Author: FarJourney Caribbean

              But when the guy dropped to the floor, writhing like a cut worm
        Reduced to a curled-up oozing mess in a uniform
        Designed to inspire confidence in Pages’ expertise
        And in its wearer’s self-control, the lady felt her knees
        Jerk forward as if they had a mind of their own that would
        Bend to help her help up the helpless man.

                                                 ~

                                                                            But no such good
        Came of their impulse, for it was staggered by Common Sense
        That whispered a medley of Run! and Satan, get thee hence!
        And Quick! Report his strange behaviour to his bosses and
        Damn, now I’ll be late for dinner, hope Ben will understand.

                                                 *

         Ambulance and first-aid kit and even mouth-to-mouth were
       More what-to-do tags that bobbed up to the surface of her
       Mind but were drowned again under the more important need
       She felt to prove what a great thing her cellphone was indeed,
       How magically necessary its modernity,
       How progressive and useful in an emergency.

                                                 ~

       But, though the thing often proved a complicated nuisance,
       Like a servant whom she had to end up herself serving,
       It was a godsend, she would swear, with a faith unswerving.
       (She thought she knew how to think and question things, but in this
       Case, she’d paid for the right to blow thinking a goodbye-kiss.)

           Her name was Radica Astronomo-Kanamono
       - Just ‘Mona’ to her friends who couldn’t be bothered to show
       Any respect for her klutzy surname:    why, just to try
       To pronounce the damned thing made them turn their eyes to the sky
       As though to beg God for deliverance from foreigners.

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

          
                
                                                     "Ganesh Pundit had given up mysticism for
                                                            a long time. He had taken to politics and
                                                             was doing very nicely. He was a minister of
                                                              something or the other in the Government"
                                                                              – "Miguel Street,"  VS N.

        You want I curve learn ? flat yield . the knot masseuse, what
        the brain wants.

        In our Gwan Down office chair men pledge . needy feed,
        unlike the serviettes quiet inside preamble rooms not sure
        the desk spread ~ Take ! Not one breath ~ would last . the way
        he always reaching.

        Some sent home pack benchers brood : who plants what now    
        betrayals worming where ?  awake at four Not ever again?
        mouse members sash . cords lower the sky.

                          If only / this prayer you hear / I could remount,     
        boss of base feel strong again . hug big bubby village pride;
        toss ethics to the manatee, oil flame pilots train.
                         As bone dogs scratch our predilections Admin picks    
        a face unripe : trench foot soldiers griping  >  go ribbon food     
        baskets, prod promissory turds; divvy ‘n’ hide poles to plait.
                        Who cares ? what per Custom wringing hands declare; 
        dark light swells . fear, bad actors, All is fair.

        No cross . course practice how we go, cluster set flag      
        falls . you go | won’t go?  molasses to Gwan Dung dry storage
        pace nail straight away.

                                                               – W.W.

           
        QAT + LESSING

        Had he sensed earlier his Soul’s agendum
        Stamping its urgencies into his person’s
        Urges, Lessing would have grudged and resisted
      Less, or not at all, his fixes and jams, by seeing
        Them all just, rather than unnecessary.
        Sensing his soul’s urgings came too late: by then
        Pique had become his chronic hairshirt, his wont.

       *QUOI, il encore Catholique?  Qat would half-think
       Sensing a dégoût to his – quoi?  she couldn’t
       Say personage, since ce type-ça was hardly
     Recognisable from moment to moment

     (from “Charon’s Anchors” by Brian Chan)

        Recalling clouds, Raimonde became one, one needing to burst
      Out of its vaporous density.    But feeling (at first)
      That he couldn’t very well pop into song on the job
      (Wordless song at that, in a cage of words) and end up sob-
      bing his swollen-burst cloud-heart out like Mario Lanza
      On acid or Ogden Nash without rhymes for a stanza
      About all nature echoing itself back to itself,
      He didn’t court such chaos while sorting books on a shelf,
      A-to-Z and all that jazz called ‘not spending enough time
      Tending to (smiling at) customers’ in Cooking and Crime
      Or this one seeking Henry Miller in Ailments and Maps.

