Tag: Brian Chan

THE CHINA SAUCER BREAK AGE *

 

         
      Mirror wall caves more exquisite than truth . once
      our route charged with unlimited minutes.
                                  Blood types can go shark tooth . bone
      formations open force . formulas guard anyone apart in
      tent nomadic who dare screw found with.

      Stone buildings with double pane windows restyle the cold
      high castle . dungeon saves. Devices tap you text quick
      love ! scratch back finds a match : knot records kept
      string mystery loss.

      Bitch on any pledge . may your balls, ducks swear,
      into a thousand peck bits fall. The da-да! Endlike
      clutch, dinosaurs trying for a baby | Anyways.

      Over heard inside the kingdom ? as in sand serpent
      days crescendent blades behead \ An error occurred \
      melon slice red : And you thought, lip moisture
      rising, you’d never scarf anything like it.
                                                                   Where will you,
      Mon Dieudonne ? shak-shak shake, Medium elect again.
      No . time is ever wasted.

      As for what some bad Papa forbid, dead wise once
      said, sons will swing light . sky sorcerers : cloud
      caught they wait till trop c’est trop! ~ spiral in
      exhume . brush S‘o’S skulls like Basquiat.
                                                                      *Bent . people
      poking at us, what were we taking . on life rails fugue
      fevers run ? who forks less more > lean in here
      round the horns . amazed again.
                                                                 – W.W.

       

         

 

         QAT

       Qat's shaking-off of negative influence
       From Charon’s bad vibes (she is an active fan
       Of Hippy and New Age shibbolethal jive)
     Was literalist: she would let her whole frame quiver
       Like a dog’s after a soak, or as when her
       Body’s heat lowers as she pees. Then she’d sign
       The Cross onto her still (half-)Catholique torse.

       Finishing an action with such a gesture
       Is key to Qat’s sense of balance, while Charon’s
       Main anchor was/is his reluctance to be
     Steady or pinned down like a still jerking butterfly.
       Yet sometimes Qat sensed the tâche of suicide
       Sweeping out from under his lazy eyelids,
       Pauvre vieux, rien qu’un homme ‒ et à peine.

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

 

NOW . LEFT OF CALL TIME

 

          
              Not even the driest humor could jook! make humour 
       shrink; über less in terra stages every last ‘n’ first
       time . act the beaver faith retriever.

                                             Runways at forest edge oblivion
       strips for our departure ? forgoing all the blood we let
       angels restart ~ Merci, cellTower ~ particles of odor vie fly
       here there encrypt in screen swipe nowadays.  

                 Some air shows like Sahel dust propel face
       touch infinitesimal; it matters you don’t think until
       solitary the viaducts choke . migraine shields mock Hope
       you’re happy now.

       Clam shellfish types set up mausoleum webs . in stuff
       their resumés ? like Egypt pyramid relic wraps to carry on
       over.
                          Who D’cries box burial ? grounds not fit
       for hair loss care; get the Premium Conditioning package
       all that permutation . closer to home Economics, don’t
       presume après the sky falls.

                                                                   Knowing nothing
       knocks to wake you for the gate sleep keepers, why
       bother ? schedule post Op ash Wednesdays.
                                                                                      Flat
       line order the Fin d’oeuvres : ask the Cloud play All
       Season standards / Dig in! / taste what the wiped plate
       rim secures . at which point ? what could go wrong.

                                                            – W.W.

  
     

        

        
        LESSING 

        Stepping out of bed, he yawns, stretches and bows
        In the Sun’s direction, ironically at first,
        But next, not so, his blood rushing to his head,
      Pressing him to transmute his gesture like base metal
        Into the gold of genuine surrender
        To the outer gold acknowledging its twin,
        Reaching off the varnished floor to his bare toes

        Whose feet are suddenly flooded with a need
        To affirm their actualness by springing
        To a rabbit-like hopping around the room,
      As though racing to a point of goodbye to themselves,
        And, hopping, Lessing feels the fascia under
        His latest skin flapping like a gusted flag
        Dying to be freed from its skeletal pole.

