Burning Ghost

            On Tuesday I spent a lot of time typing out my lecture notes from Monday’s Romantic Literature class. In the afternoon I found some time to practice my song “Lonely Mass Murderer’s Blues” four times in preparation for the my slot in the Shab-e She’r open stage that would be happening later on that night.

            Since the plastic casing for my bike’s front flasher had been partially shattered in my dooring accident last week it could no longer be secured to its complimentary bracket that’s attached to my handlebars. So in order to have a functional flasher for my ride through the snowfall and the dark to Bloor and Brunswick, I had to fix it in place with several orbits of electrical tape.

            On my way I was twice shy while passing parked cars with their lights on because I didn’t want to get doored again and so I whistled sometimes when I passed to get the driver’s attention. On the Bloor bike lane I was startled when someone opened a passenger side door on my left, even though I was probably out of range of its swing.

            After locking my bike near Bloor I walked south the half block to the Tranzac and as I approached the door Bänoo was just coming out for her cigarette. I gave her the hug that we couldn't exchange last month because I'd had a cold.

            When I walked in, Giovanna was sitting at the reception table with Marta Ziemele and Emilie Ballay while Terese Pierre was standing nearby. Giovanna said to me, “$5.00 or all your worldly goods!” I said that I’d only be putting $4.45 in the box this time but that it would be the same as me putting in $65.00 because I’d turned down work to come there that night. She responded that she wouldn’t put a value on me and I was welcome for more or less.

            I realized as I walked to my usual front row seat near the stage that I’d forgotten to bring my folding guitar stand. The last two times that I’d brought my guitar to Shab-e She’r since last April I’d remembered the stand and it had given me a lot more freedom. This time I would have to go back to leaning my axe on my knee during the readings like I used to.

            I tuned my guitar and the musical feature, Dr. Swarn Lata came to ask if I was playing that night. I told her I’d just be performing on the open stage and she nodded and walked away. I assume the conversation would have been longer if I’d said I was also a feature.

            Cy Strom came and sat across the aisle and one row back. He asked how I was and I told him that school was going well but that I’d recently had a bike accident and I’d also been penalized by Facebook for posting a nude photo. Our longest discussion was about Facebook’s “community standards”. Cy thinks that Mark Zuckerberg is running scared. I think that Mark Zuckerberg has enough money to afford therapy to address his fear of women’s bodies. I told Cy that I also got kicked off Facebook for a couple of days once for posting a photo of Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salomé and Paul Rée standing together topless while Rée was pinching Salomé’s nipple. I’ve recently discovered that the complete picture includes their genitalia, with Salomé holding Rée’s penis and Nietzsche wielding an impressive erection. I would have posted the fully nude picture if I’d had it and I will now that I do.

            The most recent occurrence that got me kicked off Facebook for five days was a beautiful black and white photograph of Diane Webber, a nudist supermodel and belly dancer of the 50s and 60s. In the picture she is fully nude and being lifted above the water in the middle of a swimming pool by a man with one hand on her arched back. She is facing the sky with one leg extended downward to the lower left, the other bent upward, one arm stretches to the upper right and the other to the lower right. If Zuckerberg had only been raised in Europe he might not have grown up to be such a prude.

            The event started at quarter after with Terese reading the indigenous land acknowledgement.

            Bänoo welcomed us to the sixth anniversary of Shab-e She’r, which started on November 27, 2012. She assured us that this event would be talked about for the next 200 years because she’d been interviewed about it at least fourteen times.

            Bänoo reminded us that everyone can say whatever they want and that the answer to a poem is another poem. We need to write to the world.

            The first open stage performer was Catherine M. Thompson, because Catherine had come to the very first Shab-e She’r at the Queen Gallery at Parliament and Queen.

            Catherine told us that when she was 12 her father took her to a family reunion and since then she has been fascinated with genealogy.

            From “Chronological Genealogy” – “I’m Ojibway … through grandmere and grandpere … I’m of the Acadie … I’m Germanic … I’m United Empire Loyalist … My forefather … a Prussian mercenary … I am Métis … Franco Ontarian … Colonized and colonizer … I am Canadian.”

Norman Allen read “Twilight” – “The night wind breathes … balancing the seed from which the future grows …”

From another poem – “I realized in my room, surrounded by Buddha and Hindu gods that there is no Jesus …”

            Jess Goldson read two poems. From “Explorers” – “I want to be an anti-colonial explorer of your body / I will leave as much good in you as when I found you … I will not eliminate your language and replace it with my own / We will create our own language … I will not squash your faith until your last remaining belief is in your own worthlessness … I will adorn you with comfort … I will not strip you … I will not hold you until you can no longer distinguish between a lover and a captor.”

