Category: Uncategorized

                                                                
                                                        
              He had enough cash saved to rent 'my' room in Mia's home,
           Dollars he had taken into prison with him and some
           More he had actually earned in there for doing those chores
           Of shit/blood/vomit-mopping only half-blind dogs could bear.
           ‘But whatever the job,’ Raimonde wrote, ‘you’re paid to stay poor
            And needing more money’ – like a clerk in a retail-store
            Who needs two other jobs to be able to pay his rent

 

                                                   *

                                                                                              With the dough he did 
           Have when he got out of there, he rented ‘my’ room and hid
           His face, like the Ugly Duckling, from the rest of the world
           That took no note, had no knowledge, of his life as it swirled
           (The world, not his life – which was now a stagnant slough) about
           Its worldly business of getting on with business without
           A moment’s pause for losers too slow to keep up with its
           Relentless race against The Clock as though there were a blitz
           Forewarned and on its ruthless way over a horizon
           Of dark noons threatening an eclipse to keep our eyes on
           Before it gave way to the most glaring midnight ever.

                                                   

                                                   ~
 

             Jane had dumped him for the same guy he’d tried to ‘save’ her from:
           She had written Raimonde a letter while he was incarce-
           rated:   Dear R., I can’t take it any more, it’s a farce
             That isn’t funny, I don’t know what else to say, it makes me cry
             Just to think of it, I don’t know, I guess I’m just too shy
             A girl underneath everybody thinking I’m sexy,
             Or is everybody right? (smile)    When I look at Rex, he
             makes me feel something I never felt with you, that is free,
             And everybody needs free Raimonde so please let me be
             Happy for once in my life with someone who can help me,
             And don’t…’ et cetera et cetera et ceterass
           Raimonde had thought, feeling redundant, like a donkey’s ass

                                                *   
                                                              

         So he lit up Jane's letter to smoke it like opium.

           Myopia-opium:    into his eyes went its black smoke,
        – And, inhaled, the smoke made Raimonde choke, cough and miss the joke
        Of his self-pitying knee-jerk reaction to Jane’s note:
        The joke of her freedom’s price being his sore eyes and throat.
        He managed to douse the letter’s flames in his toilet-bowl,
        But what little he’d read was set like a scar on his soul,
        A scar he would spend the next few months licking like a cat
        Whose paw had been crushed and who couldn’t get enough of that.
          In many people lurks a masochistic martyr just
        Dying to have its blazing moment that transcends disgust
        At itself for repeating and refining one old pain       

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

                                                   

            

       In a television interview in 1991 the West Indian author George Lamming
       examined the question of what it means to be a person, Indian or African,
       in the West Indies. It required, he said, a measure of “curiosity” about
       places outside the region, ancestral places. 
     
       At pivotal points in their career, writers of Lamming’s generation pursued
       their “curiosity”. Walter Rodney, best known for “How Europe
       Underdeveloped Africa”, steered his doctoral interest toward Africa after
       studying in England. He lived and worked in Tanzania before returning to
       the region in the late 1960s. After student and writing spells in England,
       V.S. Naipaul turned his attention to India (this led first to “India: A
       Wounded Civilization”, 1977)

       Kamau Brathwaite lived and worked in Ghana and was apparently
       “transformed” by what he saw and felt there.

       He returned to the West Indies with “news” of observances, and with
       definitions for repairing fragmented West Indian lives. That repair process,
       he noted, was already on the way through the fevered assemblies of
       Rastafari in Kingston, Jamaica, a community viewed with contempt in
       those days simply for singing and thinking aloud about Africa.

       Walter Rodney’s activity in Jamaica was cut short. Less confrontational,
       Kamau Brathwaite stayed on and flourished, at least for awhile.

       In that1991 interview George Lamming spoke of efforts by West Indian
       writers of his generation to make those ancestral places part of an island-
       empire, cost-effect discourse.

       Europe (Britain, France) was not ready, he said, for revised history
       lessons about the slave source of their immense fortunes (documented by
       Walter Rodney); or the Windrush migrant experience in London (captured
       in Samuel Selvon’s stories).

       More recently, it has been noted, England still seems reluctant to consider
       arguments for colonial labour reparations, advanced from regional Admin
       centres (UWI, Hilary Beckles).

       Back home in the 70s these graduate men were not just “news breakers”.
       They set about “raising consciousness”. Fragmented West Indian nations
       could be unified by attempts at ideological realignment (Rodney), or trans
       Atlantic kinship recognitions (Brathwaite).

       There were reminders, however, that like reservoir water levels, regional
       “consciousness” could rise and fall; periods of optimism and intense
       creativity, if not sustained, could flatten into stretches of mind shelling
       chatter, like in Guyana, masking stagnant cultures.