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

 

 

 

FATIMA ARTERRA : CONTRAFICTIONS

 

        NUDE SKETCH – 01

     WE ARE TOLD that Wisdom helped to set the sought/foundations
     Of the Earth.   So why not invoke Wisdom to emerge here,
     At the start of this world, this odder dream?    Trouble is:   i
     Am no wisdom-wand god.     For one, i have no wisdom-teeth,
     Nor have ever had:   they never put in a twopairance,
     Never turned up, never sprouted, though I do remember
     Sore back-gums in my youth.   Susan, my last wife, consouled me
     that a lack of wisdumb-teeth did not necessarily
     (She liked staggering spanner-in-the-works words like that one,)
     Denote folly.   Would I rather be as long in the tooth
     As i was elsewhere short?     (Ouch!)   Often her words flagged themselves,
     Through her jestures of raised eyebows and a shrug, as a joke,
     A jovial javelin of revenge for all the pain
     I caused her by assuming we were both enjoying life.

        Another way of looking at our joking together
     (I was no better than Susan at not having to joke)
     Is that our jokes were like planks being nailed onto a frame
     Slowly that way becoming a bridge, one we more and more
     Needed between us ‒ before it turned into her caixão

 

      SKETCH – 02

        Will this record, of the kind of hajj i never dreamt i
      Would ever make, itself shrivel into a limping joke?
      But lame or not, as crutches, my jokes are a humorist’s,
      For l-imp-ing along the Serious Way, i tend to want
      To burst into laughter.    Or call me a mere absturdist
      Who can’t help seeing the vanity of all our buzzing
      Effarts ot climbing this or that molehill of ambition.

                   – 03 ***

       Should you, testy reader, need to tag such talk ‘pretentious’,
      I’d suggest you either throw out this book or, grinding your
      Wisdom-teeth, rip this page out and scrunch it up or mail it
      To the Onfire of the Minister of Forein Offears.
      But if you entertain these case-studies just as they are
      In your hands, they may dekidney a laugh or two, or more,
      Who can tell? – not only jokes but also less ambitious,
      Non-threatening notthings that have no pretentons to be
      Anything but what they are:    myrages (all records are
      Fictions) in a dessert with oases of detached smiles
      Here and there, even if only your smiles of indullgence
      Of the mush-rooms of my prolostly superfishy jokes
      Spored by an arrowgaunt childishness ever on the verge
      Of oblivion’s edge where the blindest child starts to see.

                                  
                                  
                            *** Behind that zigzagging 'style' loomed the polemical bent
                                   of a self-styled ‘Art-terror’ claiming her right to disrupt
                                   what she called the régime of too purrsuasive [sic] fictions
                                   with persuasionist detours of her own tangenital
                                   [sic] forays into angles and corners of reflection
                                   which the anglo-novel’s wayward seeds (like Fielding, Defoe,
                                   E. Brontë, Melville and Poe – and not excluding Milton,
                                   the Brownings and the Dante we know from bald translations)
                                   took not for granted but as a right of trust, an aspect
                                   of their relationship with their readers
                                                                         – Lissana Cesare-Ábusem, PhD 
                           

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

 

 

MESSAGE IN THE BOTTLE : OCEANS WIDE TURN

 

              
          Earth seeded, desire sluices . mountains heave new
          lava flow . first time in years, more so. 
                                                                 Raise the water
          mark too high gondoliers glide elsewhere, leaving you
          measures of naked decency to take . ashore blame
          mix messaging; clean dry fountains instead.

          Just so you don’t feel always the inflatable one . hand
          reach back like run receivers / pivot, grip / sinews
          in curve sync you’re working together seam less
          at this . end to chase after.

          Not there yet doubt free limbs keep the beast . mobile
          that’s how time strips the argument down there ~ Non :
          oui Intime ~ barnacles for the life of you; our freight
          break swept to sea viabilities.

          Floor to moon . shoot yearning ! like keyless
          entry, ‘long as you’re close enough ‘n’ firm, trust
          the spool / arc, send / mesh that passing Great night
          whale . the spout thing bottom feeds ~ mind whet
          mate folded ~ disappears.
                                                               – W.W.                        

             

           

           

         
           LESSING 

           For there behind her, in profile beyond her
           Narrow cell's window suddenly grown wider,
         Is the shadow of the face of a man listening
          To the bliss of her tilling her own soul’s soil
          So that he, her man, might know how to tend it
          Whenever she’s ripe for a true husbandman.

          Or perhaps the man’s just waiting to become
          Her necessary nuisance, the disturber
          Of her fantastic powerful privacy,
       With his powerless facelessness insisting that she
          Sketch in its features as recognisably
          Human, and that she alone underwrite his
          Book of fabulous risks and resigned crossings.

