"Originally,
we weren't going to leave home"
– John Ashbery, "Token Resistance"
Off cross market shores swapped gold : text the last chair
EO decked on his coast swatting away fireflies curious about
close one eye merchant glasses . bet now he'd wink.
Flying was whose eagle wing idea first . turn to quick
share with someone considered a friend who woke . Ah!
hacking
off hard to be heard from again.
Panners keep dusting : man the ground pride the stand take
the leg dog lick . tokens to where undulating cities fugle you
know though you can’t swim . dying to raft riff the fear
the stare of others.
Certain something’s out there . who can wait as crinkled
throats crow caution . what’s faith for if not to race . face
slab
nots supposed to happen | fighting chance, submit night
sand snow day . why flavor this? last will this?
More
like how clocks watch . memory hands pick plucking world
feathers; the climate of angel and tyrant vagility . seed beads
or balls finger fondled as familiars would have you . crave
pray Get to work! web shop sweet songs | get you some
rest.
– W.W.
THIS NUDE
of living stone, lava delayed in time,
utters the scars of its sculptor who thinks
what he has shaped is a figure of the world's
pain and love of pain and worship of blood.
But is there either world or pain except
a man and his faith in a world outside
the orbit of his own dreaming blood, a world
he wants to shape with his nude’s flame, coming
always too close not to set both ablaze?
In terror of his own fire, the one fear,
he locks away his nude or he smashes it,
no matter: his nude has altered our blood.
The sculptor minds, thinks he has kept or lost
something but his nude’s only another
cloud of brick shelved or scattered just as he is
only one more dream of an avid ghost.
Other dreams read of the nude what they will:
how much can they ignore blood, recall ghosts?
Dreams locked in a focus of blood can only
breathe like frozen stone longing for new fire.
(from “Fabula Rasa” by Brian Chan)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 