            From “Later” – “See you later I say as I leave you for the last time … when I return our pool will be dry … You are gone … I see telephone lines … reach through the countryside searching for you … I see the curve of an arch and I remember how our bodies fit …”

            Paul Edward Costa read three poems. From “The Gaslamp in the Demon’s Right Hand” – “The demon travelled with a monk at his side … weeping and wailing about the Devil’s fall from grace … They hold him under salt water.”

            From his second poem – “The violence of the beast didn’t break me as completely as the lack of recognition on his face …”

            From his last poem – “I find that the best for living in the moment is to hide your hand beneath your clothing as if you have an itch … They’ll have no idea how close they stand to the truth.”

            The first feature was Gavin Barrett. Terese read his bio, which had some funny parts, such as, “His work has … helped elect prime ministers … drawn angry crowds in Lagos … cease and desist correspondence from the lawyers of Dolly the cloned sheep and criticism from a fictional character in a John Irving novel …”

            Gavin’s first poem was “The Deccan” – “Wise man who first said hell was hot must have come from … this place of the dead … Here the air is only rarely touched with life / When it stirs we shiver … Cold sweat … caressing those intimate inner planes of skin … Everywhere ash and stone … Above, a kite hawk circles on this still afternoon … We have not been long enough in hell.”

            Gavin said he is involved with a series called the “Tartan Turban Secret readings”. “Tartan” for his co-founder Mike Welsh and “Turban” for Gavin although he has never worn one.

            Gavin told us that his mother was a troublemaker in the Catholic Church.

            From “The Kiss” – “My father kissed my mother’s face where he stood inside her tomb … My brothers sang love and peace … The grave’s walls were six feet deep … Women raised her high and now nothing is the same.”

            From “Million’s Girl” – “Million’s girl … Money, her husband … A ride in the Maid of the Mist … An immigrant to wisdom’s shell … The camera whirs … To the lens it’s a smile from orphan’s hearts … The dream of money … Money turns in his sleep … mired in the unzipped codes … cable trucks outside splitting the signal … In the cellar the wines sighed … When Million’s girl married Money they loved the counterpoint … Million frowned not yet money … Lust too put in an appearance … The music slants … ends in a cage … in her house … A brown skinned girl who bends and sways … Money moves forward … makes things happen … Money buys a continent … His expertise in the face of their ignorance … He assaults his female clients … Money delivers a fat joint … Money’s well-read … Who moved my trees? Money takes on Enron … Money smiles … Money bares his teeth … shook the shaggy dog of his shinbone … On the day that Million’s girl slit her wrists Money went for a swim … Money ran indoors … It was the first time that Money had seen her bleed … observing dully that this was blue blood … Money said fuck three times … blood dripping to the marble floor.”

            Gavin told us that he grew up in India and came to Canada when he was thirty.

            He told the story of a woman named Mary who had worked for his family. She was in an abusive relationship with her husband and one day she doused herself in kerosene and challenged him to set her on fire if he hated her so much. He did.

            Gavin’s last poem was “Seeing Mary” – “Mary burned … flame springing from her forehead … He’d set a match to her … caught her nylon sari … Mary ran across the field … A boy with a blanket smothered Mary’s burning head … Violent light … Cinders fell and died and then Mary too.”

            Gavin Barrett uses a creative grasp of imagery drawn from experience and a sense of humour and irony to give us the view from under the table where oppression takes its meals. 

            Normally after the first feature there is a break, but this time we went directly to the second feature. I assume that this was because there was also going to be a musical feature that needed time to set up, and so it would make sense to have the break before she went on.

            The second feature was Erin Kang, who told us that she is usually full of vivacity but she had just had surgery and so her energy was lower than normal.

            She let us know that she would do some of her reading in Korean.

            She began with an untitled poem – “The voices of hundreds of women have spoken secrets of the universe to me … reminding me that distance means nothing … leaving their secrets buried like clay … I still yearn to understand the shame … insemination of our bodies … into soft layers of jewel-toned silk … shaking off generations of sea salt.”

            From “Family Dinner” – “Sure fingers guide blades … We sit cross legged … I clutch fistfuls of treasures … The house is distinctly Korean … Relatives who I called Chocolate Auntie and Chocolate Uncle … The magical gateway … The juice of persimmons … ”

            From “House” – “It is the house you always dreamed of … It has three floors and even a second basement … couch and TV, which is all you need when you are twelve … You paint you room lilac … You refuse to watch as he starts to see shadows … The pool stays empty … You pass time at the Wendy’s.”