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

 

 

FATIMA ARTERRA : CONTRAFICTIONS

         
         
         UNTRODUCTION – 01


       I recall her saying that her sketches would be ‘crude nudes
       for lewd prudes’, by which she meant to counter what she believed
       was a warp in written and graphic works of Western art,
       to cinemise or gossipise the force of womanhood
       with figurations of a flaccid femininity.
       (Such terms herein obliqued are lifted from her diaries.)

                                             

 

                                  – 02

       
                                                                 Hers was but one
         of many cases of delusio Caligaris
         identified in treatment-centres, and given import
         in professional journals and conferences, throughout
         the 1990s.    What was, till then, a rare condition
         (first drawn attention to by a Dr Fritz von Harbou
         in Berlin in 1927) seemed overnight
         to mushroom, along with an epidemic of rampant
         somnambulism, throughout immigrant populations
         of the unsettled and settled tribes of the entire world.

            Simply propounded, delusio Caligaris is
         a complaint which may assail a mental patient after
         immatisation in a therapy-facility.
         The condition involves her slowly coming to believe
         she is directing the functioning of the institute,
         rather than being but one of its inmates ‒ among which
         group she is likely to seem a kind of chameleon,
         or at best its most suggestible member, with leanings
         towards solacium potestatis (otherwise known
         as ‘consolation-controlitis’: vide Agressive
         Defense: Control-Freakery in an Age of Cowardice
         Codified, Berne & Hyde, Pentagoff Press, L.A.; p. 2)

            Such tiltings within the psyche may lead to the splitting
         or diverting or, in extreme cases, sheer postponement
         of personality as identity ‒ a syndrome
         indicated by Fatima’s anti-fiction sketches,
         as she termed them, that conjure two male stand-ins for her self

                                   – 03

 

          For all its extolling of the miracle of Woman,
          Fatima once scrawled after one session with me, Art shrinks
          the feminine principle to mere fuckability
          ‒ an outrageous but understandable claim by a ‘bitch’
          who had spent all her adult life as an overworked ‘whore’
          within what was then mainly a man’s field of faux-pursuit,
          that hunt-scent perverted (or ‘male cross-stitchery’, as she
          later called it) to Certifiable Accountancy.

                                   – 04

               Being put out to grass from their ‘field’ became her first stage
          of fertile depersonalization.   This I treated
          for eight years (before her suicide).    In treatment she seemed
          far from delusional:    mild-mannered and soft-spoken, her
          slightly ironic lazy-lidded gaze suggesting none
          of the incoherent anxiety usually
          displayed by depersonalized megalomaniacs.
          Yet it was the same Fatima (but was it?) who would mock
          our one-to-one sessions with hummed sentiments like With you
          I rule creation or I’m sitting on top of the world

         UNTRODUCTION – 05


                                   And once, without a trace of irony,
         she offered to write me a ‘nice’ commendation towards
         my next job ‒ as an auto-mechanic or cleaning-maid
         (a ‘slip’ revealing her obsession with self-revision).

         Less kindly, she was once eve/adamant that very few
         women give a fuck for the minds of the men who fuck them
         and fuck them over ‒ and over (Fatima had no faith
         in the promises of the Sexual Revolution);
         that they are no different from men in not giving a damn
         for the different feeling-mind quiddity of their not us

 

                                   – 06


          Arterra distrusted the cages of realism,
          with its verysilimitude [sic] the strangler of dreams.
          Thus, for example, her near-blind bookseller is given,
          in all his unlikelihood, as a presence in her ‘dream’,
          a figure of entry in her ledger of no account.

              We must also not forget that Fatima Arterra
          ‘sketched’ in a so-called foreign tongue, having picked up only
          English scraps while growing up in Angola and Macão.
          Those scraps, dismissible in a world of business-numbers,
          are less ignorable for their influence on the near-
          glossolalial utterances of her word-sketches
          – an idiomatic strain she called a distant cousin
          of the Pole Conrad’s trick of reviving great bad writing
          whose snakes of sentences undermined the ladders of Taste
          by empathically echoing the complexities
          threading the inner/outer magic-bag of consciousness.

 

                                  – 07

 

             A more detailed analysis of my patient’s complaint
          is not intended here:    these few lines are proffered only
          as a layperson’s guide into an orderly-seeming
          mind’s mazelike detours of which its unrevised ‘sketches’ are
          ample examples, evidence revealed only after
          Fatima’s sudden death.

                                      Lissana Cesare-Ábusem, PhD, ASPUC

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

                                                  
                                        

 

EVERYONE LEAVES . HAPPY END COMING

         
  

           Pole positions some kind lean . keel in the course
           of our rolling grasp about; but a hands street lift
           off seems guaranteed providing you're not alone, left
           haltered . fade in hospice layers.

