Of the Divine Mysteries (a prayer for understanding)

Day 4:  A poem about a religion you don't understand

Of the divine mysteries
of our forefathers' faith

We pray for understanding

Of the faith they hefted
like bundles of sugar cane

We pray for understanding

Of the pure white faith
like sacks of fresh picked cotton

We pray for understanding

Of the faith that kept us bound in isolation
with saws and axes in the forests

We pray for understanding.

For those who prayed to lay down their burdens
but never thought of putting down this one

We pray for understanding

For our blessed white savior
in the land of the olive skinned

We pray for understanding.

For hair of lambs wool to fall as feathers
on the shoulders of renaissance paintings

We pray for understanding

For the morning star and the angel of light
who turned out to be black

We pray for understanding

For a faith that demands obedience to authority
yet turns our ancestor spirits into demons

We pray for understanding

For a faith that turns its own forebears
into witchcraft and pagan devils

We pray for understanding

Of the mystery of being made in his image
but not worthy to question his design

We pray for understanding

Of an African cardinal
with a European mind

We pray for understanding

Of an American pope
who is wrong for loving

We pray for understanding

That 'America' is the child of
Europe's cruelty and New world innocence

We pray for understanding

For the difference between
Catholic, protestant, Anglican, and Adventist

We pray for understanding

Between Episcopalian, Pentecostal,
Rastafari and Baha'i

We pray for understanding

Of the ever broadening line between
Religion and Spirituality

We pray for understanding

Of what god the birds sing to
when they wake each morning

We pray for understanding

Of why I should not dance in church
when everything else in nature does

We pray for understanding

Of what makes Abraham's new God
better than any of the old ones.

We pray for understanding

Of what makes Abraham's old God
better than any of these new ones.

We pray for understanding

For the supreme knowledge
of taking knowledge with you

We pray for understanding

That despite what you might think
I can believe in several things at once

We pray for understanding

That any dissonance in my cognition
is the radio being tuned towards harmony

We pray for understanding

That my questions about your faith
does not make us enemies.

We pray for understanding

That I love you
and that's all there is to it

We pray for understanding

The Preferred Method of Writers

Day 3: A poem about how you wish to die

If it worked in prose for Virginia Wolf
And it worked in poetry for Eric Roach
When the calm, cool face one day gives me a wink
I'll read her my sappiest one yet, I should think.

Dry Season 1

Here, it is always
cicadas hidden deep in
whispering bamboo

and boisman singing
bout how this place have tiger
striped with old brawl scars.

Heat comes from within:
the Harmattan in our lungs
red dust in our eyes

Young boys drink too much
red bull and johnny walker
staggering anger

Who knows what to do
with a man these days? Give him
room enough to burn

Without catching
us all a'fire.  Burning
both bush and garden

Sac pase, ay'ti?
We are, all of us, burning
in this endless heat.

But boismen know well
the secret of singing in
whispering bamboo

of bringing flambeau
to riverside.  Of making
steam to turn turbines.

Of carrying rage
in belly, in hands, in throat.
Of wailing like men.

Of meeting drumbeat
with karray.  Of that fire
that makes gardens thrive.

So sing the lavway.
Pass body and bois through flame.
Here it is.  Always.

Ribs and Elbows

Quiet Boy, boney boy
all ribs and elbows
and pnderance over simple things.
Did you run your fingers over the grooves,
believe the world you felt
more than the often lying light of it?
Did you think there must be some
secret trick, some magical more-to-it-ness
to the mundane machinery,
the way you do even now?

You faintly glowing ember boy,
grandfather's tobacco boy,
water held tight in hands boy, there's no keeping you here.
Though i'm told your mother sees you often
I am left with only memories and mimicry.
At times, in homage, I seal my lips shut
with hours of silence.
Time spent staring at my hands
wondering which wrinkle in the lines
was you.

You under-kitchen-table-surfer,
you excavator of old valises,
you who knows as much about why
old people hid away old things
as I know why I keep them now.
That relic in your lap
will be yours one day, or one like it.
Treasure hunter turned memory maker.