            From “Is it Possible to Love a Ghost?” – “Two big patches of dusty gravel … crunchy little ghosts of thousands of shoes … in pursuit of the swings … I didn’t realize there was a different smell … until we went back … It is strange that … it fills me up. For most of my childhood it … drained me … Is it possible to love a place only for its memories? … moments when my heart aches for things that hurt me in the past … The way he cooked for us … Is it possible to love a ghost? To cling to water? … the spot our old restaurant burned down on the main street … It wasn’t an Asian restaurant … But we did attempt an air of exoticism by featuring a chicken teriyaki dish … amongst the bruschetta … I wondered where the echoes of us had wandered to … I am certain I left a piece of my lungs in the place where I first began to watch dad’s slow descent … where he covered his face with a shirt so we could not look into his eyes as the police led him away … Is it a betrayal to return to a place that helped spawn the monster of self-hatred? To long for a place … that rejects me still … via looks of mild surprise when they learn that I … grew up there? When Princess Diana passed my mom cried … She loaded our little arms with roses and we walked the two blocks to throw them in the lake. I never understood her romantic attachment to colonial royalty until I understood my own … Why do you return? Scenes of us throwing rocks into the water and building huge snow forts collide with scenes of broken glass and skin … The smell of roasting chestnuts mingle with the scent of old alcohol breath … There is an old tree on my school grounds … my sanctuary from the other kids … where my love for Harry Potter and ketchup chips blossomed … How many other trees have sprouted because of tears? Would I find a ghost of myself if I unearthed the roots? Would I be able to hold myself in my dirt covered hands … whisper songs of strength for future ghosts … A heritage town that would bring busloads of tourists whose faces look like mine … What heritage and for who?”

            From an untitled poem – “Yours is the breath I wonder most about … I breath air you have never feasted on … You make me want to beat my heart … Yours is the heart I wonder most about …”

            From “Woman” – “To judge ourselves by the feelings of incomplete men … purple hearts of valour blooming on our bodies … a laugh to pass down to future daughters.”

            Erin’s final poem was “Night Talks” – “The light grazes your eyes … I am baldly before you … You gather up my smithereens in your hands …”

            Erin Kang has some very good easy flowing natural writing about what she knows, which is always the best way because it’s not dragged down by contrivance. The piece “Is it Possible to Love a Ghost” is particularly strong though a little long. She could chop away a lot of it without losing anything and in fact gaining impact. She claims it’s not a poem but it would be more powerful if it were.

            We took a break and after using the washroom I went over to talk with Tom Smarda. I asked him where he’d been since I hadn’t seen him since the Shab-e She’r at the end of June. I know he leaves town to go to up north for a couple of months every summer but I’d been looking for him since Shab-e She’r moved to the Tranzac in September. He said he’s got other things he does on Tuesdays and expressed some frustration with what he referred to as artsy fartsy venues where one sits around all night just to do one song. He complained that he’s been coming to Shab-e She’r for four years and has never been invited to feature. What can I say? I think it would be great to hear Tom perform in the showcase part of the evening. He’s got some terrific songs that the audience seems to like as well and he’d put on a good show.

            Tom started playing a song that speculated about Jesus coming back. He asked if Jesus would really go around telling people he was the one and only son of god and demanding that they worship him. He sang it in kind of an ironic voice that made the woman seated just ahead of him turn around and smile at me in amusement. Then the song asked if Jesus wouldn’t more likely try to be a voice for change rather than an object of worship.

            I joked to Tom that he should ask the musical feature if she wanted harmonica accompaniment for her sitar.

            It was time for our musical feature, the sitar player Dr Swarn Lata. She sat cross-legged on the stage with her sitar and with a row of small candles burning in front of her.

            Swarn told us that she’d been in another world listening to all of the other performances of the evening. She added that Gavin had given an exact picture of India of women going through violence when he told the story of the woman whose husband had set her aflame. “Women's voices have to be heard!"

            Swarn gave us a little tutorial about the sitar before she began playing. She said it has seven upper strings, eleven bottom strings and nineteen to twenty-one frets. She said she was going to begin with an evening raga and that there are also morning and afternoon ragas. She said the first piece has only five notes but there is so much power in those notes. She told us that she had invited her tabla player to perform with her but he wouldn’t come unless he was going to get paid.