                                          ~

      Such absurdities, corrupt or innocent, were perhaps
      Not worth disturbing but, then at last, Raimonde felt, why not?
      And burst into a scatting sob, a storm of tears and snot.

                                           *

         The customer, (or ‘book lover’) whom Raimonde was helping
      To find Tropic of Cancer responded to his yelping
      With mild amusement, as though she had won a surprise-prize
      Being prefaced by a sung slogan (one of those cute lies/
      Fictions without which Society wouldn’t know its name)

                                          ~

      But when the google-eyed clerk extended the singing-game,
      of With a dutiful mourning, everything’s coming my
      Way into a wordless waving, lashing out at some fly
      Which only he could see hovering all around his head,
      The book-lover realised something was amiss and said
      Calmly, ‘There, take a deep breath, you’re in Canada now, see’

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

                                                                    "She was a pale-brown woman, about thirty,
                                                                    somewhat plump, and her favourite colour
                                                                  was blue. She called herself Dolly. We used 
                                                                 to see her looking blankly out of the windows."
                                                                                                      -  VSN, "Miguel Street"

                                                                                                                                             
                                                       Quick to draw veil, mark threat              
           our neighbours keep stills of elephant innocence; even when sore
           at bottom volcanos pass quiet quiet, gift roll picks of flowers
           for rectum rectitude. 
                                                            Sun . so plenty spider eating
           shade in tree lime haze; speech free like seed in rage bird
           feeders . zip ties in the bird.

           Morning you break your bread . fruit should night fall;              
           evidencing you scour . the mind our food burnt utensils | stones
           fleece gall peezy squeezy . catch the gaze as statues topple,
           open fly rods refute.

                                                     ~ 

                                
                      Wriggles in the stomach ? only a wish but Boysie 
            swear he snag a halo to casque his head hard.
                      All of a sudden at thirty one he stopping for water
            coconut, he counting chicken spring.
                      No, not power moves, which does blow back exposure
            blows. He scrimping to frontier . spine infection dress flush
            over seas – the speed of flight is not for all the same.

            Off the plane labor pay slips fail to wave . but at least he step!    
            distance on line long pave | while high ‘n’ dry love cramping 
            game Dulcienne (first) put gem ring in her navel (next) rose
            tattoo on breast view . till Eh-eh! everybody Stay home! rubber
            band stretching.    

                                                                 – W.W.

 
          MARA

           
          Not that Mara, though a house-trained Guyanese
          Chameleon, has felt any more at home
          In loud Illinois or Brazil than in this
        Anxious secretive ambitious big-citied small town
          *OR IN that big town of George’s where she’d borne
          The diseducation of being born and      
          Reared in a hothouse of brilliant repressives

          Who knew much about the world but little of
          Themselves, only what was required of those selves
          By the demanding phantoms and directors
 

             (from “Charon’s Anchors” by Brian Chan)

           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)

           
         Heritage due filled stomach folds . frequency still chimes come
         nuh?    winds stir up and about ready to hook the moment
         break water levels . swelling over.
                                        A pinch of rash, the cheek to grasp – most     
         tear sheets show how splash dives miss the dot; whose blade
         harpoons the whale of one fine lime . fat luck with stern
         mountings.

               If you’re just joining us we’re at the Friday good night    
         Club that drives deliveries over primate bounds; stroke falters
         walk back to the pavilion for the tea sandwich munch . off
         the pad shag inquiries.

               For you, I get I do : a bird nest wireless hub . no clutch     
         purse lip tree kneeling | mini short little chips . who’ll conceive
         miracles with me ? thigh chafe triangulate.

               Trans wings now test curves; not long once the island
         boy hawk eyed Catholic plaid . hem touch was weep simple.
               Noël shop rite joyeux, Marie first time discount . add     
         Caution : after the cincture red unwrap senses find wonder
         mates unstabled, better left as riddle.

