FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN

                                                                 
                                                                 
                                                                      "And in point of fact – there it was – pregnant
                                                                         again after all these years.”
                                                                              – Wilson Harris, “The Waiting Room”

          
       Sworn to stay rid of colonizers, then news spread about
       a fungus lounge in the pancreas. Send down the mudloggers! clean
       deep sea avenues, boom drain experts in route canals.                        
                     It’s a card scratch to morrow about : mites gross in
       the coils nibbling our huddles . in the cane fields, over pet
       fur sheet strandings.

                                  The baldy man who walks angst hands
        behind back knows a thing or two URL hurlyburly three
        some chewing gum only half tease.
                      Fowlers on the coast wild ‒ like sand quick rich
        marchands, thumbs on Bedouin age wounds ‒ loop ‘n’ pen
        merde holds . infinglers understand what this means for colon
        passagens / hot in outhouses emission rules.

                        Meanwhile, asked what happened check tight first
        mating, an ex Carib queen posed . hips sealed : too much duck
        rubbery. Too much duckrubbery! that’s how iSash'on platforms
        glow . crude light, no quarter moons.

                                  Here's the latch : extract spats aside, fat
        pledges no longer analog leave little groom for flag raise lady
        crab hems . for fleas that pee red on the carpet, the potted
        plant seems Oh Dear! BBC metres off . air pocket views.

                                  These vapours, you breast heave, like host
        guest courtesy bows, could fade famously the old one cent
        stamp way; like my old aunt’s coin change purse . grip
        for fish rain days | Ok . who dives well not chest vested?
                                          
                                                                       – W.W.

       

           

 

             LESSING

         Checking on him from the saddle of his thighs,
         Her eyes those of a careful fox ensuring
         Its eating of a fellow was in service
       To this Other’s need and desire for change from one set
         Of buzzing atoms to another: that pure,
         For all her grunts, groans and yelps of quasi-words
         And her last smile: You me firs Brack. No difflence!

         (Her English wider than his Chinese or their
         Portuguese.)  Other gamblers too must have known
         Guanyin’s disinterested generosity
       As their Eastern trophy, but not known his afternoon
         With her in her busy but well-tended room
         Which she turned into the humbling Titanic
         Of his hubris of consumerist buying

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

  

         

          NUDE SKETCH – 31

          What he was witnessing was a d rama being rehearsed
          At primitive and pupal stages of maturity;
          Was an urgency whose ‘window of opartunity’
          Was closing down, as was perhaps all of huemanity
          – Again.   But this death-birth pulsation (a soul knows many,
          Has sunk with, yet survived, many a sinking empire’s shit)
          Had a pungent odor of nosetalgia rising from it,
          A yestalgia for angelhood – despite all the money
          And crass but clever polluting racket that policed it,
          Despite all the Future and futures that were promissed it

                    SKETCH – 32

            Yet it persisted, the herd’s eager-to-be-eaten bent,
          Underbelly of their eating-lust, that fatall tallent
          They shaired with every other member of the Cosmic Maw
          With its teeth chained to tyrant Hunger’s omnipotent law.
          Under its yoke Raimonde himself, say once a week, bent weak,
          His stomach as small as a bird’s and his mouth like a beak
          With which every now and then he’d peck at some nuts or seeds,
          But seldom feeling deep hunger, seldom feeling the need
          To bite into anything, least of all into the flesh
          Of some innocent beast who had been kept behind a mesh
          Form onths and forced to get fat on sum chemical lies (dnosh
          Out of a nosebag)
 

 

                                – 33  

 

          A lack of empathic imargination, Raimonde felt,
          Was the germ of every hypocritical horror dealt
          As business-as-usual by dealers to the players
          Sleapwalking through their game-hands and handhakes, with their layers
          And layers of pre-judicial lava sliding under
          Their thick sleep’s thin skin and about to burst its next blunder
          Of holocaust (a term not to be limited to Jews

                                – 34

           This skechter can guess what you’re likely to think:    – They’re only
           Using this ‘Winterkiss’ to piss on and piss off the rest
           Of us moretales just trying to get through the damned lonely
           Business of being breathing bodies bearing souls, at best.
           – Well, yes and no:   yes, provocation is ever a part
           Of bothering to midwife and give birth to any f/art,
           Even the crudest and yes, the deliberately crude,
           Like this (call it ‘crudist’, just to be accurately rude);
           But no:   nothing's pre-medictated:

