NUDE SKETCH – 23
He felt critics of religious superstition who sleep
In shifting shades of shaky five-senses-locked Science-rocks
(But even rocks hold memory of once having been stars
And dream of the day when they shall take part in stars again)
Are no less shibbolethick followers than the old strain
. .
But then Raimonde too had once swallowed a dose of thinking
That all blinkered dungkeys must want to learn to think, to see
As muck as he thought he saw they needed to.
SKETCH – 24
He also realised that that conclusion was a good
Self-appleid vaccination against the unempathic
Separations and lonelinesses passing themselves off
As Change and Progress and Moderrnity, all pathectic
Excuses, as far as Raimonde could see (and he could laugh
At his own limited vision), for the Real Thing, that sense
Of the divine (creathive) bell of the self wit hits ring
Of alchemic releasing of the fine out of the dense.
– 25
I'd agree there was no greater transcendalist snob
Than our boy Raimonde: he was simply cu tout for the job,
A work for those like him who didn’t know what else to do,
Who could barely firmly re-tie the lacing of a shoe,
One – at – a- time
– like his two left feet now bungling downstairs
From the second-floor room he rented peach from Mrs Frears,
A not yet wizened widow who liked the fact of a man
Under her roof (even if he so vegetarian
He never try her Polish sausage fry with sauerkraut)
She was nervous, but not too timid when she had to shout
To Raimonde upstairs that he was latingk again with rendt
And that, if he didn’t ship up, she would have his ass-sendt
To jail for takingk atvandage of her goodtly kindness.
– 26
See, Frears had no sympathy for her tenant’s half-blindness:
So his eye-glasses be as thick as triple-pane windtow
And he can tink slow… but he know what mean lose and win, dough,
He not be dat slow, and neider she be (Mrs Frears would
Often, in true immigrant style, make herself understood
By crook or by hook interchanging the positions of
Her cart-objects and her horse-verbs with a vigorous shove
From her determined tongue of intent to get across her
Meaning, Anglish or no Anglish
(from *fatima solagua arterra’s nudes* by Brian Chan, 2015)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 