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<\/p>\nBy Tom Bradley.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
ii<\/strong><\/p>\n … So, it\u2019s hopping that I go, but not to bars One tiptoes, cringing, through a sordid isle In clip-joint after pedagogic clip-joint, …So every construction that burps from their jawbones (While on our author\u2019s turf, society\u2019s seen iii.<\/strong><\/p>\n I pass an ungreen grove of academe One snoring educator\u2019s office hours …To increase tuition and cover expenses Encouraged by Management, loving the Other, This lingo guru\u2019s regulation \u2019do Adherence to the dress code notwithstanding, So now it\u2019s time to bar-hop, after all, iv.<\/strong><\/p>\n False quibble, this quintet of fibbing words A tavern curtsies on a spalled seawall, Yet, unlike zippered pricks, their light\u2019s unhidden. Instructors, youngish, from the language schools This is an extract from Tom Bradley’s Nagasaki Soul Huffer: a Manhunt in Fifty-Five Cantos<\/em><\/a> (Trapart Books & Editions).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n(not yet), rather to \u201clanguage schools,\u201d so-called.
\nFor schoolmarms such as me, where else to fuss?<\/p>\n
\nawash in nowhere\u2019s grim, un-Englished sea.
\nHere scuttlebutt alarmingly reputes
\nour Prophet-Shaman-Seer to be marooned.
\nThose sightings of his sole anomaly
\nleast burdened with implausibility
\nare clustered \u2019round this slough of mute despond.<\/p>\n
\nreluctantly deployed Eustachian tubes
\nwithin my skull stay forcibly dilated
\nyet shrink from grunts that answer to this tune,
\nanother snarl from Deuteronomy
\nthat pounds and frightens, just as previously:<\/p>\n\n
\nis grammared like goulash, and ends with a singsong
\nlike questions from teen-boys with diagnosed syndromes,
\nand all of their vowelings are schwas without diphthong…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\nthrough his unsocializable eyeballs.
\nForgive my reportage if it displays
\na certain, shall we say, uncuddliness.
\nYour schoolmarm\u2019s purer self, as you\u2019ll soon see,
\nis warmed and cooled with nicer qualities.)<\/p>\n
\nin harbor slums, a dockside alley Hades,
\nwhose faculty, through warped windows, impose
\nsuch speech impediments on passersby.<\/p>\n
\nare evidently scheduled on the stoop
\nof this converted storefront (let\u2019s be blunt).
\nThe lecture swirling from his tenured gob
\ncomprises tousled hanks of ramen braids
\n(a local staple) chased with chem-lab \u201cbeer\u201d
\nfrom Kirin cans that clank a mustached dragon.
\nThree Shiba Inu bitches service him
\nlike supine Lazarus, tattled by Luke,
\npersuading me, for succor, to retreat
\nto anti-idylls of our Pentateuch:<\/p>\n
\nfor morphine sabbaticals, ladyboy whoring,
\nthey brighten their eyeballs by wedging in lenses
\nof Hollywood turquoise, enhancing the foreign.<\/p>\n
\nthey\u2019re follicle-bleaching their dishwater fauxhawks,
\nup-sprucing ethnicity, bonused to bother
\nto penetrate pupils who spring for the Botox…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nshows barely two dark roots, or none, or few.
\nThe more seductive of the suction cups
\ndesigned unsubtly to eroticize
\nhis irides, mouse-colored otherwise,
\nremains in place, but likely unseen-through,
\nas he is comatose, despite his gaze.
\nThe second plastic shard has come unsucked
\nfrom lids and lashes, chin-ward to migrate
\nand, milkish-blue, to glint amid the stubble
\nin lurching time with Teacher\u2019s sleep apnea.<\/p>\n
\nI wonder if this stud-cum-stoop stymie,
\nthis customer deflector, counter-tout,
\ncould gigolo one \u201cbeer\u201d in student fees.
\nHis place of work is not the thriving dive
\nour clear-eyed Deuteronomy decries.<\/p>\n
\nand time to do what\u2019s called \u201ccollecting thoughts.\u201d
\nWhile tripping over drunkards, anyway,
\nyou might as well jump in and chase some shots.<\/p>\n
\nfrom Luke and Matthew: Seek and ye shall find.
\nThey contradict my life, which schools me thus:
\nStop looking and you\u2019ll stumble straight upon.<\/p>\n
\nits barnacles made girlish by kelp tresses,
\nambiguous as \u201chostesses\u201d inside.
\nThey\u2019re foreign creatures, tiny clasping tweens,
\ntransgendered and homogametic, both,
\nindentured to this shackling island chain\u2019s
\nexcessively tattooed fake Mafiosi.
\nOrgasms are their remit, caused in jeans,
\nin keeping with this nation\u2019s reticence
\nand sense of \u201cface,\u201d in place of heart and guts.<\/p>\n
\nTheir song rings bright in lisping Tagalog,
\nmore supple-tongued than what I\u2019m ruing now,
\nthe sweeter for its pitiable condition.
\nThey\u2019re trinkets bulk-imported from a jungle,
\nsuch lovely things, mourning their Philippines.
\nThese \u201cOthers\u201d (see above), post-colonized,
\nwith pidgin, \u201cglobally indigenized,\u201d
\ncan elocute bright worlds above the skulls
\nof ethnic Anglo Saxon TEFL \u2019tards,
\nupon whose nourished thighs, across whole seas,
\nthey\u2019re kidnapped from their villages to toil.<\/p>\n
\non \u201ccoffee break\u201d (read: fifth pre-lunchtime \u201cbeer\u201d),
\nwho never knew, before expatriation,
\nthat they were pedophiles, crane Adam\u2019s apples
\naround the babies dying on their pants,
\nto answer questions I can barely gag.
\nUndiphthonged schwas, cretinously inflected,
\nmoan, just as Deuteronomy describes…<\/p>\n