Winter Camouflage

            On Monday morning during song practice I saw a white pickup truck drive by, covered in snow. It looked like a camouflaged ghost.

I got an email from the model coordinator at OCADU offering me two short notice jobs for Tuesday afternoon and Tuesday night, so I took them. That meant I had to take a shower on Monday though. The sacrifices I’ve made for that school!

            A week or so ago I received a letter from Ontario Housing asking me to call them to discuss my application. I applied for Ontario Housing when my daughter first moved in with me, which will be twenty years ago this fall. I was looking for a two-bedroom apartment back then. We went to see one or two but they were either too expensive or in complexes where dealers were hanging around. I don’t really want to move out of my place, but I want to keep the option open just in case I suddenly have to leave this apartment. I called them and was on hold for half an hour before I finally spoke with someone. He told me that several landlords have called me since October. I hardly ever have my phone turned up these days but I didn’t tell him that. I just said I would answer if they call as long as I’m not at work or in class. He reactivated my application.

            Early that afternoon, I was two-thirds of the way through a siesta when I got a call from Ontario Housing offering me a one-bedroom apartment at 245 Dunn Avenue. She asked if I wanted her to book me an appointment. I said, “Just a minute” and I looked it up online because it sounded familiar. That’s the place that all the fire trucks race to and also the place that an exterminator pointed to when I asked him, “What’s the worst place for cockroaches in Parkdale?” I flat out told the Ontario Housing worker that 245 Dunn is a horrible place and not to bother booking me an appointment there.

            I finally finished writing my review of  Shab-e She’r.

Cheese Ass

Very early on Sunday morning I heard my across the hall neighbour

Nickie coming in. She might have been drunk. I don’t think there was anyone else there but she was shouting as if she was calling somebody out and repeated the phrase, “Cheese asshole!” several times. I can’t find the expression anywhere, but maybe it’s a reference to sodomy. A “cheese ass” is apparently a bad driver though.

I spent most of Sunday writing my review of Shab-e She’r.

            Raja came for the rent around midday.

            I watched a couple of episodes of The Big Bang Theory. In the first one Bernadette and Howard found out their yet to be born baby will be a boy and they were both disappointed. Bernadette had grown up with six brothers and she’d always missed having a sister, so she thought it would have been nice for Halley to have one. Howard was frightened of having a son because he wasn’t sure if he was man enough to guide a boy to manhood.

            In the second episode Amy and Howard began collaborating but Bernadette was not in the least jealous. Sheldon and Raj were both bothered though by how well the two were getting along. Sheldon went to complain to Bernadette and told her he’d like to find a way to make Howard mad. She lied to Sheldon that what really pisses Howard off is when someone else does his household chores and so she got Sheldon to do a lot of housework. He was about to clean the oven when Raj arrived and spilled the beans that Howard hates doing chores. Sheldon was angry that he’d been tricked and he wanted to storm away but he loves cleaning ovens and so he did that first.

Monsters Are Poorly Educated

            Now that I’ve switched to the Fender clip-on tuner it’s easier to get my guitar in tune, though it still goes out of tune just as much.

I didn’t go to the food bank on Saturday morning, mainly because I was behind on my writing and going there and then writing about it would have put me even further back. Also, I was glad not to go because of how cold it was outside, but I guess that wouldn’t have stopped me if the writing side of things had been all caught up.

            In the evening I went out and bought a couple of cans of Creemore. A can of Creemore costs $3.10. When I bought some last week the cashier commented, “That’s expensive beer!” Then she explained that she was used to people buying cheap beer all day long.

            A couple of hours later I went upstairs to knock on David’s door. When he answered I asked if I could take some pictures of his doorframe that I’d broken when I forced his door after he’d forgotten his key. I wanted to send them to Nick Cushing to find out if he thinks he’ll be able to fix it and if so, so he can tell from the photos what tools he’d need for the job.

            David gave me a bag of food. He said that he’d bought it for his sister but she couldn’t come. The bag had a package of strawberries and a Styrofoam container with rice and a couple of spicy chicken drumsticks. Maybe it’s jerk chicken. I had some of the rice with my hamburger for dinner and it was very hot.

            I watched a couple of episodes of the Big Bang Theory. In one, Leonard was interviewed on the radio and he made the mistake of being honest about physics. He said there have been no major discoveries in a long time and it may be a dead end, so he didn’t understand why it gets millions of dollars in grants. The dean of the university told him he had to write a retraction and he went to ask Sheldon for help, but Sheldon, in looking over the state of physics to disprove Leonard, realized that Leonard was right. This made them both very depressed and they got drunk on Comic Con Romulan wine, which is vodka with blue food dye. Howard and Raj joined them because Howard was depressed about being a father of two and Raj was depressed about having no girlfriend. Penny joined them because there was booze.

