Category: Uncategorized

           Straight over the precipice, arms flapping on the way
        down – and here he is holding a press conference . which
        is what is clogging up our limb proceeds| even tree tower
        window leaners wave rags, cleaning as if already their air
        rights have vapored.

        The premise every one will eventfully move forward
        coasters the hour glass : whose bored child stick prods
        whose body inside ? sand grains jammed nanotight so,
        stomach turd curating . secrets that might out . run
        ruin everything.

        Thighs bidding for apple bites tempt hubris down; add
        the boot bendy luck of progress . banks rolling over
        rubble as dust inhaling lenders uncover well well
        Well ! ovary dark preserves . could be updatable; call.

                                                                                  That :
        ‘A day is like an hour; a week is like a day,’ inmate
        jellymen pray . praise the stars mobile with plight
        devices; though calendar / inward slash count / marks
        the sky . spark blue in extremis left raging.

                                                                            D’accord :
        So you ‘can’t continue like before’ . carpet ride ‘born
        this way’ home : the final movement, the only sin
        unscented set to bowel . swell millennium flower
        beds, sniffles You’re good \ too good! \ to leave.

                                                                         – W.W.

         
                                [ In mem . João Gilberto . 1931 – 2019 ]
 

            LESSING

         *WHY did lower-level devils like him think
          In such cheap tropes like dead trees lining a rut?
          And he wondered how she managed to survive!
        It was only when she said, out of the blue, You can
          Flirt with me a little, you know that he could
          Begin to imagine a map of the maze
          Of hell she was inviting him to enter –
            

            Which he perversely did, though it cost him Qat
          And lost him a lot of protein fucking up
          And down between cities and highway motels –
       Before the exhausted lovebirds invented a fight
         So she could find herself a White-next-time knight
         Whose horizons bore more than mere hints of sails
         Abulge with spice-perfumes from exotic shores

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

          NUDE SKETCH – 11

                                               through telltale ‘Raimonde Winterkiss’
          Who awoke one frosty morning to a fleeing of bliss
          Rising out of his frowns like vapor from ice.    Happiness,
          Or the hint of, before it bore any fruit, was a threat
          To Winterkiss, a parannoyed sourpuss who wouldn’t let,
          On the best of days, anything close to a slime upset
          His Keatonesque mask which he favored like a fragile pet
          He was saving from some meddlesome nut-neutering vet.
          But today, looking in his mirreither, his eyes grew wet
          From his sense that life, that crappy joke, could prove happy yet.

                     SKETCH ‒ 12

          (And when those dried up, and since he couldn’t afford to pay
          For a real roll, there was always Mrs Frears, his landla-
          dy who once in a while would let her Raimonde ‘make her day’.)
          And so what if every now and then he woke ups creaming?
          The first thing he’d not ice was still moon- or sun-light beaming
          Through his room’s window, and he’d think -i was only dreaming,
          Who cares if some ghost was choking me?-     And, his eyes streaming
          With post-nightmare releaf and eagerness for the steaming
          Pile of manure called The Next Day, he wood get out of bed,
          Scratching his head and his crotch, and thank God he wasn’t dead

                            – 13

          Where's the story they promissed us?      Do they not realies
          That ‘Winterkiss’ up to now hasn’t done a single thing
          Worthy of ou rattention except to open his eyes
          And feel, despite his ingroined pissimessm, like singing?
          Alll right, so dunce in a while we all like a fuel lies
          About the Easy or Simper Life to take us winging
          On a reinbow over our whoreyesons of compromise,
          Boredom and despair and such, but christ, should our liars cling
          To their reignbows too long, we reeders wood dam their eyes
          For not reminding u show darned hard life is, how dooming-
          ly inescapable its routines

                            ‒ 14

          Readers want to be persuaded of tough heroes and things
          In their dencity.   Don’t try to convince us otherswise.
          The ‘facistnotion of what’s diffycult’ is the brass ring
          In the nose of our ‘suspender of disbelife’ that cries
          Out to be pulled into grazing fields of mouth-watering
          Cuds of consoiling gossip about life’s complexities
          – Which, in fictioff at least, are exemplifried as the swing
          Between positive/neggative poles given humon guise.
            Trubble is:     Winterkiss was far too plimsole a being
          To live the kind of life which can be sensationalised
          Enough to sitassfy formrulers of story-telling
          On which every guzzler of addictive gossip relies.

