NUDE SKETCH – 07
Oui, c’est moi, con who has failed to forego love’s brouhaha
And still riskily friskilly forgets his resolve not
To postpone its transcendance, the moment he spots a face
And/or figure that remind/s him of his long-dead mama,
His Mutter? Meiner! ‒ given to and snatched from me by him,
Meine Vater, und nein, there’s nothing oedipussy there,
It’s a fact, not the fact of a myth, that the old man was
There before me, tasting mia mamma’s capezzoli
Before i could get my short-in-the-tooth chops around them
(I still sense the lady’s pleisure at my intuitive
Expertease which she herself allowed me to be born with
SKETCH – 08
Sì, mine’s but a case of infantilità banale,
That commonplace retarded traumatic fascinotion
Which the senses hold for thelmseves grabbing you long before
You can get your first ass-slap to take you make your first gulp
Of air and make your first bawl of protest against the fuss
Of breath’s dense body which your own soul called for and helped form,
Experimental opportunist, the soul, scientist
Become artist of self-molding in one flash of marrage
Between tail-wagging sperm and yoke-spreading egg ‒ always in
For more trouble, the soul
SKETCH – 09
Well, i’ve decided i must write badly well (as you see):
That seems to be the freest way to fail at being free
Of Litricher’s avid leaning towards posterity
– Of which i’ve been, tool long, too fatihful a devotee
– 10***
But pay scant attention to my purple intensity
(Not quite Yeats-passionate), one pathetic propencity
Of a poetaster in love with the immensity
Of pressuring meaning out of vises of verse and rhyme
And being shocked by bliss in the midst of the flat Grand Time
Being had by labell-spouters ‒ the standhard murderus
Civil Servants of Common Sense & Correct Form that fuss
To feed, like choked dragons, off/on their own smoke, while i cuss
And grind my grey dentures – instead of shouting Hideous!
*** A last word on the form Arterra’s sketches took: she thought
that, as a poetaster, she should at least try to fail
to overthrow the thudding thumb of the English iamb,
that bully with its colonising whip which not even
wildman Whitman tried to escape. Nor do his descendants,
with their dry twitching twigs snapped off their bush of ambition
to be poets, know any need to court that poetry,
that impersonal siren animating the serpent
curling up and down the spine of breath anteceding all
– Lissana Cesare-Ábusem, PhD
(from *fatima solagua arterra’s nudes* by Brian Chan, 2015)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 