INDECENCY

 

            
         So all his thwartings hung about him like a fallow fart
         Whose yellow odour refused to fade (like that sepia
         Photo, of his just-wed not-yet parents stiff as corpses,
         Which his less iffy but equally harried sister kept,
         In an album, beside a shot of her and her lover
         Projecting fearless toothy smiles during a Pride parade).

                                              *

         In this sense (of a legacy of bland labels), Stew was
         As densely diseducated, as ripely mesmerised
         As a newly freed slave or serf who, in his liberty
         Now, unwittingly, finds himself under the tyranny
         (Called ‘freedom’) of yet another yoke of terms (in perhaps
         A new tongue of negotiation demanding a wrench-
         ing and twisting and knotting of the muscles, the habits
         Of his throat's voice-box and vocal cords, of his very tongue;

                                             ~

         Or perhaps in a birth-tongue that overnight has under-
         mined the the dreaming changes of its magmatic foundation
         And the volcanic force of its lava-like surprises
         Of utterance to construct and impose the fearsome rock
         Of false fire whose walls are policed by disdain and silence)

                                              *  

         Terms new but tied to old nets of words as survival-tools,
         Things that proved he was not a fool, if he used them rightly
         And, in doing so, broke no rules of behaviour proper
         To the breaking of old stones towards making new mansions
         And to turning the mud of lies into the hollow pots
         Of gilded promise, gilded futures denying the Now.

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