INDECENCY

 

          
       But slowly Radica’s final no-argument word ‘sucks’
       – with all its dismissive mindlessness rooted in mere Taste,
       that fashion of Correctness wallpapering her café – 
       somehow crossed the moat of my detachment, only to sink
       like a sack of sand through the quicksand of my consciousness

       When her sack at last reached the bottom of my mind’s morass,
       all the tightly locked grains of silt whose sleep it had disturbed
       grabbed their chance to escape sleep’s final configuration
       and surged like lava upwards through the burst veins of my calm
       (so-called and so on) and i jumped to my feet, i stood up,
       looking down at Mona looking down on me from below:
       our appointment/disappointment bulged to a boil of pus
       to burst in a whore-house between a whore-man – who has searched
       a hundred houses, none of which housed his ideal twin whore –
       and a madame who couldn’t care what the ideal might be

                                                   *  

       So could there be ‘a deal’, finally?    Why had i stood up?
       I don’t know why, but i believe i saw ‘once and for all’,
       that i had failed with my moat and quicksand and castle-keep,
       failed Life itself, not ‘life’ locked between ironic quote-marks
       to shield me from breath’s gormless disappointing miracles.

       Beside her godwoman’s ironic fire, Mona seemed mere,
       and that’s what (to offer a mirage of ‘resolution’,
       in truth only a fading of the lights behind the scri’m)
       made me say to her in my learnt bland Canadian way
       – Have a nice life –   and turn and walk out of and away from
       Mona’s café, bonsai link in Ratsmoolahs’ hothouse chain

                               BLACKOUT

(from “fatima solagua arterra’s nudes”, a verse novel by Brian Chan, 2015)