By Tom Bradley.
ii
… So, it’s hopping that I go, but not to bars
(not yet), rather to “language schools,” so-called.
For schoolmarms such as me, where else to fuss?
One tiptoes, cringing, through a sordid isle
awash in nowhere’s grim, un-Englished sea.
Here scuttlebutt alarmingly reputes
our Prophet-Shaman-Seer to be marooned.
Those sightings of his sole anomaly
least burdened with implausibility
are clustered ’round this slough of mute despond.
In clip-joint after pedagogic clip-joint,
reluctantly deployed Eustachian tubes
within my skull stay forcibly dilated
yet shrink from grunts that answer to this tune,
another snarl from Deuteronomy
that pounds and frightens, just as previously:
…So every construction that burps from their jawbones
is grammared like goulash, and ends with a singsong
like questions from teen-boys with diagnosed syndromes,
and all of their vowelings are schwas without diphthong…
(While on our author’s turf, society’s seen
through his unsocializable eyeballs.
Forgive my reportage if it displays
a certain, shall we say, uncuddliness.
Your schoolmarm’s purer self, as you’ll soon see,
is warmed and cooled with nicer qualities.)
iii.
I pass an ungreen grove of academe
in harbor slums, a dockside alley Hades,
whose faculty, through warped windows, impose
such speech impediments on passersby.
One snoring educator’s office hours
are evidently scheduled on the stoop
of this converted storefront (let’s be blunt).
The lecture swirling from his tenured gob
comprises tousled hanks of ramen braids
(a local staple) chased with chem-lab “beer”
from Kirin cans that clank a mustached dragon.
Three Shiba Inu bitches service him
like supine Lazarus, tattled by Luke,
persuading me, for succor, to retreat
to anti-idylls of our Pentateuch:
…To increase tuition and cover expenses
for morphine sabbaticals, ladyboy whoring,
they brighten their eyeballs by wedging in lenses
of Hollywood turquoise, enhancing the foreign.Encouraged by Management, loving the Other,
they’re follicle-bleaching their dishwater fauxhawks,
up-sprucing ethnicity, bonused to bother
to penetrate pupils who spring for the Botox…
This lingo guru’s regulation ’do
shows barely two dark roots, or none, or few.
The more seductive of the suction cups
designed unsubtly to eroticize
his irides, mouse-colored otherwise,
remains in place, but likely unseen-through,
as he is comatose, despite his gaze.
The second plastic shard has come unsucked
from lids and lashes, chin-ward to migrate
and, milkish-blue, to glint amid the stubble
in lurching time with Teacher’s sleep apnea.
Adherence to the dress code notwithstanding,
I wonder if this stud-cum-stoop stymie,
this customer deflector, counter-tout,
could gigolo one “beer” in student fees.
His place of work is not the thriving dive
our clear-eyed Deuteronomy decries.
So now it’s time to bar-hop, after all,
and time to do what’s called “collecting thoughts.”
While tripping over drunkards, anyway,
you might as well jump in and chase some shots.
iv.
False quibble, this quintet of fibbing words
from Luke and Matthew: Seek and ye shall find.
They contradict my life, which schools me thus:
Stop looking and you’ll stumble straight upon.
A tavern curtsies on a spalled seawall,
its barnacles made girlish by kelp tresses,
ambiguous as “hostesses” inside.
They’re foreign creatures, tiny clasping tweens,
transgendered and homogametic, both,
indentured to this shackling island chain’s
excessively tattooed fake Mafiosi.
Orgasms are their remit, caused in jeans,
in keeping with this nation’s reticence
and sense of “face,” in place of heart and guts.
Yet, unlike zippered pricks, their light’s unhidden.
Their song rings bright in lisping Tagalog,
more supple-tongued than what I’m ruing now,
the sweeter for its pitiable condition.
They’re trinkets bulk-imported from a jungle,
such lovely things, mourning their Philippines.
These “Others” (see above), post-colonized,
with pidgin, “globally indigenized,”
can elocute bright worlds above the skulls
of ethnic Anglo Saxon TEFL ’tards,
upon whose nourished thighs, across whole seas,
they’re kidnapped from their villages to toil.
Instructors, youngish, from the language schools
on “coffee break” (read: fifth pre-lunchtime “beer”),
who never knew, before expatriation,
that they were pedophiles, crane Adam’s apples
around the babies dying on their pants,
to answer questions I can barely gag.
Undiphthonged schwas, cretinously inflected,
moan, just as Deuteronomy describes…
This is an extract from Tom Bradley’s Nagasaki Soul Huffer: a Manhunt in Fifty-Five Cantos (Trapart Books & Editions).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Bradley is the author of numerous novels, essays, and short stories.
