Violence Poetry Slam

David Fujino

David Fujino is a Toronto-based writer and actor. Born in Greenwood, British Columbia, David’s poetry has been published in Canada, the United States, Australia, Great Britain, Japan, and the World Wide Web.  Fujino’s efforts at self-publishing have produced the 1987 chapbook, “FAST” (Vocabulary) and a 1990 collection of visual and text-based poetry, “Lines” (ee.no books). His poetry has been anthologized in the 1982 Coach House anthology of Japanese and Japanese Canadian poetry, “Paper Doors”, the 1986 “Anthology of Japanese American/Japanese Canadian Poetry”, Doyoh-Bijutsu-Sha, Tokyo, Japan, the 2001-2004 “papertiger” CDs (#1, 2, 3, and 4), and the 2003 anthology of contemporary Canadian concrete and visual poetry, “White Wall of Sound #33”.

Four Poems

Gabi Bila-Gunther

Spoken word, performance & visual artist, collage maker,’ creative workshop leader & educator organiser/curator of multimedia events & exhibitions

I saw a girl drinking bourbon in the middle of the street, in the middle of the day
Hey girl enjoying the sunshine?…. I say
No I am waiting for the rain….
Is the bourbon going to bring the drops down?
Don’t know yet…. I am just hanging around
Her words are tough. Her cigarette is almost under her thumbnail
Traces of nicotine spell poetry on her palms
Tatts and dirt live face to face…all the way up her fingers.
She looks at me like she’s seen plenty and that I am just another stumble to her day. Because I judge and dare feel sorry for her…for the shit that went down while she was growing up…
She doesn’t need me to make small chit chat…she needs more than that. She doesn’t even ask my for my coins or sympathy…. her skin is like a lizard’s…tough and shameless…her hair is like a chameleon’s…changes with the moods of her mind
Pretty thing nurtured by the streets who found love and comfort on park benches. Streets as inspiration
You are looking for love in all the wrong places…. can’t help it she says…love ain’t anywhere else
Lives in her car she tells me and has grog for breakfast, drugs for lunch and trouble at dinnertime.

But today she is writing while drinking…drinking while writing. Like all good poets do, I encourage her, a smile at the back of my mind…just don’t get…
Angry while you writing…. Write when you are angry…
Anger is my best friend…It got me where I am today… 

This girls’ fists have made a lot of noise…but no one bothered to listen
She’s sorry her mum couldn’t hang around and that she never knew her dad…but she’s got a sister somewhere in Melbounre…I look for her when I can…. she murmurs her happiness to me…
Hey girl…anything that makes you wanna go on with your life?
Yes but I can’t seem to put my finger on it…I can’t seem to know what it is…
What is smiling all about? How do you feel? Do you feel old or young?
Well depends on whose doing the smiling…. I say
When you are smiling? Are you happy on the inside too? How do you feel? Young, sexy, like a virgin?
I am smiling now…
Should you be?
How do I look?
Why are you smiling? 
Seeing you drink that bourbon….
That makes you smile? 
Maybe I am trying to tell you something 
Not you too….
Bourbon won’t bring the rain down….
I know that…. I am only wasting my time.
And she finally gives me a sip.

By © Gaby Bila-Günther, 2002

Sadiq Bey

Originally from Detroit, Sadiq Bey is a performance poet, percussionist, composer, author and recording artist living and working in New York and Berlin. His work has appeared in print, electronic and recorded media for over thirty years.
He has performed and recorded with Geri Allen, Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Fifth Dimension, Eartha Kitt, Brandon Ross, the Mbase Group, MFA Kera (DE), Scatology (DE), Gebhard Ullmann (DE), Dinamitri (IT), Uri Caine ( Sidewalks of New York, Bach: the Goldberg Variations, Mahler: Dark Flame) and Don Byron (NuBlaxploitation, Tuskegee Experiments) (USA) among many others in the Jazz, Classical and Pop idioms, in the spirit of the avant garde.

intro

You can’t go back
You can’t go back
You can’t go back
You can’t go back
Driven to anger who’s driving?
Driven to sadness and who’s behind the wheel?

A)

1. 

we all fall down.
And sometimes burn.
The world looks on.
We’re burning. Burning.
The world sees—–
Us burning.

2.

we all tell lies.
And break some law.
Corrupt ourselves
By making sex.
By making cash.
The world looks on.

3.

we fell real hard
asleep at the wheel.
War declared!
When we woke up…
There’s hell to pay.
There’s hell to pay.

4.

we all fall down.
To center earth.
The cloudless blue.
The flaming tomb.
The raining flesh.
They all looked on.

Coda.

The raining blood.
They all looked on.

B)

1.

think with strength
mental vigor is a must. 
Find yourself
Beyond your means.
Then find the means, BOOM!
Right on the money!
Take that step
Into the Real. [space chord]

2.

and own yourself.
And own yourself.
And own yourself.
And own your soul.
Credit cards
Are obsolete.
Take that step
Into the Real.

Back to A)

1.

The world became.< /! P> 
Aware of us.
A second time.
A rebooted time.
A tv time.
Who’s in command?

2.

the blazing sky.
where power stood.
and lost its time.
and bit the dust.
the twisted steel.
we all looked on.

3.

I saw the jets.
That cost so much.
Make that noise.
On 14th street.
They shot downtown.
To visit the dead.

4.

the vultures came
and robbed the tomb
of smoking dust
that once was flesh
and picked it clean
the world looks on.

Coda.

