eugene stickland  

Here I am with my new haircut and Movember mustache -- I hardly recognize myself! -- standing in the Auburn Saloon which looks vaguely like a Mexican bordello, not that I've ever been to Mexico.

Wow, what an odd photo. Maybe it’s because there’s Salsa dancing at the Auburn Saloon on Thursday nights I feel this has a surreal Latino look to it. And it seems that I have a surreal and rather low rent Latino look to me. The machismo of the mustache, perhaps. I’ll be happy when November is over and I can shave it off and I can get back to my clean-shaved self!

On any account, it was the Poetry Slam at the Auburn Saloon this evening. After running the thing for six years, the venerable, the indefatiguable (if that’s a word, I thought it was?), the amazing and magnificent Sheri-D Wilson stepped down as the Slammer of Slammers (although she’s still surely the Momma of Dada) and has passed the torch to a consortium of poets who are going to keep the thing running, under the name of The Ink Spot Collective, comprised of poets Tyler Perry, Jen Kunlire, Erin Dingle and others.

Sadly, Sheri-D could not attend this momentous passing of the torch as she is in hospital, having had her appendix removed. But she was still in the room, and the recipient of all of our awe and appreciation for all she has done for poetry in Calgary over the last few decades. And obviously our thoughts are still with her, wishing her a speedy recovery. (I too am an Appendicitus survivor!)

On any account, the Slam must go on and it did and there was some good poetry and some not so good poetry and then it was all over and then it was Salsa night and it was like it had never happened. But it will carry on, pre-salsa, at the Auburn Saloon under the Calgary Tower on the last Thursday of every month. If you want a snap shot of what’s coming out of the pens and mouths of local poets, there’s no better opportunity.

I read some poems — being decidedly old school, I read, I don’t recite. There’s one that I am quite fond of, and am happy to share it here with you.Thanks for reading . . .

Falling

You fall so far into silence sometimes

It feels like liquid

Like the temperature of darkness

Like the texture of night

Like the taste of the stars

Like the smell of god.

Sometimes thus

Up so falling

You land on the surface of the moon

And look down on the un- and other-

Worldliness of the broken planet

You once called home

And if you didn’t know before

Your silent scream reminds you

You still have everything to say

But you’ve run out of ways so say it.