           If only beams could flight globe plan : night till ray;
           our bracing as wheels touch faith scorch land, breath
           blue burning : It’s Ok! part angels clutch . ride 
           sigh beside you.
                                   Such fear ! to stare, reach with.

           Terms cum deed knock wedges clear out of even; feed
           numbers swell . last offer sits on the table growing
           cold the longer favours hover corks and chrome
           fork over.
                           Into stars vast, work ‘n’ rest heaps ~ swan
           knife dives feel expected.

           For pluck good feathers revel game, lovers weigh
           caveats like lobster . claws reminding us nothing is
           given that wouldn’t be taken . back snap! next
           red turn around \ Aie aie aie.
                                                                         – W.W.

               

           

 

          

         QAT WITH CHARON  

         *BUT The world IS bigger and here before me!
          Qat once shouted at Charon, her nègre rouge
          Of a cancre who had just dared to suggest she
        Fooled herself by kneeling scared below the world’s totems.
          Qat could forgive Charon for talking funny,
          Et après?, but she did not intend living
          With some pimp who refused to honour his pute.

          She held no delusions about her active
          Rȏle in keeping Charon and the world alive
          And kicking ‒ Charon and therefore the whole world ‒
        Which does not, as he felt, start with a soul’s latest dream
          Of it, but had A-start, world without Z-end:
          She was born Catholique and he was born blind.

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

 

 

FLAPS . JUST SO WE’RE CLEAR

           

        Ask from the closet and dead man's clothes hanging
        on . how long! before the brand starts up, gods name
        new . promising this time no mask die cast, meters
        paid in spirit ‘n’ risen things.
                               Up late . we know near how the planet
        outposts run; last test, sun shields holding.

                                                        More . so we stir
        moon about done for howls . as capsules eagle away!
        fish feed on asteroids. Vantage points what’s beaming
        front lobe towers . glass sides list pyramid tips. 

                                                          Could be what's fixed
        wind twisting shapes. Still, no lip stiff sips wisping, You
        see, in those days/ or touched recounts . how much spread
        on the cob costs love.

        The life wed Art lock ? brush lines slipped off the grid
        no fear path found. Sensors pick up what once marveled
        so essential seeming, canvas left trails; and museum tap
        screens demonstrate how dust to code webbed tales.

        Rest best we can, filled feel . knowing it was worth
        the plastic parts played : skull scalpel phone in hand
        despite what frost ‘n’ fires put us through, hatch
        snatched from us . lucky at all we came ! brute
        incomplète . et tu.

                                                           – W.W.

                      

             

               

 

                     

           LESSING

       
                                    No thinker himself, Lessing
            Was horrified by the hollows of set fear
            In which those who could think even less than he
          Dangled like bats whose sonar echoed nothing outside
            All their caves the one cave, and nothing beyond
            All its labels they had swallowed and become,
            Tags numbingly hallowed like temple-standards.

            Lessing, to challenge his own cave’s habit-mind,
            Would in blind daylight stop in mid-flight some bat
            Whose wings and lips would then flutter and swear how
          Much like a lark it was darting through its cave-free day ‒
            At which point of the wayward fiction called life,
            Lessing would be swamped with envious regard
            For the bat’s rampant pluck, its gift from blindness.

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

 

 

OH, LOOK ! BEAUTY . BREASTS YOU WILL NOT SEE

          

         Keen ? Even to start appraisal you must fall
         in . relationships end deep, lover of breast beauté.
         Better hurry, the Tags are out : for the cat walk no
         dogs allowed . district red hydrants lift. 
                                                   Pageant display drives
         might soon stop working, as bad hip splitters thread
         time past to sue; so roll with the redress, man. 

         Ankled ! plot lost vulturians : the view with crossed
         knees now considered toggling; own flown, they'll stay
         peaked . chest medal fondling. 

         There is one possibility : a crew of young fellas filing
         redacted snaps of sleep partners . a risky tort, hands
         down, rappelling the gorge; and far from the full
         court thing.
                                                                         So what’s
          left about to crow ? even the beach flyover’s off limits;
          vacations tossed to beast rough seas and great white
          stakers | bodies hauling up to shore . boat bloat nyreries,
          roiling everything.
                                                                 World wound tight
          fabric unraveling, looks like we’re screwed, mate; primed
          with . what we got now duly remastering the Oorah that
          sheds on cushions : given to give, dare who touch.