                     At play girl swings in the park, grandfather’s hand       
         watch checked perimeters  >  knot ruptures from the village
         snatch . blood gunbelts flavour.
                    Virtually it’s about whose past futures ‘ill, love
         calf ~ ‘uck or ‘all in, turret dove view.

                                                                    – W.W.

             MARA

         This sweet ting, Mara sensed, was really looking
         For escape-routes out of a sex-object fate
         In the state of affairs she’d been born into
       As one of its accidents of sharp hybridity
         Whose fresh blades needed something hard to cut through,
         That way to confirm their sharpness as valid
         Beyond the gossips of Literature and Sex.

         Mara, the girl’s shrewdest witness, was willing
         To expedite the failure of her struggle
         To keep herself free, outside of the tangle
       Of what Lessing called Georgetown’s incestuous despair

              (from “Charon’s Anchors” by Brian Chan)

         

         Pretend this story's a river, and if you've got this far
       On it, reader rower, then it will take you where you are
       Already, no more – but the air about you will have changed,
       As after a long deep breath, no furniture re-arranged
       In the space you’re reading in, but its moment might then feel
       As ripe as an unrained cloud, lighter and denser, as real
       As only an uncalled-for pure kiss in a dream can be

                                             ~

       But Raimonde estimated that, for every thousand books
       Left strewn about the store (by ill-mannered schmucks and dumb schnooks),
       Only about ten others were sold, the cheapest at that.
       But Raimonde didn’t understand, he only oversat
       The con of moolah sanctified by perverted numbers
       Like deadly spiky cacti disguised as smooth cucumbers.

                                             *

          Ain't it a drag how a few fools never learn the bourgeois
       Business of escapism as inescapable law,
       And this sketcher must confess to being one of that breed
       Of dunces no less hypocritical than those who feed
       On escapist fare (that allows them to bear their despair
       Or ‘quiet desperation’ from day to day, year to year),
       Since we earthbound non-escapists know we too are only
       Made up of words that help us pretend our thoughts aren’t lonely

                                            ~

       - Call it noisy desperation, this breaking of silence
       To prove that people need not settle for being islands
       Of unbridgeable separations, horribly discrete
       For informing the most tyrannic mode of self-deceit.
       Since (as Tom tells us) people can’t bear much reality,
       We fool ourselves that discreteness, not mutuality,

       Best defends our frailty pretending in turn to be tough,
       Though only tenderness constitutes true strength.
                                                                                   But enough
       Of all that blinking thinking (as the thoughtful blinker said)

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

                   
              Maroon prow . path out to set, so tempting to test
              stroke functions nonbinding : peak at cards in hand
              shade; vagina fables . the native stub bridge long suspension.
              Endurance knows the drills. 
                                                                  Booked . hotelling island
              palm rubs best flute glass torsos; aside cell signals . bald
              head wrinkles keep double scotch downing the evidence
              of rivers and  rocks. With custom ties loose into pods
              or pools of our iguanas slip pink hips.

              Eve's faith leaf dangles . maiden night errant bitchery, since                
              nobody’s seriously watching pale flab go beast.
                                                                                     Slim shark
              threat, seems Okay time being to anchor the beach umbrella,
              toughen the wait.

                                                            ~ 

                                                                                               A fish
              crow flying in from the sea reports our egrets nibble high
              price waste . you can’t mind step their hunger.   
                                                                                         As if too
              tired to grieve the surf returns broke ground crates . refrains
              fit for song.
               
              On your shoulder dragons in tattoo I know! you’d swap
              for one sound thinking conch.
                                                                          Why not now! you
              keep wrestling, whose pirogue is that ocean bound ? wake
              to iron rudder . contract tracing.

              Shore cruising ends, sun risers dress again . so please              
              Welcome blue yield curve space . circuitry, for all get
              tested get to fly home.                            Here back weary, 
              Seule : bed access code, the winsomest cabin.

                                                             – W.W.            

               QAT 

                L'ennui c’est qu’elle aime son travail, being good
              At it, and people White and Black let her get away
                With murder since she’s so hotly good-looking,
                Fashion-beauty an all-seasons pass, sometimes,
                Into the blackest anti-blacksnowdrop heart.

