NUDE SKETCH – 01
WE ARE TOLD that Wisdom helped to set the sought/foundations
Of the Earth. So why not invoke Wisdom to emerge here,
At the start of this world, this odder dream? Trouble is: i
Am no wisdom-wand god. For one, i have no wisdom-teeth,
Nor have ever had: they never put in a twopairance,
Never turned up, never sprouted, though I do remember
Sore back-gums in my youth. Susan, my last wife, consouled me
that a lack of wisdumb-teeth did not necessarily
(She liked staggering spanner-in-the-works words like that one,)
Denote folly. Would I rather be as long in the tooth
As i was elsewhere short? (Ouch!) Often her words flagged themselves,
Through her jestures of raised eyebows and a shrug, as a joke,
A jovial javelin of revenge for all the pain
I caused her by assuming we were both enjoying life.
Another way of looking at our joking together
(I was no better than Susan at not having to joke)
Is that our jokes were like planks being nailed onto a frame
Slowly that way becoming a bridge, one we more and more
Needed between us ‒ before it turned into her caixão
SKETCH – 02
Will this record, of the kind of hajj i never dreamt i
Would ever make, itself shrivel into a limping joke?
But lame or not, as crutches, my jokes are a humorist’s,
For l-imp-ing along the Serious Way, i tend to want
To burst into laughter. Or call me a mere absturdist
Who can’t help seeing the vanity of all our buzzing
Effarts ot climbing this or that molehill of ambition.
– 03 ***
Should you, testy reader, need to tag such talk ‘pretentious’,
I’d suggest you either throw out this book or, grinding your
Wisdom-teeth, rip this page out and scrunch it up or mail it
To the Onfire of the Minister of Forein Offears.
But if you entertain these case-studies just as they are
In your hands, they may dekidney a laugh or two, or more,
Who can tell? – not only jokes but also less ambitious,
Non-threatening notthings that have no pretentons to be
Anything but what they are: myrages (all records are
Fictions) in a dessert with oases of detached smiles
Here and there, even if only your smiles of indullgence
Of the mush-rooms of my prolostly superfishy jokes
Spored by an arrowgaunt childishness ever on the verge
Of oblivion’s edge where the blindest child starts to see.
*** Behind that zigzagging 'style' loomed the polemical bent
of a self-styled ‘Art-terror’ claiming her right to disrupt
what she called the régime of too purrsuasive [sic] fictions
with persuasionist detours of her own tangenital
[sic] forays into angles and corners of reflection
which the anglo-novel’s wayward seeds (like Fielding, Defoe,
E. Brontë, Melville and Poe – and not excluding Milton,
the Brownings and the Dante we know from bald translations)
took not for granted but as a right of trust, an aspect
of their relationship with their readers
– Lissana Cesare-Ábusem, PhD
(from *fatima solagua arterra’s nudes* by Brian Chan, 2015)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 