Poetry Night

Yesterday I went to The Black Swan, a pub near Broadview and Danforth, to see CZP's own Helen Marshall read her poetry at Hot-Sauced Words. Her co-reader was naturalist David Day, author of Nevermore: A Book of Hours, in which he channels his feelings about various extinct animals into elegaic obituary poems--also amazing, so I picked up a copy. There was also an open mike in the beginning at which Sandra Kasturi read and another at the end, during which audience members were encouraged to read prompt poems they'd written during the show. This was mine, which ended up winning both Best Poem and Best Performance (though I'll point out that I actually tied with two different people, in both categories):

INVOCABULARY

At this very moment, what I'm avoiding most of all
is laying a curse on you.
I've thought about it, a lot, and really,
it's far too much trouble
for far too little reward. So I sit here
smiling pleasantly,
avoiding carving your name with my fingernail
into a sheet of soft lead, then melting it
over a fire. On no account
will I drip wax into water and see
which of the resultant
lumps looks most like your face, then
drive pins into the places
where your eyes should be. Neither will I bury
your cat alive in a cemetery at midnight,
or weave your hair into a nest for birds
to fuck and shit in. None of that.
The worst part of my own forbearance is how you
frankly don't even seem to notice how much effort
it takes for me to avoid making
my thoughts real, killing you long-distance,
sending black words down into your blood to bloom
like microbes. Nevertheless, I refuse
to spit into your food, to lick your spoons,
to show my vagina in your shaving mirror, in hopes
that its reflection will strike you blind. To take
photos of you while you sleep, then burn them.
You can't make me, no matter what you do,
or don't.

The title comes from the fact that I later told Sandra: "It's sort of creepy how easily I thought of those potential curses. It's like it's just some sort of alphabet I'm really, really familiar with." To which Helen, standing nearby, replied: "Well, it's kind of the vocabulary of your work, right?" Right.

Also, my success seems more a testament to the shocking power of saying the word "vagina" out loud in a room full of mildly drunk people, really. But hell, I'll take it.;)