                                                                        On the podium
          for the cameras ? if you must, raise ‘n’ hold a child.

                                                                                  – W.W.

            
       

          

           
         MARA

           
        *CAUGHT still in desire's traffic-jam, Mara feels
        ‘Mara’ and ‘Qat’ are beached bricks on an island
         Of patience no storm can disturb in its sea
       Of restless angst that masks itself as Maturity
         And other institutions of Common Sense
         Like Vitamins, Organic Teas, Working Hard
         Making more Money & Talk To You Later.

        *YET talk now to each other they do not seem
         Keen to do, as though words were absurd outside
         Of their initial official engagement ‒
       Leading to no marriage. Still, it is as a couple
         Of cats that they sit there

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

 

WAYS TO EAT AN ELEPHANT

         

        So many rooms, head full of cupboards, stomach
        layers . never sure where to start; then experters come
        along with expensive knife blocks : here, use these
        like for deep hide exams ? pigment the issues fresh
        off the loin; fold next in felt . hard yield song.

        Not carve strong enough ? you have left little
        choice so torch the forest . no mercy : leaves like truth  
        loose curling; departures from intestine tangling arms.

        Or play the actor jogging flushable thoughts, all
        the while rehearsing chess clean lines : that pawn
        encroachment ! the king must turret; bishop robe hems
        lift . reseal quest answers; knights white angle links
        help islands think . breasts in distress home guard.

        If the honor files you drive or swear by keep getting
        Hits from bad mother poachers, consider new contract
        options.

        For starters those bloodlettors who IV drip ‒ not flood
        the shaft with blunt asks, then elevate sobbing tusk
        to tail portions ‒ maybe they could help. Careful,
        all the same ! is not crab legs you spreading, hairs
        like nerve ends . warm up the wonder.

                                                                 – W.W.

             

         

          

            MARA

          Mara knows she has cause but no right to curse
          Housewives, chefs and other respectable whores
          And connoisseurs of the gormandizer-arts

          They know what fresh flesh bought in the cold dawn means
          For a body’s fucking/working-energy:
          Without it, quasi-persons might lose purpose!
        Mara is not unsympathetic to the bald facts –
          And superstitions arising out – of food,
          Sex, work and death and the terror which they spawn
          In post-Edenic stomachs, hearts, guts and heads.

          Her beef is against respectable systems
          Of scorn, torture and death.

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

 

 

GO FUND THE MOUNTAIN TELL

 

                                                         for Terence Roberts ( Gt : In mem.)       
       

           They containerd the axis : the sorrow once shared
           what the gap through paling, speck on the horizon
           plied . now roll call; the über blood carriers ‒ all
           the Sign in gates flocked out; trapped so, we didn’t
           no! we didn’t know.

           Days stalled long, man ! dawn cleans no farther;
           shirt tail dinosaurs can’t change the code; trails
           Search log the missions row till river mists lift
           Run the risk mind . strip climb Kaie’s gold ladders.

           Guardians faith empties fill with bubble blowing
           drills . as sweaters peddle beads for desert night
           sky miracles : the Thirst on knees relieved.
                                                              Scan the homage
           late models : ship coordinates for swim eyes only
           up welling seas.

           Which is what sent our arcs in orbit : now where
           were we ? not always there, for all the lush land
           rover dust . haze slow to settle.

                                           Off again from flood ‘n’ fire
           news rafters pole, reach shores no safer . bets even
           rust red terrain egg planting.
                                               Tag played ~ we’re it, man,
           kind of planet puzzlers ~ to stay awake for ? what
           on earth remains.
                                                           The apple Adam
           bite Eve scene ? Hurry! can’t be late for that shoot.

                                                                 – W.W.

 

              
               

          

         

           MARA 

           *YET self-exhausting Mara is reluctant
           To bury the corpse to whose dying breath she,
           As its witness, has become hooked, like a fish
         Resisting a taut line tugging it up towards light,
           Up to its last chance to become more than fish
           Through glad surrender of its accustomed flesh
           In service to the changes of other flesh.

           *SHE now fondly recalls Sun-Dung ‒ her fellow
           Corpse she sometimes called by that last name he loathed:
           He claimed his mother Else marked him with it, less
         To invent his father than to slot her child-fadduh,
           The man that got away and perhaps never
           Was, as the Gershwins and Gloria Grahame knew
           (Else craved chocolate but needed chocolate-box art.)

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