            In the second one Sheldon was talking in his sleep, taking on a personality that was super laid back and the opposite of who he is. When Sheldon found out he hoped that he wasn’t becoming Mr. Hyde, mostly because Mr. Hyde doesn’t have a post-graduate degree like Dr. Jeckyl.

Newman's Own

            On Friday morning during song practice I got frustrated with my clip-on tuner. It’s usually the B and high E strings that go out of tune, but when I was hitting the B, sometimes it would register as E until I’d hit the string several times and then finally show the correct string. I switched the battery from the AT4 tuner that I was using to the Fender, and suddenly the problem went away. Maybe there’s something wrong with the circuitry of the other one.

            It occurred to me later that morning that I had forgotten to get my rent money out of the bank and it had also slipped my mind to pay for my phone service. When I’m late for my pre-paid plan in a short month like February I always feel like I’ve ripped myself off, so around midday I rode over to Freedom Mobile to pay for my February service. After that I went east on Queen to the Bank of Montreal between Bathurst and Spadina to get my rent money and some extra for shopping. On the way home I stopped at Freshco. I got blackberries, grapes, oranges, bananas, ground beef, tostados, sour cream, extra old cheddar, yogourt and some Newman’s Own roasted garlic dressing. It says on the Paul Newman products “all profits go to charity”. I assume though that by profits they mean after everyone that runs the company is paid, including the highest paid executives. The CEO of Newman’s own makes $300,000 a year and puts in a 30-hour workweek.

            I watched the tenth season finale of The Big Bang Theory in which, while Amy is across the country at Princeton, a young, tall, attractive, blonde scientist puts the moves on Sheldon, though he doesn’t know it until she kisses him. He says, “Excuse me a moment” immediately leaves, takes a taxi to the airport, flies to New Jersey, takes a cab to Princeton, knocks on Amy’s door and when she opens it he is on one knee holding up a ring in a case and asking her to marry him.

            I watched the 11^th season premier and it shows Amy accepting Sheldon’s proposal. We also see that Bernadette has just discovered that she is pregnant again. Howard freaks out and so does she. They try to pressure Penny and Leonard into having a baby too so they won’t be all alone.

My Dinner with Jubal Brown

            The wi-fi from the donut shop downstairs was off on Thursday from around noon until I went out that night and so I managed to get a fair amount of work done on my review of Shab-e She’r.

            On January 22, I got a message on Facebook from Jubal Brown, inviting me out to dinner on February 1. I’ve known Jubal for 25 years and he was still in high school when we first met at a Christmas party in the Sanctuary Church at Yonge and Charles. Jubal’s father, Les Brown was the drummer for a Christian band called Red Rain that hosted a dinner and open stage for the disadvantaged four times a year. I went because there was an open stage there for me to perform on and I also wanted to promote my own weekly open stage for writers called The Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy. Red Rain would perform first, doing mostly cover tunes, and then they’d stay on stage as back up for anyone that wanted to do something on the open stage. They were actually pretty good at improvising. Case in point, when I took the stage to perform my song, “Instructions for Electroshock Therapy”. In those days I didn’t know how to play any of my songs on guitar and so with me singing acapella on a very unconventional song, it was pretty impressive that they could follow along, albeit in a conventional way. Afterwards, Jubal approached me and told me that he’d liked my song and I invited him to come down to the Orgasmic Alphabet Orgy.

            Jubal did come to the Orgy, at least a couple of times, and since my policy was that anyone that performs twice at the Orgy could become a featured reader, he got a showcase. I recall though that on that occasion he didn’t bring any of his own poetry but rather read from a child’s scribbler that he’d found on the street.

            At one point a few years later, when I needed a drummer for my band, Jubal played at least one gig with Christian and the Lions. It didn’t work out though because Jubal didn’t feel compatible with my music, plus he wasn’t a very good drummer.

            Then Jubal started going to The Ontario College of Art and Design, where he was studying video, so I used to run into him quite a bit and it was around this time that he started becoming infamous for radical art performances and events. He also got into trouble with the school administration over controversial things that he said and did. He tried to explain himself but a lot of people didn’t get it.