                Even those women who are jealous of Qat
                Of her influence on their husbands and sons,
                Can’t quite help warming to her for her open
              What-I-offer-is-what-you-need style of handling them
                And their problems of adjustment by money,
                And other things only women talk about

  
                  (from “Charon’s Anchors” by Brian Chan)

            
 
           But, having (again) nodded to his ghosts, their landlord now
         Had to turn and return to his when-where-what-who-&-how
        (Postpone why) job as a retail-slave in a Pages chain-
         Store that sold pseudo-books to real folk who liked reading less
         Than owning books (as the success of the Shelves store next door
         To Pages proved:   they were sisters with the same parent cor-
         poration and spied out our each other’s gains

                                                   ~

         That's why the job suited half-blind Raimonde to a T:    he
         No longer had faith in Litricher and Litterrusty,
         Partly since they were hard for blindish bluffers to follow,
         But mainly because they’d become bourgeois products, hollow
         In their assumptions and pretensions, all their promises
         Lazily dangling from a halo of bogus Progress.

                                                   *

          But, Raimonde wondered, what could his loss of faith in books have
        To do with anything?    He had chosen work as a slave
        Lifting and carting and shoving and shelving what was called
       ‘Product’ by Head Office and the overseers it installed
        In stores mushroomed across the latest American state.
        As rushmoons, they were designed to shrink quickly out of date,
        Shrivel up and disappear, but, in the mean slave-greased time,
        They’d feed a few sharks some more rollover-numbers – a crime
        Against true exchange

                                                   ~

             It wasn't just Raimonde’s dream that such madness wouldn’t last:
        For him every thing was a dream come to life and to pass,
        So he valued every ‘win’ in his dreams’ Olympiad,
        Lest he wake, on the other side of breathing, to feel bad
        About not having paid enough attention to their seeds
        Sprouting – which his own soul-mind sowed in response to the needs

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

                                                                                            
                                                                              “One day a man called and said he was hungry.
                                                                               We gave him a meal. He asked for a cigarette
                                                                               and wouldn’t go until we had lit it for him.”   
                                                                                                – "Miguel Street", VS N.                                                                                                                                                                 

           
         With heritage clamps that jump start side eye shadowing
         as conviction seals, we should be sparking thunders . husk
         blade sun flash in rice fields. Time feeds instead this
         fester of cleave.
                                       Estate ground . down lines find soil
         on paper tissue typing, koker watch dog at sea; big
         toe in slipslops recognize . breath cart veer pushing.

                               Our mountains twitch ‘n’ wait for foreign     
         hiker haul loops . spike trace validating; not paying
         squat to observe our cage bird warble contests.
                              Distancing ? village fears scratch choice
         match North . bending longer on Like to commit;
         thiefing a wine, innocence presumed (don’t freaking say
         so loud . warrant half past poet stares).

                                          *

         Wishing you knew before ? Boysie my pardner in NY♥
         text to warn we best practice crossing wide streets
         mean, using river boat new speed.
                                        Yes, they have bike lanes up there
         but . don’t like wearing helmet we bound to get knock
         down, passport photo on TV / Sir, you need to keep
         moving, Ok? / warm coca cola . exact change.

         This is no crow crow matter ! reverse our shopping     
         mall first escalator . see how most people step on step
         off ‘fraid ?  for comfort chart our town canal send
         posts to flogging hosts, bottom issues for grab.    
                                                                               |So. Is
         our domain, Ok?  besides, box head! we need to keep
         moving.
                                                               - W.W.

         MARA

         *NOW Mara recalls that, when she used to teach
         (Or try to, and, at last, only pretend to),
          At the university in Guyana
       An option-course she called Hersterical Hisstories:
         Universalist Second-Sex Literature
        (By writers the club of LITRICHER shut out),
         One student had asked her to mark and correct

         Her verses.  Mara, the ghost of her mother’s
         Straps and slaps close, joked, What, whip them into shape?

             (from “Charon’s Anchors” by Brian Chan)