I sometimes wonder, as some men often do,
would i truly become my father
and make another you. Or at least
become my own man
with my own wife and son.
Will he explore the ruins of our closets?
Brave the perilous journey of the high attic?
Plumb the depths of the under-bed?  Will he be
a quiet boy, a boney boy,
all ribs and elbows?

Thom Shift

There were five men in the water.  Before anyone could give a name to the sound we were hearing there were five men stumbling stupidly toward the starboard side, knocking their hips against the railings and tumbling, heels over head, into the sea.   “Man overboard!” went the call and it repeated with every third man that heard it.  “Man overboard!” Called Mr. Swanson, a grizzled old gentleman with a body filled with bright tattoos over leathered skin.  “Man Overboard!” called Riptide Jack, who had always threatened to throw a man or two in himself whenever a dice-game wasn’t going in his favour.  “Man overboard!” called Mr. Kawai, who was the first to toss buoy and rope with one good hand and one dull, blunted curved hook.  By the time the crew had assembled for a proper rescue, several great fanned tails were seen lashing at the surface of the water and it appeared as if three of the men were already being dragged underneath.  A fourth man, a brute and a brigand known as Jonas Black, was seen floating on his back, though no one was sure whether the sounds he was making were sobs or bouts of laughter.  

There were creatures all around him.  Four of them swam with him, lashing at the water with their tails every so often.  Their bodies resembled women.  No, they more resembled girls; young girls with budding breasts, wild, short hair and grotesque shell-shaped ears.  They caressed his sun-beaten skin with strange webbed hands.  In a moment they flashed eyes black as coal up at the crew, then turned back to Jonas, smiling at him and revealing tiny, pointed teeth before biting into the flesh of his chest, his belly, and his legs.  

            “Mermaids” someone in the crowd muttered in wonder.  

            “Worse” another man cried out.  “Sirens!”  He plugged his ears and a wave of panic ran through the crowd of us as we realized it was the sirens’ song that had made them do it.  It was the sirens’ song that we’d heard before, and were still hearing now.

            “Keep your wits about you!” barked Mr. Swanson, and he threw another of the buoys and managed to chase off one of the creatures gnawing at Jonas’s leg. 

            “Don’t save me, gents.” He’d managed to say just as he pulled up the one free leg and kicked away the buoy meant to save his life, or at least give him hope.  “Oh, God.  Oh, heaven.  Oh, hell that awaits me!  If you could feel what I’m feeling you’d beg for the same.  Don’t you dare try to save me!”

Later, at the wake we would have in his honour, the men would remember that the only time Jonas had responded to anything with more than a miserable grunt had been that very moment.

Thom Shift was the fifth man in the water and he clung to the buoy meant for Jonas as though he meant to tear the thing apart.  He’d escaped somehow.  Perhaps the sudden splash of warm brine had shocked him back into his senses.  Perhaps too much time working the cannons had made him deaf to the last faded notes of the sirens’ song.  Whatever way he’d managed it, he came up kicking and thrashing his way to the surface just as Jonas disappeared from sight in a stream of bubbles that broke the water where he’d last been seen, weighed down and delighted.  Still in shock, we’d all watched those bubbles.  Perhaps some of us were imagining old Jonas, cold hearted Jonas, stoic, stone-faced Jonas laughing all the way down.  Thom Shift, on the other hand, was screaming!

It took ten of us to pull him aboard and when we finally had him he was still babbling.  He’d start out in fright at every touch, screaming and swatting at phantoms. 

            “Swallowed too much salt water” suggested Riptide Jim with a knowing sort of nod.  “That and I suppose having the sea-hag’s voice in his mind...poor bastard’s gone insane.”  The men all nodded and murmured their approval at Jim’s wise assessment.  Swanson’s was the only dissenting voice.

            “No, you fools.”  He groaned.  “Look.  Look at his flesh.”  It was then that we saw them.  In the spots where his skin had been exposed, and in some spots where his clothes had been torn away, were bite marks.  They were all bright red and in the shape of two semicircles on top, and two on the bottom; one for each row of mermaid teeth.  Peculiarly, they did not bleed.  And while the flesh was pierced, it was not torn or gnawed at.