       Brathwaite’s work falls within a continuum of great Caribbean innovators –
       Rex Nettleford (dance), Bob Marley (music), Walter Rodney (education) –
       exceptional men whose interventions vitalized generations in their life time.
       From deep research areas graduates were returning, but few with such zeal
       to address directly the historical deformations in the region.

       The publication, for instance, of Brathwaite’s “The Arrivants” (1973)
       sparked disquiet and debate in the region. Jamaica seemed a “kin” perfect
       testing ground for its ‘look back then forward’ thinking.

       In UWI Humanities Depts. at the time there was a mood of cautious
       accommodation. And occasional mockery, like this from one not impressed
       member of the English Dept. about Brathwaite’s page line structures:
       “Anyone can write stuff like this. Anyone can go, Shit /shit / shit is not /
       shit is not enough.”

       Still, Brathwaite’s poetry rallied classes of believers, hanging on to every
       drum beat and reference; placing his ground raking lines in contest with
       the elegiac stanzas of acceptance from Derek Walcott’s divided veins, his
       formal command of European aesthetics. Here was poetry with the power
       to change the life of anyone stuck in tropic shade.

                                                 *

        These days, as tinder and gossip blow about on news sites, islanders no
        longer need wait for traveled authors to return with world reports.
        Messages and links pop in on devices a hand reach away (along with
        platforms for doctored profiles, tribe followers piling on.)

        Back in the wireless 70s, Brathwaite’s poetry introduced new word rhythms,
        the new “perspective” he considered essential for island nation building. It
        is easy to forget how intensely that need was felt back then.

        Readers installed his words rhythms like reinforcing steel rods – in strict
        Brathwaite terms, reinforcing “spirit” rods, recovered from submerged
        sources of self-belief – essential for island restoration, for changing how
        islanders managed their lives.

        Some will argue his “work” on the islands, undermentioned in recent
        decades, was done; that it’s time for future mining appraisals, new
        actors clearing and building on old village frontiers. Building – not just
        waiting for things to grow.

        As memories of that productive period fade, as surface issues draw clicks
        away from Brathwaite’s subterranean tremors, he leaves behind these
        saved images: his Rasta tam, his Elder shepherd beard; the reading voice
        swollen with compassion; the nation language format he created like a
        toolbox for ever sure imaginations to search forward with.

                                                                     – Wyck Williams

                                

                                                ~                    ~
                                                                                                     

               On our island the pothole near Lamp Post 59 plays dumb
           strike | the signs are there for everyone, Don’t stop to piss
           here! People passing.
                                    Jar money firming jam spread so, hazards
           surprise only the load roles of shackled heart axles.

                 Our neighbor frets ‘n’ slaps his tablas, wife night
           back less gown. Everybody fancies wheel control; buses
           stop for folk with low blood leisure, getting on . who’d
           off line bump alerts about time share polyps.
                                                                       Or take the market
           stall trip : fruit fatty vendors call you Darling tugging
           at your leave; they tender plant reaps, catch pen meat
           sweets | fish they know, what corks duck well.

           Canal takeoffs ? crow head peckish; still, one last bird
           bath in our Ganges > web wing hoarders snap . fly . high
           on blades shave icing; road hours that trip iguana sun
           sets, tambura wait lines.
          
                        Anyone can with fear run anywhere . a whole series
           of tests for pain change; raags first under basement Saddhus
           form / forks you’ll tune, game side pick / no flow sound
           system wrecker.
                                      One bill to pay from folding. And there
           you are ! streams go Hello.
                                                               – W.W.

             

           

 

 

 

              LESSING ~ MARA

          Yet, again, absence of mutuality
          In his people was one of Cartoon’s bȇtes noires.
          But Lessing recalls Mara saying that once
        She had spotted, in a park in Leeds, Cartoon propped up
          On a bench and looking numbly half-asleep
          And paying attention to nothing, no-one
          In that space of Summer’s native foreigners.

          Lessing, defending the Common Man’s Wordman,
          Asked Mara then –You sure-sure Cartoon wasn’t
          Listenin to dat place, tekking it all in?
      – Nah, she said, he tought it had nuttn to do wit he,
          Nothing to say to him, Mister Otherness.