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

         *A note on the text:  Rather than clutter an already chaotic ‘sketchbook’ with many ‘[sic]s’
              after Fatima’s misspellings – most significantly of a psychologist – (whether scribbled in
              haste or out of faulty memory or out of a perversely determined dyslexia shunning
              ‘Litricher’ with near idioglossial zeal), I’ve chosen to let her oddities of scrawl (including
              her thankfully shortlived boldfaced (multi-inked) ‘deconstructs’ ending with the
             ‘significan’t’  hint of their own ‘ch as m’) stand without editorial excision on my part.
              – L.C-A

 

                                        

 

         

                                                                        to Brian & Mollie                 

            The coffin lift grips shiny, first drafts tucked in
            like a bodybuilder's pyramid sets; shovel stomach
            turning gardens | wealth^check worms caught naked
            wiggle a full face shave disclosure : which side gets
            to play well?   Wait wait, I was juking! not juggling.

            Coin issues lipping in before the meter expires allow
            colonoscopy cops to enter > jigger, so opinions like sticky
            rice poop softly > trade warriors should experience cold
            feet once at least.

            Oil off shore bankers drying out the night haul < lost gold
            fish keep jumping our falls; village fly girls taking home
            cooked orders ~ chat nyam?  No! lest they claim ~ two silvery
            forks poke at marriage omelets screen off chefs wouldn’t
            remake.
                                                                                                Oh
            the plan ‒ with no phone no sky camera – one fresh dog
            teaming shot at Antarctic whiteness; the rubble crouch
            run under weapon fire for a pack of jokes; the shop lottery
            agent asking, How you been?

                                 None of whose business is all this ? hunger
            deep, done light before house^passed Confucius motions
            of happiness.

              Come shove the harbour faut quitter : il on its back
            in a forest of polished hard wood \ the navel hollow
            livid, It broke, I didn’t do anything \ receiving close
            off libations, Chinese rubber gaskets; the rest of it
            Ce n’est rien! sent ahead . far as we can tell.

                                                                               – W.W.

                        

           

               

          

           LESSING

           *BUT, now, checked into the tallest casino-
            Hotel his Visa-card can bluff to, Lessing,
            Guanyin and all wave-crests and -falls behind him,
         Starts betting, the sirens of risk and of getting more
            Than he has to lose (there is no escaping
            His room’s price) still singing their green blues to lure
            His soul’s grey ship from its true home-harbour.

            *YES, death and all that, he loses, wins, loses
            Most of his pile, then phones (collect) his ex, Mo
            (She manages an inn in Banff), who threatens
         To fix his frilly you-know-what if he ever try
            Again to get her to len him any more
            Of her, he get it?, her effin (Moreen is
            Decent: she dares not fully cuss) hard-earn cash.

            But let her poke around in her purse and see…
            Dis is de laast time, OK?

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

 

 

          NUDE SKETCH – 27

           That poor (‘lidtle-richish’, as she tagged herself) landlady
        Could have no imagination for the minds of the likes
        (Unique, but also types) of Raimonde, and i’m afraid he
        – for all his allegiance to outsiders from kikes to dykes
        To street-beggars (whom even the best kikes and dykes, who should
        Feel something for their fellow outsiders, blandly ignore
        And sometimes righteously refuse a cent – ‘for their own good’) –
        Had no patience (his time was always running out some door
        – Of urgent anxiety ever about to be closed)
        For this latest of widows who would have him for a son,
        Although (because?) he didn’t want to be one.   He supposed
        She felt sorry for him.

                                            ..

       For balancing their centres of heads and hearts, cocks and cunts
       And every other polarity of experience

                  SKETCH – 28

 

         – Speaking of which, how did Winterkiss find the time to fuse
       His two careers of resident duncehood as regards dense
       Earthbound commonsensical matters, and of hesitant
       Confidence in the face of finer things-not-things that can’t
       Be ignored, since they’ve no respect for what you think you want,
       But nudge and tickle and turn you beyond all self-defense?
       Things-not-things might overwhelm, but things-things demanded:

 

 

                                      – 29

 

          Ah, distraction!, Raimonde now with quasi-nostallgia thought,
        If only he could afford to indulge that blinking thing
        That clung to and leeched off each focus of those few who sought
        To bring a moment of clear Silence to their suffering.
        But of course everyone suffers ‒ even those with enough
        Money to appear to be beyond such immature stuff
        And may object to ‘suffering’ as too grand an idea
        To apply to normal slaves who thank God when it’s Friday
        (Sed q.e.d.).   But Raimonde, feeling out the blurry forms
        Of all the gods about him, all the wrd&nmber worms
        Whose freedom to choose some angels are believed to covet,
        Knew it was suffering’s pain all were trying to escape