            “Poison.”  Swanson suggested.  “The beasties have poison in their bites.”   There began a debate among the crew on whether it was better to nurse a possibly mad sailor back to health or cast a poisoned man back into the sea.  The only thing that could break us out of our shock in that moment was the captain’s voice, and it came in a furious bellow.  The captain, a great barrel-chested, long-bearded beast of a man, had appeared on deck without us even noticing and was already tearing through the crowd of us, shoving men aside. 

            “All you men get back to work!” cried.  “Unless you’d rather join those we’ve lost today on the ocean floor!  We’ve got the Spanish at our tails and have to clear these damn monster-infested waters.  Back to work!  Back to work!  We set sail for Port Royale!  Get us clear of these beasts or it’s the lash for you!  Get back to work!”

And so we did.  And for some time Thom Shift was forgotten by his shipmates as we again made ready the sails to give us best speed in the wind.

That night we all mourned with grog and song.  The men who we had lost that day had been bunkmates with us.  Faces we had known nearly as well as our own.  We found their names in their absence.  Glenn Paddock, Jim Tillet, and Isaac Fletcher had been the first three dragged in.  We prayed that their deaths were as happy as Jonas Black’s had been.  I spent half the night still awake, for on the bunk above mine Thom Shift laid still as a corpse.  I eased out of my bed to peak at him, to check if he’d succumbed to the poison.  But as I eased my head out to peak at him I saw his eyes, wide open, staring back at me.  Even as I left the quarters I saw his eyes following me, filled with fright and anger.  I went out to find Swanson on deck that night and told him about Thom’s peculiar state.

            “That’d be the poison working its way into him.” Swanson said.  “First it kills the sleep, and then it’ll kill his taste for food, then his taste for everything else.  The only thing on his mind will be the beasts that bit into him.  The thought of them will drive him mad and take him away from this world.  The man won’t be a man again soon.  He’ll be something changed.  We’ll lose him eventually.”

            “Why doesn’t the captain make port and find him a doctor?” I asked.

            “No friendly ports around these parts.  Throw yourself roughly into the waves long enough, lad, and you lose many a friend.  Our captain’s been at this long enough the make quite a few enemies.  Only safe port is Port Royale, and that’s at least a four day journey.”

            “Do you think those things will be back?”

            “I’m sure of it.  We’ve got their prize now.  They don’t give up that easy.”

            “But the siren song didn’t affect us.  Only those few went in.”

           “Yes, that one handful for that one song, but that’s not the only song they know.  What you saw in the water  were juveniles.  The elder, the hag, hunts in a different way.  She has her tricks about her.  She knows just which songs to sing.  Be brave and you should be fine.” 

I could bare it no more.  I had to ask him how it was he knew so much about these creatures.  That’s when he opened his pea coat and pointed to his painted skin.  “Here is the adult mermaid”, Swanson said and pointed to one section where the fanned tail I’d seen earlier snaked around a ships anchor, and on the other end of the tail was a woman, but with hair far more luxurious and breasts much larger than the ones I’d seen that day.  “She is crafty, swift and dangerous.  All that only adds to her beauty, which is a blessing, since seeing her may be the last thing some men ever do. 

In another section was the face of a woman, reasonably done, which Swanson pointed to, saying “Here is my wife Maria, now dead.”  And in between the two sections of his stomach, he pointed out the barely visible double arcs and said “And here is the mark of the only time I have thought of taking another lover.  A time when the sea-hag’s song shook the sense out my head, and the kiss of a mermaid nearly took me to her ocean bed.  I escaped.  I went mad.  But with the help of my crew I found myself again.  But I promise you this, boy.  In four days, when we find ourselves in Port Royale, I’ll never sail the seas again.”

The next day we all worked diligently, though I’d never heard the crew so quiet.  Each man had their eyes on the water.  Each man was listening for a hint of song.  Each man watched Thom Shift report to mess, take a bowl of gruel, and weep bitterly into it. 

