Learning para-linguistics

Learning para-linguistics

Learning para-linguistics

Hoping to articulate my relation to The Other
downmarket I move,
Swiss hotel hierarchies
shadow-play of Samosir bars.
A German pulls up his socks,
the textile boss smooches his Euro-babe
wide-eyed and learning maritime knots
smiles a lot and tastes his special broth
of chicken tainted lake water.
This is how we do it over here.

The Colgate remedy for blisters
heals the wound,
the parasite sits with the hybrid,
the leech on acid,
hermaphrodite of grace
schooled on hippie talk
swotting on Amerika.
Lay one on me, babe – arrow pulled from his quiver.
The one-eyed barfly lands on my interface:
Heh, you:  buy me a beer,  spluttered
through his nozzle, canines cracked
fragrant and black stubs of cloves.
No school, but educational – Mahabharata
of the loser and the broken-nosed
Icelandic angel, pale as snow,  young
steel rimmed Kierkergaard transcends logic
spooning up his magic omelette.
His blood begins to flow, his eyes
explode, then collapse, his blue iceberg face.
Opera island style, the chorus leader
rolls six-paper joints and the policeman
grins in a burning bush of ganga.
The man who laminates fake ID
is a man with a theory on fear.
The shaker of hands and the fingerer
of mandolins, the blower of flutes. Offstage
some gangster cracks the whip,
I feel the blowpipe find the bird.
A hundred bucks fleeced from the son of Moses
a motorbike jack-knifes
into the hungry creek of Fate.
A little scratch becomes an amputation,
each stitch decays in the wound.
I write what I can, brush up Dodi’s lewd translation
at five percent commission,
He says Pay Up, or you’re Tragedy.
Sheena, from Bradford,  
contagious Kharma, murmurs
just wait till we get to the endless
corridors of silken Heaven
where she’d be waiting,
like an eight armed Swiss army knife
of a goddess on wheels.
The monkeys smear her with a kiss.
Sulphur bubbles up from the gutter of Conscience.
Commandos playing tennis
see me to the witness box
at the trial of an Empire – the crime:
uncontrollable all-inclusiveness
and a weak back-hand.
I wait for the cool attorney of Justice,
for the question I will answer,
the judge wipes sweat from his nervous hammer.
I hear the question that the Lake must ask.