your teeth like letters … the minor hum of syllables … marking the moments that entered each other … She needed to finish him … Please don’t stop now, this is the warmest I’ve ever felt.”

Jeff Cottrill did a piece that he gave the title, “An Unabridged History of the 20^th Century, According to My Parents” – “Once upon a time everything was perfect … Every little girl wanted to grow up to make the perfect sandwich …People smoked nicotine a lot but doctors said it was okay … Everyone was good because everyone went to church … Everything was perfect … until February 19, 1964 … The Beatles … They did it by seducing everyone … The Beatles told the young people to grow their hair long … The little girls screamed in rapture … The Beatles told the young people that they didn’t have to go to church on Sunday … But it was all the sexual intercourse that brought about the collapse of the stork trade … They also told all the scary people to leave their neighbourhoods and the whole world became a miserable orgy … and none of them got the spankings they deserved … Then Kenny G released “Classics in the Key of G” and everything got better again.”

From Khashayar Mohammadi’s poem – “Summer sun and smouldering hatred nauseates … Working class rabble in Zen cloud furrows … liquid sugar … turn dust in squalid hands … Prophetic clouds … to drown us diverging ones.”

Sydney White read – “Like the retarded who laugh along with their tormenters we’re discounted with the trusted weapon of ridicule … Territories were taken from us … Returning from the front we look through a single eye … In gathered scars our minds are joined … We do not laugh … We must educate our brothers now.”

Nick Micelli shared “Emerald Eyed Tiger” – “The tiger … warrior for justice … the tiger … The teeming wild orchard, fenced and guarded by the trolls … evil, selfish trolls … muscles at the ready … the charge of wild creatures all savouring the feast … even the mountain antelope … Shimmering gold angel, formerly a troll …”

Cad Gold Jr. gave us – “The fallen angels saw the dangers lurking there below and intervened upon the scene … For all we know she boarded that bus without a care … She took everything he didn’t have and left him there to die … When your lover leaves, it will be me who finds you.”

Catherine Lu recited – “This is a test … Room 42 … You learn how to learn how to be taught … So test me … I am a tested product … Are testicles another test … Patent 246F … Emotional pain constricts … It’s barbed wire … on a scale of one to ten … I’m only human … Even the test makers can’t be perfect … one hundred billion neurons … I am tested goods … I am a certified human resource … I am finally ready … This is a test.”

Elana Wolff read “Walking Song” – “I hold my fingers to the rain … It would drench them anyway, even in my pocket … You with the thin, birch limb … You, the handle on the gate … When I get back I’ll shed my shoes and hang my coat to drip … Now a second rain is falling on the first.”

Valérie Kaelin read “Confirmance” – “Mama and her friend stare at me through a sepia window … These children in white shoes with the faces of grown women.”

Ted Nolan read “Afternoon of the Hottest July on Record” – “A tiny handful of wildflower seeds … Squirrel is in the corner of the tub … It sees me … It’s stock still … The tiny brain forgets me … It begins nibbling on a weed, forgetting that any day could be any different.

The final performer of the night was Tom Smarda. After choosing which of the two microphones he wanted to use he set it so it was about halfway between his voice and his guitar. He began by saying, “Happy one hundred and fifty, state of Canada. The state that impoverishes people with government owned and controlled …”

A man behind me mumbled, “Play the song!”

From Tom’s Bank of Canada song – “This country’s in debt … We just pay through the nose … It’s a small price to pay to dismantle Canada … Eventually they’ll even own our bumble bees … They’ve got a ministry they call Dismantle Canada … Our debt still rolls … Paul martin sold off Petro Canada … Your taxes built highway 407 but now you have to pay a private company to drive on it … The Skydome, Ted Rogers picked it up on a steal. Too bad you can’t take it with you … Use the Bank of Canada to Finance what we need … it’s a small price to pay to get out of getting screwed … Interest free infrastructure loans so that the $45 billion we pay to banks every year can be spent on something good. Like Canadians.”

Tom mentioned highway 407 being owned by a private firm. That’s not entirely true. 40% of it is owned by the Canada Pension Plan.

So that was the end until July 25^th.

Nick Micelli approached me to tell me that he thought my poem was good. I asked if he’d had any problem hearing me, and he assured me that I was very clear and he’d been standing off to the side by the door.

I said hello to Cy Strom but he was waiting to chat with someone and so after politely shaking my hand he turned away. Since no conversations sprouted up as I lingered, after about five minutes I just left. I think I felt a little down that Tom had said he couldn’t hear me and it made me feel that maybe others hadn’t either. Of course though it is possible that Tom has hearing problems.