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

 

 

 

           
       NUDE SKETCH – 47 

         It was the feel of the flexibility of her flesh
       (Sorry, sometimes i can’t avoid alliteration’s mesh,  
       But i’m no fish that, hooked on it, keeps looking for a fix),
       A feel to be felt through all its defenses (three? or six?
       He couldn’t conduct an indecent count) of various
       Textures of synthetic fabric we needn’t here discuss
       (Since we don’t want you, reader, to grind your teeth or cuss
       Over how long it’s taking to get our boy off the bus)
       – Anyway, it was the lady’s gelatinosity
       (Call it that, for want of a subtler word)

 

               SKETCH – 48

 

          Shocked into staggering, and almost tippling like a drunk,
        Winterkiss looked over his shoulder (ah, at last the monk
        Has come down from Overview Mountain) only to see her
        – In all her magpie pride, so clear despite his vision’s blur –
        To see her glancing back at him, her shoulders tight, her mouth
         A dark-red turned-down sneer (belying all the beauty south
        Of the rule of its scorn)

 

                             – 49

          This was both distressing and comforting for Winterkiss:
        Though The Lover by Tarot-type, he feared the artifice
        Which love and falling in and staying with the thing entailed.
        Once he had ‘loved’ a girl, Jane, so much, he ended up jailed
        For beating up a guy who had asked her for her address:
        Raimonde pummeled the boy’s face into a frightening mess.

 

                             – 50

        Why, even as he had been battering that boy’s eyes with
        His bruised knuckles the agents of his supposedly blind
        Jealous rage, he had, he remembered, felt sorry for him,
        – And himself, sorry his eyes were growing even more dim
        Than they already were, with the sweat of an anger too
        Crass to be entertained, yet acted out – by someone who
        Thought himself free of infantile jealousy spawned by lust –
        As his Jane screamed to her Tarzan to stop!, the guy was just
        A boy who had offered to buy her a drink, jesus chrust!
        – She whom Raimonde felt grateful to for her having enticed
        His right-royal arrogant ass off its rational throne,
        Bless her illogical jugs

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

 

 

 

 

                 
                        Cowitchy . in recline who could refuse one last    
             paseíllo > cape wrap a crowd grand bull < years spent ring
             running close | or charged with ‘lewd voting’ agree to abstain,
             part of a deal the vertebrae no longer acts the house full
             batty card handler.

                         Flags deadly in flight lose most harpy requests for
             a second chance . at nuance | granted, enzymes could leave
             fears still unadjusted . brows beading some fugit tempus  
             survivor might return, come after > shovel up camp oven
             bones cause trouble < all the rubble for attention That’s
             ridiculous! souls reduced.

                                        Wall plaqued . in  #meOne secure with
             holding, wrinkled fingers crack nostalgie in an evening soup
             bowl, wiping off any open coffin forehead kiss bits < from lips
             on face value the frog licks reveal.

             Legends down, main divers find a frame . veins declassifying;
             cables ‘n’ fate bring up ‘n’ back sovereigns for the glove
             blue : gold fish oil piroguery, a child pulled by the ear
             from classroom dreaming.

                           Mere glitches? nein | all genuine hives in God’s
             registry, steeups our chubby code folder, checking her Hi, it’s
             me! messages . not stuff shy to parlez her faith covered
             bed billow preferences. | Sic Mundus < part game, Si.
                                                                              
                                                                            – W.W.

           

                

         

 

          
            LESSING

            *LESSING, riding life's skiff of anxious atoms,
            Would remind himself, as traitor to all tribes,
            That he’s still just one of the boat’s galley-slaves.    

            Trouble is:  very few chained to it know how
            To row – and the bucket has long since capsized,
            And both those holding the oars and those the whips
          Are sinking while thinking their vessel the best of ships –
            Which is what every Final Apex sinker
            Swears, even as his Titanic’s cracking up
            Breaking down

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

 

 

 

 

           
        NUDE SKETCH – 43

           Sorry if such airy fish don't match your taste, for i love
        Imagining the changes the least significant thing
        Must go through in order to continue its becoming.
        Take the still androgynous mind of a god still clinging
        To its angelhood, though wriggling on the hook of ‘his’ fall
        Into flesh with ‘her’ first slap on the bum that makes ‘him’ bawl
        And gasp at ‘her’ insignificance, to make room for more
        Breath of complaint that will last a whole lifetime, rich or poor,
        What does the god’s soul know?