            She played very slowly at first and the first piece sounded almost like "Amazing Grace" being played with bottleneck slide guitar.

            Her second piece also had that same kind of slow Mississippi country blues feel to it, only with a lot more notes.

            It was uncanny how bluesy this sitar music sounded.

            She told us that there are ten thaats from which ragas are created.

            She kept on playing and playing with brief comments about each piece. I didn’t time her but it felt like she went way over her allotted time. Finally she asked Bänoo how much time she had left and Bänoo politely told her she could do one more.

            Her last piece was called “Vaishnav Jan To Tene Kahiye” and she sang a bit of it. She said that it was Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite song. My translation of the first two lines, of which the title is the first, is, “If you would worship the deity / You must know the pain of humanity”.

            At the end she was struggling to get to her feet and she said, “I am old now, going to be 72, so I have problems!”

            It took a few minutes to move Swarn’s things to the back of the stage so we could continue with the open mic.

            The first performer was Fira – “I did not love you the first time … not as you laid on my floor spilling trauma … My eyes closed … I let my body open … I began to love you … I burned … years up in smoke … suddenly the fire was ours …”

            Sidney White read two poems. The first was a request from someone who thought it would fit well with the other readings of that evening.

            From “No More Nice Girl” – “Men in white lace and red slippers who divide us into hookers and virgins … How dare you preach to me … How dare you raise your brow  … How dare you condescend … Men who make bombs … Fuck you shima!”

            From “Constant Reminder” – “The story of Christ is not about a god, it’s about humanity … Only his mother watched him die … If he came back he would be crucified again.”

            I was next. When I stepped up to the stage with my guitar, I guess because I was wearing black, Giovanna called out, “You look like Johnny Cash up there!”

            I sang my song “Lonely Mass Murderer’s Blues”, the chorus of which goes – “ … I guess it’s god’s little joke to leave a killer all alone / cause I’m stuck here with all of my memories in a world full of bones / Gotta find another hobby, stop my moping around / cause I’m the loneliest mass murderer in town …” It got a very good reaction from the audience and when Bänoo came to the mic she said, “That was good!” She’s told me personally over time that she’s liked a handful of things I’ve written but this was the first time she’d ever said it to a crowd.

            Nadereh read – “Lest we forget those who died … young and old … marched into their graves … died alone … in masses … far away … Lest we forget … forgetting sadly … We will.”

            Marta  Ziemele read an untitled poem which she said was written as a reaction to recent events in the news – “In a world where mistrust and fear of anyone different … In a world that insists on your silence … sing loud and discordantly … be a bullhorn … In a world that splits people apart … In a world that prizes discord … In a world that shouts emotion has no purpose … use compassion … If the voices in your head are screaming … find a tiny bright spot and stare until your eyes burn away.”

            Doe read a poem that she’d written ten minutes before she’d come to the stage – “I didn’t realize my gender was in the closet until it fell out … I thought we were comfortable in these outfits and I guess we were sometimes … It’s hard to find your gender when it looks like dresses … sensible shoes … tiny high heeled steps … My gender is here.” She added, “I’m not sure about the end!”

            Chai commented that there had been a lot of “serious poems tonight! I thought that I would go home and cry! So I thought I would smile you!”

            From his poem – “My mother told me, when in doubt, smile … I got into that habit … Driver’s licence … No smiles! Smiling while driving as bad as texting … Passport … No smiles! Why can we not smile like Justin in selfies? Many people thin he’s the only Canadian that can smile … Next time you get a selfie with Justin, say ‘No smiles Justin!’ … Bush and Blair are still walking free and we cannot smile on our passports?”

            Gloria told us that this was her first time reading at an open mic.

            From her poem – “I resent my father and my brother for being able to express their desire for women they thought were beautiful … I resent my non-rebellious self … It’s okay to be in my skin and say my words.”

            Dan Jiang read two poems.

            From “Drunken” – “Drunken with energy … I raise my cup to the empty sky … only to find it overflowing.”

            From “Ravine” – “”Lying in the hot sun … insects massage me where I want not … I know not how deep the valley … Hundreds of insects … a few butterflies dance … mystery of the depth.”

            Leah read “Bargaining with the Psychiatrist” – “ … I really think I’m fine now … I think I’m okay … weight loss, weight gain … I think I’ll do this on my own … rashes, fever, flu like symptoms … I’m fine … I’ll see the therapist twice a week … I wanna be okay … increased thoughts of suicide … risk of suicide.”