 

                                – 30

 

            But, half-blind Raimonde now thought, so many people must love
         To suffer the tyrant’s racking wheel, and who could blame them?
         Its teeth were so smiling in their bite through the apple of
         Aunticipation of things promised (and all would claim them)
         That the distractees, spinning through suck delickious torteure
         Which would change the constitution of their eyes and their nerves
         And their very psychic fibre with all its twists and swerves,
         Were seduced beyond discriminating between ordure
         And gold, both equally whipped and frothèd-up for easy
         Conventient swallowing – consumption not for queasy
         Stomachs like Raimonde’s.

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

 

 

 

 

                                                                                      
                                   …taking root, the chosen place in which to raise
                                       the final tent, where you can walk out into the night
                                         and have your face washed by time, and join up with
                                          the world, with the Great Madness, with the Grand Stupidity.”
                                                         -  Julio Cortázar, “Hopscotch” (1966)

                                                  for Davo, Johnny, Robbie /GT

                                                   Night scolds warming . stomach to back on
          line for life close hanging / Satira's bone wedge discharges, Can't
          go on like this / through prayer fabric slits Save me! code
          slips.
                                                                                 Swipe anime
          swish dock / the comb loose wonder, tattoo cover / even
          her mother wouldn’t believe she just click left . no duck
          weed sucked shell.             
                                                                     Hard to fold sheet
          cleaners of company stain come after you like issue arrive
          seagull on train platform . you might do well to practice
          not withstanding the tree bird powerline pivot.

                                                                              At some front
          desk point the act resets her form address : short Show
          More cuts ? the bend overtures of wealth white glass
          milking | tail light !the fuck you snatching at?  deer skip
          away.

                                                                   Park way back siding head
          lean marks you . off what purpose depends who’s paying
          attention; or sends a scootering house delivery ~ about this
          Japanese haunt design by one M. Aurelius Biswas.
                                    Nah, the bells don’t ring . plus Satira's ankles
          might jewel up star spangling | they roll you only you
          now.
                                                                                Hold on, door
          opening ? es muy diferente / off the knob the syllables air
          lift . hearts stop here to hungers sift / time gem precious
          haggle.
                                                                      – W.W.

            

         

           

       

         

            MARA

            *Had it not been for her innate (she thinks) flair
            For awareness of her soul as a gold bowl
            Drained of all its memories of former lives
         (So that it might not be terrified by the prospect
            Of one more petrified-physical lifetime)
            And of her mind as a metal-plate hammered
            And etched with words and other labels of doubt –

              Had it not been for such early self-versions,
            Would she have had the detachment she needed
            To survive the pain of her parents passing
         On to her the cross of their own childhood’s cruelties?,
           Hoping she might help them bear the choked panic
           Which its crucifictions had spawned within them,
           Helplessness with no naming voice for itself.

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

       

 

       
   
        NUDE SKETCH – 23

        He felt critics of religious superstition who sleep
        In shifting shades of shaky five-senses-locked Science-rocks
        (But even rocks hold memory of once having been stars
        And dream of the day when they shall take part in stars again)
        Are no less shibbolethick followers than the old strain

                                   . .

       But then Raimonde too had once swallowed a dose of thinking
       That all blinkered dungkeys must want to learn to think, to see
       As muck as he thought he saw they needed to.

 

                 SKETCH – 24

       He also realised that that conclusion was a good
       Self-appleid vaccination against the unempathic
       Separations and lonelinesses passing themselves off
       As Change and Progress and Moderrnity, all pathectic
       Excuses, as far as Raimonde could see (and he could laugh
       At his own limited vision), for the Real Thing, that sense
       Of the divine (creathive) bell of the self wit hits ring
       Of alchemic releasing of the fine out of the dense.

                        

                             – 25

         I'd agree there was no greater transcendalist snob
       Than our boy Raimonde:   he was simply cu tout for the job,
       A work for those like him who didn’t know what else to do,
       Who could barely firmly re-tie the lacing of a shoe,
       One – at – a- time
                                  – like his two left feet now bungling downstairs
       From the second-floor room he rented peach from Mrs Frears,
       A not yet wizened widow who liked the fact of a man
       Under her roof (even if he so vegetarian
       He never try her Polish sausage fry with sauerkraut)
       She was nervous, but not too timid when she had to shout
       To Raimonde upstairs that he was latingk again with rendt
       And that, if he didn’t ship up, she would have his ass-sendt
       To jail for takingk atvandage of her goodtly kindness.