            “You see this hook?”  Mr Kawai said to him after placing a cup of grog in front of Thom.  “There used to be a hand where this hook is now‘till a recoiling canon tore the damn thing to shreds.  Dr. in Tortuga said there was no way of savin’ it, and it had already started to rot.   He had to saw through the bone.  And he had no anaesthetic.   Do you think I cried in my gruel after I got this hook?  Well I didn’t.  I know pain, sir.  It’s a good way of knowing you’re still alive.  And you haven’t even lost any limbs, so buck up, damnit!”

Thom Shift did not ‘buck up’.  That night, just as I was drifting off to sleep despite the sound of sobbing coming from the bunk above mine, I heard him stir.  I watched him make his way for the cabin door, letting in the moonlight...and the siren song.  I raised the alarm, though I barely had to.  The men had all been too afraid to sleep, their minds too busy anticipating this exact moment.  In the end, three men were holding down Thom Shift, who screamed and begged to be let go.  Four more men plummeted into the sea.  We did not look to see which of them had been dragged down immediately and which were being consumed. 

At noon the next day, after we’d adjusted our course and trimmed the sails, and after we’d fixed new bars to the cabin doors so that they would be locked from the outside, the Captain himself officiated the ceremony in honour of the men we had lost the night before.  Of special mention was Riptide Jack who, much of the crew agreed, was never quite as tough as he led on.  It was no wonder the siren song had gotten to him.  It was no surprise that he should surrender himself so eagerly that night.  Meanwhile Thom Shift had stopped his sobbing.  Now he only stared out at the world silently with a despondent look on his face.

That night they had come again, and again it was Thom who heard it first in the hold.  Some of the men had counted themselves lucky that the captain had ordered they be locked in.  That is, at least, until Thom brought out the knife.  The sound of the fracas inside along with the voices begging to be let out must have swayed old Swanson at the door.  At the end of that night, four other men joined the mermaids in their beds, including Mr. Kawai who, with a knife in his back, dragged a bloody trail across the deck and tossed himself over the railings.  Thom Shift had been struck over the head before he could get that far.

The next day the sun rose.  The men ate and worked, and they whispered amongst themselves.  One more night was all it would take.  They simply had to survive one more night and they would be in Port Royale, on land, and safe.   They whispered about killing Thom Shift.  They whispered about seizing him now from the hold where he called out the rest of the crew, torturing them with contrived love poems dedicated to his aquatic beauties, and tossing him into the water so that the mermaids would claim him, and possibly leave them alone.  The whispers got back to the captain.  A man received ten lashes for conspiring to murder a fellow crewman, and the whispers stopped. 

That night, no one slept.  We listened to the sound of the ocean against the hull, to the creaking of the masts as the winds urged them on.  That night we waited for the call we knew was coming.  We had expected the worst to come then, on our one last night.  The next day we would be in Port Royale, but this was something most only half expected.  The other half was the expectation of something horrible.  Thom Shift would find an errant keg of powder, or would claw his way through the hull and sink us all, or find some other way to put us all in danger.  But that night nothing happened.  All was quiet.  All was still.

The next day the sun came up and set us all to work.  Today would be the day: the day we made landfall.  We ate, we sang, we made full advantage of the wind.  The Captain stood on the aft deck, nodding approvingly and stroking his massive beard.  Just before mid-day a call came from the crow’s nest: “Land Ho!”  The crew rejoiced!  We had made it!  We had survived the night and would arrive in Port Royale within hours.  Over the reverie, I could hear a voice calling out, shouting over and over again. 

            “Captain!  Captain!  The rock!  Look there, on the rock!  Captain!”

A hush fell over the crowd, and then shouts of anger as a few of the men produced their spyglasses and focused on a jagged rock less than a mile away that jutted out of the sea.

The creature that sat upon that rock was at once frightening and arresting.  What must have been a full century in the sea had turned her hair a pale green.  Her bare breasts settled lower than the illustration in Mr. Swanson’s tattoos.  She did not look especially inhuman.  In fact, except for the massive tail which wrapped around the rock she had perched on, she looked exactly like some of the women that so many of the men had been longing to visit in Port Royale.  That, I would argue, might have been the most terrifying thing about her.