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

           
       NUDE SKETCH – 07 

           Oui, c’est moi, con who has failed to forego love’s brouhaha
       And still riskily friskilly forgets his resolve not
       To postpone its transcendance, the moment he spots a face
       And/or figure that remind/s him of his long-dead mama,
       His Mutter?     Meiner! ‒ given to and snatched from me by him,
       Meine Vater, und nein, there’s nothing oedipussy there,
       It’s a fact, not the fact of a myth, that the old man was
       There before me, tasting mia mamma’s capezzoli
       Before i could get my short-in-the-tooth chops around them
       (I still sense the lady’s pleisure at my intuitive
       Expertease which she herself allowed me to be born with

             SKETCH – 08

      Sì, mine’s but a case of infantilità banale,
      That commonplace retarded traumatic fascinotion
      Which the senses hold for thelmseves grabbing you long before
      You can get your first ass-slap to take you make your first gulp
      Of air and make your first bawl of protest against the fuss
      Of breath’s dense body which your own soul called for and helped form,
      Experimental opportunist, the soul, scientist
      Become artist of self-molding in one flash of marrage
      Between tail-wagging sperm and yoke-spreading egg ‒ always in
      For more trouble, the soul

             SKETCH – 09

              Well, i’ve decided i must write badly well (as you see):
       That seems to be the freest way to fail at being free
       Of Litricher’s avid leaning towards posterity
       – Of which i’ve been, tool long, too fatihful a devotee

                         – 10***
               

           But pay scant attention to my purple intensity
       (Not quite Yeats-passionate), one pathetic propencity
       Of a poetaster in love with the immensity

       Of pressuring meaning out of vises of verse and rhyme
       And being shocked by bliss in the midst of the flat Grand Time
       Being had by labell-spouters ‒ the standhard murderus
       Civil Servants of Common Sense & Correct Form that fuss
       To feed, like choked dragons, off/on their own smoke, while i cuss
       And grind my grey dentures – instead of shouting Hideous!

       ***    A last word on the form Arterra’s sketches took:   she thought
                 that, as a poetaster, she should at least try to fail
                 to overthrow the thudding thumb of the English iamb,
                 that bully with its colonising whip which not even
                 wildman Whitman tried to escape.     Nor do his descendants,
                 with their dry twitching twigs snapped off their bush of ambition
                 to be poets, know any need to court that poetry,
                 that impersonal siren animating the serpent
                 curling up and down the spine of breath anteceding all
                                                  – Lissana Cesare-Ábusem, PhD

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

      NUDE SKETCH – 04 

                                 i'm now a plant bearing a disease
     That’s dying to kill me ‒ and i wish i could get away
     With tha told joke about the dizzies called living, but mine
     Is an actual heart-‘imbalance’ that, like Susan’s can’t
     Be re-centred – that simple, but hard for even this me
     ‒ Who swallows other ‘scientific’ fudge whole ‒ to digest,
    Or try to undersand.    I believe it’s complacated:
    Since a fellow doctor told me so, i must beleave her,
    ‒ More so since I pay her to service my more-or-less corpse
    Which continews to hurt up here and down there, yes there, ow,
    There, you got it

              SKETCH – 05

         But i'm healthy enough to be lazy enough to not
      Take too seriously the Complain’t ‒ or anything else,
      Finally.    I confess:    at (flat) bottom, at (failty) heart,
      I’m a ‘hopeless case’ ‒ what’s new?:  When i was 9, i could see
      That the diffronts between 9 and 19 and 99
      Was a matter of days and hours made up of me reseconds.
      Now that Dr Wotzernutz tells me i have even less
      Seconds to look forward to, i sense a sigh of relief
      Undernearth the sporaddict stabbings of pain (here, there and,
      Yes, there, higher, down a bit, that’s it).   Call it layziness,
      If you like, but i no longer feel the need to man-age
      The rest of my seconds

                            – 06 ***

          But i trust i’ll wake up in the morning and start again
      That business, this business of plotting that, preparing this
      And promissing or projechting the other ‒ all those plans
      Which, as the joke goes, make God laff ‒ with lafter not unlike
      My own when i look in a mirror at a skull dolled down
      To a joke of flagging skin that both cornfims the vision
      Of the boy of 9 ‒ and belies it, since what he could not
      Envisage was himself still breathing from behind the mask
      Of a 69-year-old grin more grossume than any
      Completely unmasked skull’s.     Yes, sagging flesh and thisease not-
      withstanding, the half-blind 9-year-old survives

           *** But, Arterra felt, the writer’s impulse as a ‘garden
                   of forking paths’, then became locked to the cage of Progress
                   with its opportunism stunted by Attention-span
                   as quik-fix resolutions from Hemingway for Dummies
                   to digital distractions, the bastards of the English
                   mistrust of ideas as empire-unfriendly – in contrast
                   with French or German ideationality as mid-
                   wifing the ongoing birth of breath rehearsing the stars.
     
                                                   – Lissana Cesare-Ábusem, PhD

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