                             – 26

         See, Frears had no sympathy for her tenant’s half-blindness:
       So his eye-glasses be as thick as triple-pane windtow
       And he can tink slow… but he know what mean lose and win, dough,
       He not be dat slow, and neider she be (Mrs Frears would
       Often, in true immigrant style, make herself understood
       By crook or by hook interchanging the positions of
       Her cart-objects and her horse-verbs with a vigorous shove
       From her determined tongue of intent to get across her
       Meaning, Anglish or no Anglish

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

 

 

 

             
                                                                                          Lamb
         kin strange love, eyes closed while you're under . taking
         assumes yield bonds will loop ‘n’ wrap what little you
         have everything you worked for here nobody cares.
                                                                                            Break
         format new : at the peak roll off / torso piercing cactus
         sheets mat catch below; plus something in the air bag
         whiffy dog custom . mud knees to declare.

         Ocean gone ? risen you might wonder whose flail sink
         path you could have paved; whose Help ! please blocked
         by the inrush of water spotting a loose float crevice.
                                                                                             Gulp,
         you’ll learn how sea risk rollers beach . strip . wash off
         corpus confirmed salt.
                                                                                       Where
         necks crane this for readiness : faith walls peeling, scrape!
         save! till intime links start up . prime task found floor
         reboarding.
                             With split screen touch you’ll pinch the view
         of whales, word etch cap size recount . how currents toss
         pack risk again boat meat.

                              There will be be bridge flood stallings . forest
         mountains pastures humpable like camel; even skimpy
         microbes won’t submit a wiggle you could camp gut
         pin – all told co-sigh . sand wet wretch, Benvenuto!
                                                                                            Out 
         done, resite the sun tan server . stow away the seashells
         reception.
                                                             – W.W.

 

           

         

             

         

              

          LESSING

         *TO AOMEN via Taiwan and Hong Kong, those
         Detachments from/of China whose vigorous
         Fatalism matched Lessing’s, for he found theirs
       Less inscrutable than it is believed to be and
         More readable than it (or his) cared to be.
         His offhand ‘reading’ of ‘Chinese’ness was both
         Colonistic (his refusal to accept

         Any tribe's totems of ethos as final)
         And mutualist (no uniqueness discrete).
         Lux ex Oriente, Wisdom, The East:   flags
       Even ‘Orientals’ wave, kowtow to or salute,
         The tribal mind ever an ass welcoming
         The branding whips goading it to bray and dance
         With chained hooves – which yet often kick at their fate.

           (from “Charon’s Anchors” by Brian Chan, 2018)

 

 

        NUDE SKETCH – 19
        

        But there were moments when '‘God’ was forgotent and ‘Hell’ was
      Only a case of  having to ‘solve’ one bootlace’s knot
       – As right now, after Raimonde has decidered to bypass
       His morning shower and plunge into putting on his shoes
       And getting on with dotting his pees and crossing his cues.

         He hadn’t buffed his boots in months, and wondered when he would,
       Why he should, and if his innate laziness ever could
       Be bothered about suck stuff only to prove himself good,
         A good son of the tribe that puts a shine on everything

 

               SKETCH – 20

          But Only transcend, Winterkiss would uppend to someone
        Else’s Only connect (whether in a melding of two
        Souls, or by map-lines drawn between millions of stars) – love’s glue,
        Or the glob that passes for the real thing, being far too
        Limited a linking rung on his ambitious ladder
        For scaling Time’s prison-walls while remaining within them
          – Such triumph being what would make Love’s rose even gladder
        Of its grave-roots than if it stayed the mere end of a stem
        Of fate’s acceptense’s complacent plant.  Nothing sadder,
        Raimonde felt, than to sink to such ‘wisdom’ ad hominem

 

                           – 21

 
         Then why did he stay in a so-be-it let-it-be state
         Rather than try to do something about his so called fate?
         Perraps he felt that fate seminal and final at once.
         True, some doctor had told him about some operation
         To his eyes that might… but that only reminded our dunce
         Of weather forecasts he used to hear in his birth-nation
         (Raimonde had more than one country to which he not-belonged
         Having been born yer stranger-in-a-strange land and remained
         A staunch non-member of all tribes to which he sang his song

 

                           – 22

 

            Speaking of witch:     Raimonde had a bent for being haunted
         By a Purity not forced but ‘organic’.   Sure, today,
         Religious links may be reduced to dead-cert DNA
         And all sacred discernmeant to religiocity.

