Remembering
WHITENESS a prose poem
martin bradley
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Remembering Whiteness copyright 2015 Martin Bradley ebook published by Dusun (non profit Kuala Lumpur 2015 free download
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publishers)
Remembering
WHITENESS a prose poem
martin bradley
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Equatorial sun, bright, dazzling, burned down on the glass-fibre 4x4 cabin, listening to quicksilver messenger service squeezed into mp3 in my wannabee jeep, travelling the same roads his father must have taken back then back in the year he was born, the identical roads he would have travelled many years later to
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visit the grave of his father left dying in that year gunned down by insurgents in the emergency a bullet finding its mark, leaving him fatherless to grow, rebel, drag me into Manns Music, listening to the fool in the booth, the music sending me into paroxysms of ecstasy, hitting highs I would only know later through sex or
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chemicals. Leaving college at sixteen he was clued in, street wise, a pioneer, the cool dude who showed me the way to UFO, Middle Earth, being hold up in jail over night only added to the mystique of this Highway Chile He was On the Road Again, he was Canned Heat, Kerouac, slipping away leaving me wondering.
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Reappearing as some amphetamine fuelled guru, drinking Smirnoff Red Label, puking nights away. It was not as if we were Batman, Robin, Simon, Garfunkel, Lennon, McCartney dressed in our Sgt Pepper bandsman uniforms, parading through the old roman town, sometimes pink desert jacket, black trilby adorned with chrysanthemum, tight
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Flower Power trousers, telling residents how different, but how the same we still were. Riding in the back of Dame Celia Land Rover, knocking the tail light to fool inquisitive police, we were Abbot and Costello, Pete and Dud helpless, hapless comedians caught up in the folly of life’s little joke, pretending to be children of flowers and chasing
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the love that we all need Over time, we were both to come here, not together, we had lost the habit of doing things together ,somewhere in those halcyon days, road tripping, hitch hiking, acid dropping Ginsberg and Sid Rawl days, we had stopped doing things together. I say that with a modicum
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of sadness for the youth I was, the bond we had, the bells, beads, flowers and all the naivetĂŠ exuding from me, enough to fill a world with and then some, when the need to be together, the need to experience the world through each others eyes ceased and distance grew ever greater between us, until together or apart was the same thing,
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lost to each other in the growing. Once, as a young dog, before white hair and belly hanging to kick his waistband, he travelled the length of america down to Mexico, Spain, Poland, Japan and ended up equatorially, orientally here, not here directly, but in the old tin city tupping young Chinese
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girls and manipulating his language to gain cash for accommodation and Fugs CDs. Thats when i missed him, he being in Japan holidaying with saki and sushi, as I touched down at the airport, seeking him out in the Indian area around Brickfields, and him not being there because, as I said, we were never here together at the same time. It was
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always separate, apart, the irony being that we were both here with his father, he being laid to rest and unable to move, so we were both here independently with his father, but never he and I never together, unable to recapture the closeness we once had, chasing girls in the streets and never getting off with them because of the lack of a car, in
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that old roman town, the place where he now resides and I have long since left from, to be here, amidst the mountains and jungles of South East Asia, now calmed from the murderous 50s. I follow in his footsteps, even though I was here first, years ago, but didn’t know where his father was buried until I came
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to stay, eleven years since, and still the resonances shape the present as some Bumi father is discovered to be his father’s Jungle Scout, leading the way through mining pool areas, jungle hills, dark mysterious places where insurgents would lay traps for colonial police, but not now, now serving sweet tea from behind his wooden counter with memories
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occasionally jerked back to life from the twinge in his legs, metal plate, with his former Lieutenant dead these past sixty four years, yes it would have been good to see him metamorphose into an owl once more, eyes static growing larger, resembling glass box plates like some Grimm story, due to the drug fog both in the room, and in our minds,
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when we were reaching towards our twenties, but these days, though both crave dosa, I eschew those phantasms for reality and he favouring other worlds with mushrooms leads to irreparable culture clash and I remain here, burnt by the sun, turning browner and he there swept by snow and rain, remembering his whiteness.
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Then, meeting him during Ramadan, 554 foxes later, bringing complex memories flooding. Longer hair, kaftans, beads, bells, communes and that symbiosis arguably we once had, revised, resurrected. He, as a mirror reflection, highlighted acute whiteness of my hair, prominence of my paunch, prejudices and cautions given
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by parents about, and towards, each and other. I was his tempter, he mine, both equally evil in each other’s parents’s minds. It being practically a half century of knowing one and other, comfort found in spotlighted instances, people, places remembered, half remembered, now we are both in our sixth decade, orphans, and
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he bringing ashes of departed matriarch to scatter on a grave sixty four years old, of a man he never knew. Over journeying, sushi, Asahi, tempura, Moorcock, universes/ multiverses were spun, dreams of Hawkins, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Shinto, Buddhism danced with strangeness of quarks in recollections of Kitsune, Orpheus, Ginsberg, loneliness of
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Kerouac, talk of volpes volpes and equus ferus caballus. I sitting in Ipoh Dim Sum, alone, blue white tiles swept by air con, thinking of Brief Encounter and how quickly boys turn to men. The strands of time and whims of fate which brought us back together, whisked us apart as he jetted back to the land of Mishima and I to the sweetness with which I am
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surrounded, remembering his whiteness, and mine, amidst the varying hues of life as the equatorial sun, and our memories, still burn.
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the end
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Thank you for reading this prose poem. I hope that you enjoyed it. Dusun will be publishing more short works in the coming months Martin Bradley
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dusun quarterly e-journal of Asian Arts and Culture
Thank you for reading this prose poem. I hope that you enjoyed it. Dusun will be publishing more short works in the coming months Martin Bradley
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