".. touch and go like fish to bait, flame to match
.. in and beyond the life of leviathan, half machine,
half human"
– Wilson Harris, "Heartland"
Soon iris
scanners will determine play fold disposition; bright jagged
lines that blear in sea rooms of consent – skin cells faking;
the plateau, on your own.
Gay switched cylinders with gusto though by next half
century the word around curves could gentrify | transient
‘Who was that?’ bagged for street sanitation bins.
Too ‘intensely civilized’ to leave office, few statesmen would
concede; upload stream in the cubicle ? what down leg
trickle issues.
Bit parts linger, strain hard to pass; bent on outlasting
bankers pat the bedpan, pay to beat the gong.
With heart cubes shaping clicks through
world ends, trust deep . bio rhythms to jig jiggy paradise
stuck keys; moonlight break, babies make / unfinished
children muttering / latch the gate.
OmyGod high . we’ll chuckle at what in classic years
mattered; what passed for change : air curtain calls . hooks
you know, like ‘Well done. Now how about some dancing,
Comrades?’
– W.W.
MARA
Her screamings may have been sordid and seedy,
As vulgar as Mara would learn to hate them,
But Mommy’s fear of abandonment had been
As real as her sense of Mara’s betrayal of her
By just thinking of wanting to go beyond
The walls of the marriage cage Mommy had felt
She must accept to give her daughter a name.
And Mara’s mother’s abuses were far less
Seedy than her father’s fawnings ended up
Being one night when, helping him into bed
Drunk, Mara had knelt to his too-much, in the spirit
Of experimental vengeance, spite against
Her mother’s demandingly stifling limits,
And to taste, know the seeds of her mother’s shame.
(from “Charon’s Anchors” by Brian Chan)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 