That is to say, I would argue that point had I not witnessed what happened next.  Just before the spyglass was snatched from my hands I saw the creature breathe deep, filling her chest with air.  The next thing I heard was the groaning of men.  All the men, all at once, fell to their hands and knees.  Some began immediately to weep, suddenly aware of the loss of every great love in their lives, and confessing it all aloud.  A horrible pain filled my chest just then, a pain which I couldn’t understand then, and can barely describe now.  It was, if I am forced to equate it to anything, the feeling of utter loneliness.  I listened to the entire crew weeping, even the captain, and I felt so much like dying from the fact that I could not cry with them. 

Somehow, though, I knew what I could do.  Without thinking much about it I found myself opening the cargo hold and lowering a rope for Thom Shift.  If I could not weep, if I could not feel the satisfaction of knowing that loss, then I could at least set him free.  He thanked me, and made a straight line toward the creature on the rock a mile away, as if he meant to walk the entire distance into her arms.  He didn’t even step over the railing.  Just as he had done before, he ignored everything that was real and stumbled quite stupidly into the water.

At least, Mr. Swanson was a bit more graceful than that.  He stood at the edge of the railing staring toward the siren on the rock and sobbed quietly.  I called out his name and he turned to me, eyes pouring tears, and said “I hear her.  I hear my Maria.  I think she wants me with her.  I think I want to go.”  He perched himself on the edge of the railing, removed his pea coat, and dove in headfirst.

Upon Seeing an Egret on a Telephone Line

Sister,
You aint no pigeon!
Why you spendin all that time
trying so hard to look like one?
Trying to look like something most girls
would be ashamed to be called?
Trying to look like something
that hides its face
under tattered, greasy wings
for every hour that its not
filling its gut
with birdseed
and guilt
and cigarette butts
and shame?
Why you spendin all that time
standing out on the street,
marking time
till you're standing out on street corners
standing on lines thinner than your
girlish legs.
Stradling lines between worlds
between whoredom and
"Oh, what a good little girl."
Why you spending all that time
trying to get some arbitrary amount
of grime under your wings?
As if they were marks of pride
sullying your feathers,
anxious for a spot
of color or
something to justify why
you cry everytime the sun
rises
or sets,
sister?

Why you sullying your feathers, sister?
Don't you know that
you were hatched into this lesser world clean
and pure as both
simile and metaphor for things
most people in this place have never seen
Like fresh fallen snow?
Like a peaceful, welcome death?
Like innocence?
Don't you know you are innocent?

Sister,
bobbing your head
back and forth for these
froggy fools
is a waste of your time.
There's no need for all that ocean floor talk.
If you want to cut them down,
your mouth was made
for more
graceful
thrusts than that.

Sister,
why you
wasting all that time trying
so hard
to stay so high?
When even in the lowliest fields
men will stretch their necks
to see you wading through marsh waters,
hoping you will strut for them,
hoping you will call for them.  Hoping
you will spread yourself open,
welcome them
with your wings perpetually parted,
revealing your quickly beating heart
beneath your tender breast.  And really,
you need only step lady-like
and reveal a bit of yourself
unmarred
by the knee-high mud and shit of this world
to leave them
dumbfounded.

Sister!
I know you hear me calling you, sister!
You can ignore me all you want.
Sister!  Sister!
I will never stop calling you, Sister!
I will never stop calling you
sister!

The Girl You are about to Meet

The girl you are about to meet has a name that sounds like something men used to pray to.  She is waiting for you outside.  It is cold and the wind has teeth tonight, but she'll brave it all, waiting for you with two tickets in her pocket, smiling politely and shaking her head 'no' at all the people who pass by.  She'll say 'No, I'm waiting for someone' to the men who ask after her safety and comfort, even the ones who smile handsomely.  She'll brave all that too.  All of it, just for the sake of waiting.  After all, she's waiting for you.