            One day we met by chance on the street downtown while I was with my daughter, Astrid. I think she was about five or six at the time. He told me about an event that was happening later that day in which people would get together to destroy a car in an abandoned lot on Bathurst. My daughter was excited about it so we went home to get my hammer. It turned out though that Jubal hadn’t been able to get hold of a car and so they just staged the other half of the event, which was a book burning. What books? Any books. This was a Po Po event, and Po Po, Jubal explained was post-post Modernism. Jubal had gotten hundreds of books from Goodwill that would have been tossed into a dumpster anyway. The fifty or so people that had gathered for the event were given the opportunity to go through the books to salvage what they found interesting before the pile was set aflame. Astrid and I took a few but I don’t remember which ones, though I probably still have them. The idea was that creativity can only take place after destruction, which is something that I’d thought to be true for a long time. It was a fun and interesting event and probably one of the only times in history in which books were burned without malice.

            A couple of years later he had the run of a gallery belonging to OCADU and organized parties there. At one of them he’d gotten hold of a whole lot of mattresses. I arrived and saw a bunch of twenty-somethings sitting around on mattresses. It seemed boring to me so I started building things out of the mattresses. I made a maze tunnel that people could walk through, until some guy destroyed it. I also built a mountain for people to climb and then roll down. People seemed to like it but it wasn’t a crowd that seemed to want to be caught having fun.

            From the late 90s on I only ran into Jubal sporadically. I would see bits of his video work online from time to time but we didn’t hang out, so it was a surprise to me for him to invite me to dinner after all these years. I was looking forward to it though.

            We were scheduled to meet at The Federal at 1438 Dundas, which was not far away. I gave myself fifteen minutes to get there. It takes me about four minutes to get to Dundas and Brock but the numbers on Dundas are not parallel to Queen. If they were the restaurant would have been almost directly north of my place. At Brock, Dundas is already in the 1500s so I had to ride east. I went too far and doubled back but I was still there before 19:00 and just as I was locking my bike, Jubal arrived.

            The Federal was crowded and noisy. As soon as we walked in, there was a couple there that knew Jubal. When the guy with the beard shook Jubal’s hand he affectionately placed his face against Jubal’s arm.

            Jubal and I sat at a small table near the door and chatted about how long we’ve known each other. I ordered a pint of Steam Whistle and Jubal had a house made non-alcoholic root beer that was served in a jar.

            I learned that Jubal has been a vegetarian all his life because his Christian parents were vegetarians. When he was older they started eating meat again but Jubal continued with a lacto-vegetarian diet.

            He told me that his parents have broken up and that now his dad has gone extremely right wing Christian and he’s into medieval martial arts in armour. I looked at his father’s Facebook page and it looks like he’s into a kind of armour up for Jesus Knights Templar thing.

            Jubal opined that my interactions with Cad Gold Jr. on Facebook are hilarious. He asked if I meet with Cad at all these days and I answered that we usually see each other once a month at the Shab-e She’r reading series but he didn’t come last time, I speculated that it was because he was watching Donald Trump. Jubal asked incredulously, “He’s joking though, right?” I broke the news that Cad is indeed a diehard Trump fan but then again he also likes Mussolini and despite being a Jew, he thinks Hitler wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d only killed all the left wing Jews. Jubal couldn’t believe it.

            Jubal thinks that someone should shoot a documentary on the dynamic that exists between Cad and I.

I had a greasy piece of fried chicken, served on top of a honeyed waffle with an avocado and slaw salad and dip. It was kind of a bizarre combination flavourwise.

            I learned that Jubal is studying to be a social worker now at George Brown. He wants make use of what he’s learned from his own survival experiences to work with drug addicts. He recounted how he’d almost died as a result of abusing drugs and alcohol and actually spent a week in a coma. So now he wants to help free them from the rut that he fell into but managed to climb out of.  It sounds like a noble endeavour.

            We shared stories of traveling in Europe. I was trying to become a fashion model and he was featuring his work at film festivals. I went in 87 and he went in 97. I was alone but he had a girlfriend with him. We both ran out of money. I hitchhiked and he jumped trains. I slept in the park and in bus stations, Jubal and his girlfriend spent a night in Cologne in a church that had been bombed during WWII and never renovated. The next morning they were exploring the wreckage, walked through a door and found themselves standing in the renovated part of the church, behind the minister and with an entire congregation staring at them.

            Jubal is working on an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel in three parts. He declared that he would stop writing after it’s done because he only had three ideas left in him. I doubt that last part very much.