 

                 SKETCH – 44

 

           Raimonde was no longer such a disappointed being
         But a guy who could still bear taking the bus, though seeing
         Quite clearly through the blurs of his vision that he was not
         Ever quite present as a full-fledged bloomer in that hot-
         house of orchideous humans uncomplaining in their
         Routines of a blindness he, since childhood, could never share.
         Ever since he’d realised he had eyes, however flawed,
         The child Raimonde had known he could see through what overawed 
         Him in all its shining resonant clumsy quiddity 

 

                             – 45

 

         How did a mere wingless word-fledgling witness and survive
         Such a cruel cavalcade?    Now, he was only alive
         – On that motorised coffin of corpses breathing stale air –
         In the most limited sense of being able to blink
         And move his head from left to right and look around and think
         About what he could see and couldn’t see and didn’t want…
         – Not that none of it was wantable

 

                            – 46

 

           And yet Raimonde like a beggar kept peering for some hint,
         Some recognitive glint of real gold or some winter-flint
         That would spark like the wings of a magpie bathing in snow
         By flashing its scintillating feathers of yes-and-no.
           The memory of one such bird leapt into Raimonde’s mind
         Now as his gloved fist accidentally touched the behind
         Of a woman in white pants and a black leather-jacket
         Too loose at the neck for his cold-scared liking, but fuck it,
         The gal had chosen to open her protective collar
         Before climbing onto the dirty bus-steps, in all her
         Crisp clean fashionable glory (not to mention her sharp
         Shiny black boots designed for angels who don't play the harp)

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

 

            Sore so . the need, the feed to believers worth in some
         cases billions; most cores casting forward / the Ave . Vale
         hot stone line dance / not certain < cash ‘n’ burn, noodle
         the slurp ? board the diving grace.

         Tree rock veins re.up on altar knees, tongues out
         west for chocolate . store told virgin oil rubs shield
         faith flight from blade chase grounding; the groom
         pose doctoral dudes strike . stroking an Asian elephant
         painted trunk.

         How best to angle sleep work aerials . accounting
         angels cringe : yield days flare then over night shift
         flank | a window left open, uterus squat steamed; flash
         floods dishelving layers . shed to crown shingle solitude.

                         Pause one beat ! the papal square, phone lit
         robe red infallible ~ Ciao, Federico ~ urges all in booth
         whispers ! listen to bellbirds in the towers; press closer
         for word on flesh becoming . Vodun habeamus.

                            There’s only so much ~ Rolex to Rasta! ~ brand
         on hand can do about the slice fate of plate egg boils . for
         free when last peeled bottoms.
                                        Rip, sew . who takes off time ? worn
         nothing but . hard soft uncompromising.

         The foot good shoots, the net sighs limitations; flags off
         flurry sides; seconds coming ~ here! head wet tie breaker
         through! ~ that’s it, what balls we show | chance to wrap
         one more  now what you wonder  earth worm wiggle
         Searching ..air.

                                                                – W.W.

 

             

               

              

 

          LESSING 

            *OPENING his eyes one last time, Lessing sees
             The morning Sun insisting on seeing him,
             And at last he rises – out of sleep’s freedom
           To lay down his onus of owing the world more ‘sins’ –
             And into his final freedom of choosing
             Never to pick it up again, nor ever
             Again to fail to anchor midstream his craft.

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

 

 

 

 

           NUDE SKETCH – 39

        I and Mia (let’s call you by your love-name, my sweet sin)
        Were having it onan doff – me, the cheap son of a bitch

        (Sorry, Ma) who couldn’t afford a whore, and she, my win-
        some immigrant landlady taking private lessons in
        Anglish from her Portuguess-ish tenant (be it Brazil
        She say he be bornt in, or some place in dat Africa?,
        Who care when it come to him tongk like cock she take like pill
        Of promiss, annoder one in dis new hell Canáda
        Dat be once just pinkitsch stain in boringk Geagrophy)
        Who at leasdt, unlike husbandt, wash out mout wit Lisdterine
        Before sticking tongk down troat 

                  SKETCH – 40

        Now you know your ‘generator’, as a poor student, was
        The precursor of our lame-duck type, Raimonde Winterkiss,
        Don’t let that bias your opinion of the author as
        A writer (or a responsible tenant either:   his
        Rent was always paid up when due, and Mia never had
        Any regrets over renting to that i mean this lass lad)
        Or as a decent member of Soshighty and all that
        Codswallop which folks with enough cash to never fall flat
        On their face (except when they open their mouths) swallow whole
        ('Line, hook and stinker', as Mia used to say)

                              – 41

        But since classy makes poor compost and plain crap rich manure,
        The author and Raimonde, both, in a sense, seeding farmers,
        Would gladly admit to a decided indecency,
        There being nothing more rich to sprout from, and all for FREE.