            Sargon Yousefian told us that he was going to read in Italian though he’d never read in Italian before. He asked if this would be the first time at Shab-e She’r that anyone had read in Italian and Bänoo confirmed that it was. Maybe it was the first time for someone to have read an entire poem in Italian, but on May 29 of this year, Gianna Patriarcha read a poem that had one line in Italian.

            Sargon translated his Italian poem – “Senseless … I wrote a poem … I discovered.”

            Sargon’s second poem was “Maybe Not That Much” – “He pulled my hair during sex and I could only think of how I’m scared of balding.”

            Iman Ahmed told us that her poem was inspired by her experience of working in Somalia in the field of humanitarian aid. Somalia, she said, is divided into three countries.

            From “Mogadishu” – “In Isli Market walking behind a man I didn’t know … I insisted on cotton and neutral colours … I melted … drowned the addictive soup … long dresses had to be cut short … slept for two hours … smelled the ocean.”

            Georgia Wilder read about her father’s swamp on the Ottawa River – “ … prehistoric snapping turtles … As a kid I found a dead ling … scales glistened … chanted a burial rite … talisman ling.” Georgia told us that the lings suffered a planned extinction by one game warden. But lings are not extinct or even endangered, so I guess she meant in that particular swamp they were wiped out.

            The final performer of the night was Tom Smarda. From his song – “Just as the forest supports many different varieties of trees so the human race supports many varieties of peoples … Different people have many different dispositions and callings … We carry everything on our backs … We are all visionaries and planners who can see pitfalls before they occur … It takes time to communicate and bring our visions together as one into harmony …” Tom did a wild, chaotic guitar solo and then repeated the chorus.

            The next Shab-e She’r will be on December 18.

            Terese Pierre approached me and told me that my performance was great.

            On my way out, Tom told me not to be lonely with all those bones. I told him the song wasn’t about me because I’m too anti-social to kill people.

            As I was unlocking my bike, a woman who’d been in the audience without reading stopped to ask me if I’d been writing down people’s words during the event. She was the one who’d turned and smiled when Tom was singing the funny song about Jesus during the break. I told her that I write about everything I do. It’s interesting that last month, in almost the very same spot, another woman who’d been in the audience stopped to talk to me as well.

            This event had gone later than usual. It was almost 22:30 when I got home. Fortunately I’d already cooked a potato and a carrot before leaving home and so I just had to heat up a piece of chicken and some gravy for a late dinner.

            I watched an episode of Peter Gunn. This story begins with a woman named June, who wears thick glasses arriving at the apartment of a man named Michael. He immediately begins to try to kiss her and takes off her glasses. She backs away and pulls a gun. Suddenly there is a noise in another room. Michael opens a door and is shot and killed by an unseen killer. June grabs her glasses and runs away. It turns out that June is a friend of Peter Gunn’s girlfriend Edie. Edie asks Gunn to help June. June tells him that since she saw Michael murdered someone has been trying to kill her. She says she had gone to kill Michael because he’d driven her sister to suicide. Gunn needs to know who might have been motivated to kill Michael. She can only think of a trumpet player named Tiny. Gunn goes to where Tiny is performing. He’s called “Tiny” because he’s a giant. Tiny says he never met Michael but he would have broken his neck if he had. Gunn goes to see a ballet instructor named Stashek who is sitting and stuffing his face while putting his one student through her moves and telling her that she is not hungry. His 29-year-old student is really not young enough to be a student of ballet. He is very glad to see Gunn. Gunn asks him if Michael had any friends and Stashek says that his one acquaintance was an alcoholic journalist named Rector. He tells him the name of the bar where he drinks. When Gunn leaves, the student says, “I’m hungry!” and Stashek says, “Not while I’m eating!” Gunn goes to see Rector, who suggests that one of the many girls in Michael’s little black book might have killed him. Gunn goes to look for the book but in Michael’s apartment someone opens the same door as before and tries to shoot him. Gunn shoots back and the assailant escapes. Gunn goes to June and asks her to help trap the killer. They go to Rector’s office and June pretends to recognize Rector as the killer. He admits it and says he did it because Michael took his wife away from him. They have a shootout but deliberately shoot wild and talk at the same time. Finally Rector just gives up.

            June was played by Irish actor Fentan Meyler. She won the Miss Ireland beauty contest in Dublin in 1950 and the prize was two weeks in New York. She refused to go home and moved to California and worked almost entirely in television. After the birth of her daughters she lost interest in acting.

            The hungry ballet student was played by Tamar Cooper.