APPOINTMENT IN RATSMOOLAHS

           As he walked about Pages, on its floor of hard concrete
         Underneath his cheap thin-soled shoes, but ‘thinking on his feet’,
         Thinking with his heart and belly and balls about how sweet
         His life’s breath felt that day, despite the toilet’s backed-up crap
         He was ordered to mop up, and despite his handicap
         That made him mistake a customer for a colleague – twice,
         The second time giving that ‘brother’ some jokey advice
         (‘Go buy your annual shampoo, boy:    we can hear the lice!’),
         Only to hear some woman’s cool voice request a book’s price.

                                                   ~

          Despite his appearing (again) stupid, he felt quite spry
          All day (almost), like a cretin with an affinity
          For the simplest things – such as oxygen that makes you high
          If you breathe it in deeply for a long time, or the sky
          At dawn or noon or evening or midnight, grey or blue or
          Black and starry, perfect hunting ground for a pursuer
          Of purity like Raimonde who frequently scanned night-skies
          In search of stars (beyond the few that were blurred in his eyes).

 
                                                   *

            Now in the maze of time and its racers (in which he still
          Managed to savour his flavour of tortoise, if you will
          Risk being cute but won’t go as far as ‘spirit of sloth’),
          Raimonde intuited that, today, his blissful pulse was
          The bouncing offspring of the stare of the witch on the bus
          As it had groaned away in its inexorable rut
          Of a route whose only detour was through the heart and gut
          (Or was it just through his head?) of his lust for something more
          Tactile than the kiss of the midnight Sun, his holy whore

                                                 ~

 

          It was the only time he’d known the Sun as a woman
          Who consumed as she consoled – with a faithfulness no man
          Could match.    Now he, caught in a white-lit White Lit./Art-hothouse
          In Edmofftoff’s hothouse culture, felt like a febrile mouse
          Fecklessly dragging about a trap clinging to his tail,
          The trap of his nostalgia for the time he’d spent in jail
          For that other woman – who’d never speak to him again
          – A nostalgia perverse, disinterring nothing but pain

        (*fatima solagua arterra’s nudes* by Brian Chan, 2015)