            When we shook hands on the sidewalk I asked Jubal if there was anything about our conversation that he didn’t want me to write about. He laughed.

Southern Grotesque

            On Wednesday I was so behind on my journal and had yet to post for Monday yet. I’ve been spending too much time on social media arguing with people for whom logic means nothing.

            That night I went to20th Century US Literature class. Scott arrived ten minutes past start time.

            We looked at Southern Grotesque literature. Of the authors that I‘d read I’d only really considered Flannery O’Connor’s themes to be grotesque. But Scott puts even Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Name Desire in that category as well, with the sickening death and everything driven by death. Blanche is worn out. There is something gendered about death. Eudora Welty’s freaks are mirrors of our monstrous selves.

            We started with the William Faulkner’s 1930 story, “A Rose for Emily. Scott had asked if anyone had read Faulkner. I had read The Sound and the Fury but had never thought of Faulkner as being grotesque. I guess though that “A Rose for Emily” proved me wrong.

            The whole town went to Miss Emily’s funeral. Was it really the whole town? The men and the women went for different reasons. Emily had been southern royalty because of slavery and had fallen from that station when slavery fell. But she remained as a monument to that time. The town had been built around people like Emily. She still mattered but nobody cared. She represented history without guilt. Noblesses oblige. She clings to her old influence even though she no longer has power. The populace is coming to terms with its past.

            The old servant is a combined cook and gardener, which is not a normal combination. He is only referred to as the Negro by the narrator on the day that he lets everyone into the house, and then he walks out the back and is never heard from again. He knows everything.

            Although Emily’s old servant is called a “Negro”, her lover from the north brought “niggers, mules and machinery” for the construction job.

            The old men in Confederate uniforms at Emily’s need to remember her falsely for the sake of their identity.

            The bedroom door is forced in a sexual metaphor.

            Emily, because her lover would not marry her, performed a sort of macabre wedding by poisoning him and then spending every night in bed with his corpse. Scott exclaimed, “This is some fucked up shit!”

            The ghost of slavery still haunts the town. The populace cannot admit the truth because it would expose them. The narrator says both “we” and “they”. Emily is described in masculine terms and as a corpse while alive.

            While Emily’s father was alive no man was good enough for her.

            She may have deliberately set up the ending after her death as a fuck you to the town.

            Modernist writers often play with time by showing how it passes differently in thought.

            Tableaus are strange poses in old photographs resulting from long exposures.

            We took our halftime break.

            Eudora Welty is both ha ha funny and funny peculiar. She has a concern with the mythic.

            “The Petrified Man”. A petrified man could be a mummy but in this case he’s a fake freak in a show. No one would publish the story at first so she kept editing it to make it funnier.

            There is a recording on Youtube of Welty reading one of her stories. She’s all about speed patterns.

            The beauty salon is a filthy place where the stylists smoke while they are working. It’s homo-social space that’s tacky like a whorehouse. The customers are being “gratified” and it sounds perversely sexual.

            A customer worries that she caught dandruff from having sex with her husband, as if it were an STD.

            The women talk about their husbands as if they control them, but they don’t.

            Four women were raped by the petrified man. The reward for him is $500, which means that each of the victims is worth $125 each.

            A wild haired lady is like Medusa. Medusa was transformed into a Gorgon as punishment for being raped. Myths are not necessarily a reflection of what’s going on.

            Women do funny and disturbing things to one another in this story.

            The women beat the little boy up because he is a future man. He already knows he has power.

            We looked at Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People”. There are disabled people in her work all the time because of her own condition.

            One can’t keep secrets from good country people. The good country people in the story are not good.

            O’Connor is interested in Descartes.

I mentioned that there is an expression that for a man, a woman as a wife is a

wooden leg. Scott was surprised, as he’d never heard that before. I suggested that the Bible salesman stealing the woman’s leg is a symbolic wedding.

            As I was getting ready to leave, Scott came up to talk with me about the idea that a wife is a wooden leg. He said it reminded him of Gloria Steinem’s famous quote that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

            The weird thing is that when I went home and did a search, I couldn’t find a single reference to a wife being a metaphorical wooden leg for a man. I know I’m not imagining it and that I heard it long before the internet.

Syntactic Architecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ … bonds splinter / moonlight / requiem for childhood”

“ … Aleppo / I kiss your rubble”

“ … farewell soul / spring blossoms.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Honey Novick joined David on stage.

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

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

            Honey left the stage.

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

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

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

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

            Bänoo called a break.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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