         But the fashionable de rigueur rejection of all
         Religion and religious sensibillity – as sheer
         Brainsoak for superstitiou  sinheritors of the Fall –
         Was for Raimonde only more evidence of the one Fear
         – Of the Power imbued in every individual –
         To be found in the laziest, most literalist sheep
         Bloated with the gas of any fundamnentalist flock.

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

 

 

         
           
        Yes! no, mi close . mi can't forget, Miss Femi; habits
        flowered since the feel breeze songsters sailed : kitchen
        table cup lip sip . sun rise scripture wringing dry
        salt bed sheet. 

        Ready – since the moth days of love letter, lamp shade,
        yield on marriage lawn – made time ketch you left
        you thick rain see through windows \ the teapot hot
        spout, crystals refine; your tinkle stirs, congratulating.

        Morning . unhook the stem hung tomato; summon
        yuh Rasta nettle weedster \ Evening . sign in Di’fer,
        your only child, account.
                                                               Who need lift
        shop, banana you could squeeze jam own juice make.
        And tell book players who drop by coffee ground well
        cell calibrate.

                             Kno' seh how island fate line draw : hair
        fear skin preset, pikka wrong strong peppering; yard
        graffiti dance a wall . half sad a mother shedding. 
                                                                  Fi back climb
        change yam you decline, fi Zion step finesse.

                           True, something always there . grace
        jar badlabeling : mountain top ‘reachers, carnivores
        for Pastor time ! think they know you . how yu burn ‘ol
        Mas Joe poets ✓might, peace finding.
                                                                     – W.W.

  

         

        

         

            

        MARA

        The bridge between this marriage (yet) of mirrors –
        The kind of mutuality that insists
        On itself more often than our learnt sepa-
      rations let themselves be aware of or imagine –
          Is born of a detachment become a zeal
        Of posing that lets each woman do nothing
        But wait, without waiting, to pounce and to fix.

        But at last the mirrors eyeing each other
        Have nothing to adjust but their reflections
        Of each other’s waiting-determined blankness.
      And so they confront each other by fronting away,
        The space between them like a pregnant belly –
        Whose waters’ break Mara suddenly forces:
        Nous croyons que le monde est plus grand que nous.

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

 

 

             
          NUDE SKETCH – 15

          And what weepy Winterkiss realeyesed that morning was
          His simplyciti in all its anchorite silence and
          Utterrants as they are joined in marriage within his buzz
          (Think of Winterkiss as a human bee trapped in the sand
          Slipping down through the tight neck of an hourglass’s walls)
          Of being response-able as a half-blind wit-ness while
          Never forgetting to keep his ears open for the calls
          To that impersonal purrity no dog can deafile.
             So Winterkiss got out of bed and bowed down to the Sun,
          The resident and so visible god of purity
          Whose power lies in rendering light’s truth to everyone

 

                   SKETCH – 16

 

           Earth's generosity, unlike her fathim-Sun’s, can shift
           From uttered surface-sprouting kindness to undergrownd, sheer
           Quake-making hellish reclayming of her gifts – in the blink
           Of a human eye, and the solar eye may have to seep
           Its light down through the thickest of Earth-clouds as dark as ink
           (Clouds the stubborn fruit of contemptestuous minds that keep
           Their polluting waste piled up in the sky’s promissing plains,
           The business of evaporation and condenstation
           And precipitation the mere cogs of blind minds’ dark rains
           – A notion you may think stinks of mad imagination
           But, as my flies reveal, sane dreams are dreams called mad, made mad
           By all the measures of insanitty that pass for sane)

 

                                – 17

            By bowing to the Sun, did Raimonde Winterkiss believe
            He could ensure sum specious special privilege down here
            Or up their?    He once said he saw himself as a slight sieve
            That gathered light so as to sift and spread it through the air
            Of the Auden-named ‘prison of his days’ (or day – just one:
            ‘Days’ clung to inmates who believed they’d always be one more
            Chance to un-cook and re-balance their books of Breath before
             Auditor Death’s surprise-visit to foreclose on their bones)

 

                                – 18  

            Pessimist sentimental (Nay and Aye), our Winterkiss.

               We may think so, but he saw himself as a realist
            Who, going trough Hell, had to keep going, sweeping a path
            Through it shot coals, shedding all its shadows before missed,
            Clearing its shelves and books of false numbers, ‘doing the math’

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