                              – 42

          But what kind of freedom is that, you might well want to ask,
        And i might say:    The freedom of co-birthing a dream-masque
        In which the figures of potential meaning are no-one
        But you, reader, changing as you cross this or that stream
        Of Significance, Wonderment or, praise the lord Pan, FUN.
        – All with a little help from your co-creating friends:  me,
        Half-blind Winterkiss, not-unkind Mia Frears and a sea
        Of other ghostly fish and fishy ghosts about to float
        Up from the sea-bed and into our latency-lifeboat’s
        Con-text

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

 

 

             Leaving herd hangars virtues scramble, the family
         gasp ring can't reverse eggs after the shoot | high alerts
         instead bystanders hoping some time quick a job
         opens for endocrine home rewiring; breach closure.
                                Hind leggy innuendo sways like from this
         jelly good follow texting a faith big wife / they would later
         deny any knowledge / about inbetweeny head ducks.

                                                   Okay, #Snowfarer my dray
         horse laps drop markers ! but you know what I mean.
         Take off those skis.

                                               + 

                                    Back stage as means watch moves deep
         end, unnoticed mostly; though village rumors confirm pass
         overs of devotion, thighs tagged bitchy rubbing dry hurry
         powder away | winds even . as old sword beard Haroun
         drops by. 
                                          Beaky keen he’ll pick ‘n’ poke about
         anxieties, Who’ll mat those knees?  Not every seed starts
         pod packed; he’ll tube squeeze, like for Hajj circuit
         ambles.

                                               Don't estimate him . under most
         advances sweat the partum wet of mop handlers; indifferent
         tiles slip tease.

                                                +    

                               On the one, jump or cleave, desire requires
        no co-sign innings ‒ without which we’d feel identity cruising
        screwed | otherwise! tropes will loop any berth Hold! | put
        prize flowers out; bend resets, Mondays East West.
                                                                   
                                                                                   – W.W.

 

         

         

             

 

           
 
          MARA

          Of pain and rage a pure ingénue could have
          Hoped not to experience, nor even glimpse ‒
          As though seeing were seeing something outside
       Oneself (Mara soon caught the academic virus
          Of ex cathedra impersonality).
          *SOMEWHERE else, Mara could pay to do the trick
          Of delivering us from evil (some, more).

          By then there was nothing, she felt, she could not
          Do, even if only to prove that she could ‒
          Like people who travel all over the world
        Only to advertise where they have been and not yet.
          She, not exactly a millionaire, knows that
          Expansive habit will undo her at last,
          And for that moment, she keeps a poison-flask,

          Plus a sharp flick-knife, just in case and don’t ask:

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

 

 

 

 

           
       NUDE SKETCH – 35

       An author may seem to have more control than you over
       The hole spectacle, but he might say you’re more a lover
       Of all its gossip (limited though his will ever be)
       Than its generator (‘author’ only reluctantly)
       Who’s no more than a nut with a pen at her his disposal
       And a blank sketchbook he could afford from a dollar-store
       And the itch of a seemingly pretentious proposal
       That your eyes and his conspire to explore a maze of More.
       – But enough:    it will never be resolved, the enigma
       That marries the reading writer to the writing reader,
       The one the male pollen to the other’s female stigma
       In this follow-the-leader maze that has no set leader.

 

                 SKETCH – 36

          Bring back Raimonde on the bus, not thinking of his foe-friend,
        Mrs Frears, clawing cat with an angel’s shadow, mad bat
        Whose confussing wings staggered yet moored Raimonde’s moods like gripes
        To her firm dock of looking after boys, young or old, fat
        Or gaunt:    that mothering widow adopted extrame types
        And always thought of them as boys, her boys – who couldn’t wipes
        Own ass righdly and not keeps pisses insite doilet-bowl.

 

                             – 37

 

        She used to mother even that drunken Anglish asshole
        She had made the mistake (which was also good strategy)
        Of mirryang only to get the right to sta yin this
        Nice lonely cuntry where everybaddy leave you alone

        She never couldt unterstandt dat sorts of hypocritness
        With all chirpy-chirp please-and-tank-yous trowed at you like bones
        To starvingk dtogk.     – When she uttered so, how could Raimonde not
        Trust and love Mrs Frears, despite her interfering ways?
        No, she didn’t need her rent exactly on the first day
        Of every month, especially since she knew that her boy
        Always paid up long before its last day;   but yes, she did
        Need someboddy to look after and connect with

 

                              – 38

           Her tribal name was Grabowaska – or something like that,
        I’m not sure, though she told me more than once exactly what,
        As though i needed to have her ID-info down pat
        Before patting her down while helping her to learn her new
        Tongue that kept twisting around her old one with not a few
        Knotty results which the tongues in our mouths were too busy
        Wraping around each other to iron out, both dizzy
        With the more spittily urgent mater of heating up
        Sex’s convection-oven – while her husband, like a pup
        Who had slurped up his owner’s left-over beer, lay assleep
        And snoring downstairs

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