Now gates of hell.
The world looks on.

 
copyright by Sadiq Bey. All rights reserved.

Kenji Siratori

Kenji Siratori, author of Blood Electric and Acidhuman Project, is a brilliant superhip writer of great intellectual hypermodern fiction. Born in 1975, he currently lives in Japan. Blood Electric was acclaimed by David Bowie. Created in 1999 by Pierre-Henri Pappalardo ( Pierrre Pi), Communication Zero was influenced by many bands such as Esplendor Geometrico, Klinik, Black Lung, Soma, Dive…

Tattoo

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Mac Dunlop

Mac comes from a free music, performance art and poetry background. He has worked as a solo performance artist, and creative collaborator with several experimental artist groups. Semi-ambulant during the 80’s, HereNorThere during the 90’s, and Caravanserai over the last ten years. He continues to work on the creative residency centre Blauhaus Falmouth with Annie Lovejoy. Mac has lived in the South West of Britain since 1985 and moved to Falmouth in 2007. He also coordinates The Poetry Point and The Spoken Word Marquee – part of Falmouth’s Parklive Summer Festival series – to promote the work of other writers, musicians and artists.

Circum(con)scription

Lack, freud, loss, absent other tossed to the charted orders of chaos
called conscious.
What flesh subtracted what sexuality is distracted what is not mentioned in the hyperactive mental multiplication of ritual dis-ease?
Some country some faith some spirit some distaste, some groaning wasteland below the scar line measuring the jaw size of enterprise, of what stands before your eyes, where the reflection is despised, for its imperfection in your eyes drawing lines in the sand circumscribed like a shark attack, the tell tale fin scything through the first rays of light as you set eyes upon the world you live in, and its barbarous purpose now toward you bent, half knowing, half child half supplicant
half historically convinced that the way forward is through what once had been.
Family and law, reclusive justice and the fatal flaw of blood sacrifice and the raw healing flesh.

The lambs cavorting at Stanton Drew, their tails constricted and fading too, drop off in another week or so, the flock of domesticated rocks solidified from some ancient lava flow, vibrating in discomfort.
The tails and ears of dogs well trained, the sufferage upon the mountain range the crescent moon that once ordained such welcome news.
Are these the dogs of war that prise the unsightful flesh, is this where home and country wrest thier influence among men from? This dismissive fleshy willy so looked down upon?
Like some mutant made by some alien god, or some spawn of satan, something thrown to the dogs, some post placental fag-end drawn from scissor snip to correction.
Then upon what rights of man are we dependant?
Or securing for the sex of one anothers secret disgression.
In rituals of mutilation, in science classes of peer pressure action, where one’s sex is the last distraction, would indeed we submit to millenia of extension snip and contraction of the female form? For with one sex, such things seem still to matter, some defend one while opposed to the latter, and so, delivered up on this ceremonial platter, or hospital disaster,
here I leave you
something to chew on.

10/2/02

Luigia Cardarelli

coming from humanistic disciplines,an graduaded at Academy of arts in Rome ,she teached drawing for some time. She’s interested in 3D graphic and net art.
She took part to many projects on line, national and international exhibitions

Never

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Wisława Szymborska

Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska awarded Nobel Prize in literature

Tortures

Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.

Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are as they were, it’s just the earth that’s grown smaller,
and whatever happens seems right on the other side of the wall.

Nothing has changed. It’s just that there are more people,
besides the old offenses new ones have appeared,
real, imaginary, temporary, and none,
but the howl with which the body responds to them,
was, is and ever will be a howl of innocence
according to the time-honored scale and tonality.

Nothing has changed. Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances.
Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same.
The body writhes, jerks and tries to pull away,
its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up,
it turns blue, swells, salivates and bleeds.

Nothing has changed. Except for the course of boundaries,
the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away,
alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence,
while the body is and is and is
and has no place of its own.

Copyright © 1996 PolishWorld Inc.

Chernobyl Poems by Liubov Sirota

Ukrainian poetess

To Pripyat

1.
We can neither expiate nor rectify
the mistakes and misery of that April.
The bowed shoulders of a conscience awakened
must bear the burden of torment for life.
It’s impossible, believe me,
to overpower
or overhaul
our pain for the lost home.
Pain will endure in the beating hearts
stamped by the memory of fear.
There,
surrounded by prickly bitterness,
our puzzled town asks:
since it loves us
and forgives everything,
why was it abandoned forever?

2.
At night, of course, our town
though emptied forever, comes to life.
There, our dreams wander like clouds,
illuminate windows with moonlight.

live by unwavering memories,
remember the touch of hands.
How bitter for them to know
there will be no one for their shade
to protect from the scorching heat!
At night their branches quietly rock
our inflamed dreams.
Stars thrust down
onto the pavement,
to stand guard until morning . . .
But the hour will pass . . .
Abandoned by dreams,
the orphaned houses
whose windows
have gone insane
will freeze and bid us farewell! . . .

3.
We’ve stood over our ashes;
now what do we take on our long journey?
The secret fear that wherever we go
we are superfluous?
The sense of loss
that revealed the essence
of a strange and sudden kinlessness,
showed that our calamity is not
shared by those who might, one day,
themselves face annihilation?
. . . We are doomed to be left behind by the flock
in the harshest of winters . . .
You, fly away!
But when you fly off
don’t forget us, grounded in the field!
And no matter to what joyful faraway lands
your happy wings bear you,
may our charred wings
protect you from carelessness.

Translated from the Russian by Leonid Levin and Elisavietta Ritchie