Too old for marches teargas street barricades, I'm up
for this, I'll sign, oh yeah, Save the Planet!
Save my memories from emissions; clean my arteries of blood
trapping silt; marriage of sleeping asbestos; punditry of pointing
finger gas. Filter the rain I still catch on my tongue. Solar
panels to empower wood burning areas of darkness,
Si senor! And those plastic shopping bags (I double, singles split!)
make them so that, when used, like cane trash they crumple curl &
wisp away.
Save the trees I used to climb;
new trees don't appeal to boys with joystick fingers;
who needs paper products these days?
only old geezers in bathrooms.
Save all you want, my planet's in storage
anyway. Each moment lived I've saved on memory discs,
waiting retrieval. Yes, memory discs. You mean,
you haven't got one? You can take them with you
when you go.
While saviours mass, bright green the marketplace
or halt the ice floe melt, you're watching
playbacks deep in the earth, high in the heavens,
frame by frame. With Skip.
Rewind. And bandwidth to outlast the worms.
dot Dead, of course, oh yeah!
- W.W.
IN THE GARDEN
The lives of plants are only
as secret as we are blind
to their masks, as dumb as we are deaf
to the crackling silence of their tongues.
To these this stray ladybird
has no trouble responding
with her casual but thorough caress
that leaves unadored no pore of this
geranium's flesh of fire
to make it, more brazen, blaze.
(from "Gift of Screws" by Brian Chan)
INVOCATION
Woman of air and rain, flood these deserts
with rivers of breath and pools of cool light;
woman of fire, blow and lick a flame
up the ladder of the spine to the green
centre of love, the blue flute of the Word,
the purple sun at the eye's horizon,
the open crown of the all-seeing queen,
to smooth the path of this blind nightingale
through the sand dragging its wings
whose feathers shake with your voice.
(from "Fabula Rasa" by Brian Chan)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 