INDECENCY

   
    
      I was already regretting i used to laugh at love 
      When both Mia and, later, my wife would beg me not to,
      For here i was now looking at love’s vengeful painted lips
      Laughing at me in my new-sprung loneliness as i failed
      To make their mouth stop huh-huh-ing and smile with some shadow
      Of innocence.

      Now Radica shrugged off my attempts to understand her
      Unlikely relationship with Stew:  how did they ever?
    – No reason, Doctor Chattergoon, she purred, we fell, just fell.

                                                                       *

      Fall and fade like lovers and the words they live by and in.
      But what a pity to give up those words, like apartments,
      And let the realities they house fade from awareness,
      For words aren’t abstractions, but actions, breathing entities
      Linked with one another in a wide dance of utterance,
      And every word sounded, even if through forced or false pulse,
      Translates and transports every other dancer in the chain.
      Now with Mona on her latest plateau of suicide
      By Common Sense, i was afraid to speak some same-old words
      To tag and qualify persons and moments as discrete
      Things, yet I needed ‘things’ between us to be precisely
      Named, but with fresh words that would engender a whole new chain
      Of dancing changes by which we might celebrate our breath.

      Just as i was about to choose to fool myself again
      that companionship towards transcendence’s grail was yet
      possible, the lone queen Mona in irritation sighed
    – Bloody hell! Turn that shitty CD off!   That singer sucks! –
      and i knew at once, at last, that ‘Radica’ was, as much
      as ‘Mona’, one more delusory construct.

      (from “fatima solagua arterra’s nudes” by Brian Chan)