When you get there she'll look relieved.  You might recognize this look.  It can either confuse your or embolden you.  She will be taller than you expected.  In her boots and winter clothes she will be taller than you.  You might think this means she is too tall for you, too large, too square shouldered.  She will stop you at the box office and present you with the tickets she bought, refusing to let you pay her back thinking its polite, or perhaps thinking this will make you less likely to be worried about money in the relationship.  This will cause you to worry about how much more money she must make than you and whether you are man enough to seize control of this relationship.  This will also lead you to think that she is too tall for you.  Too big for you.  Too much for you.  You will not think that she is a girl.  Just a girl.  A girl who waited outside for you, enduring the rapier wind and ravishingly warm looks from handsome strangers.  A girl who waited outside in the cold...for you.

You will notice her smile once you're inside.  She has a cute smile.  It shines with a sort of modesty; humility brought on by her uncanny ears.  She will catch you looking at her smile and thus prompt you to look at her eyes.  She's pretty.  Far too pretty for you.  She is perfect.  If things go well you will wake up in her apartment surrounded by her clutter.  You will see her childish, un-sexy underwear.  You will see the dark splotches on her skin; on her back and on her thighs, and the ever-present fuzz of hair covering places on her body which your mind and issues of Playboy tell you hair should not grow on a woman.  If things go really well you will discover hair too bold to grow in peach fuzz.  You will encounter her most intimate of briers.  You will find she is a terrible cook or that she puts ketchup on her eggs.  All of your favorites will be absent from her movie collection.  If things go really well, you will become privy to her every imperfection; not in one night, but certainly over time.  And you may just come to love her for it.  But tonight, things will not go that well.  Not as long as you are intimidated by her.  Not as long as you fail to reward her graciousness with your graciousness.  And certainly not if you keep a girl like that waiting.

The girl you are about to meet is actually your enemy.  There is only one copy of that special edition book signed by the author left on the shelf and both your hands will fall upon it at the very same time.  She will pretend to be modest and shy.  Will apologize, because she is a girl and, unlike you, is cautious about unsolicited touch.  She will tell you, 'that's fine.' and 'You can have it.'  You will not consider the questionable judgement involved in starting a relationship based on a lie.  If you really look you'll notice the way her eyes never leave the book; and how want and disappointment never leaves her eyes.  You, however, will be concentrating on how cute her glasses look.  You will offer her the book, thinking nothing of her eager and unhesitating acceptance; in the hope that you will be able to parlay it into a date.  You can, but you will have to be a lot smoother than you actually are.  You will in fact, have to take on a completely different persona to pull this off.  See previous caveat re: starting off relationships based on lies.

You will think yourselves compatible.  You will have all the same interests and you will both think "Hm.  Perhaps this is the one."  And because you are both contemplating this, and because you are both becoming tired of meeting new people you will both be on your best behavior, and will therefore continue to lie to one another about things which should not or would not normally matter.  At the end of all this she will call you a red meat eating, uncultured, whole milk drinking douche bag, and you will call her a clove smoking, non-dick-sucking, two faced, hipster poseur bitch, and you'll both part ways searching for the girl and boy you respectively met before one another.

The girl you are about to meet has eyes like you've never seen before.  She is tired of hearing about them.  She will stare at you after you say it to her, lock you with those unprecedented cliches, challenge you to say something to her, something new, something--anything more.  You will understand thins inherently, feel the hollow Christmas ornament nature of your polished tin complement and search yourself for something with a little more...moreness to it.  By the time you think you have it, the bus has stopped, the doors have opened, and she's already left.  You will never see this girl again.  You will always, always want her.

The girl you are about to meet has been told she has too much meat on her bones.  The moles on her face mark strange shapes between her mismatched ear, her prominent nose, and the excess cheek that hides her eyes when she smiles.  And yet, she is beautiful.  She wears clothes that do not flatter her but at least they drape in patterns that disguise her paunch.  She is too much of herself.  She has grown to dislike the taste.  And so, you must taste her.  You must kiss her so deeply that she discovers brand new flavors in herself.  You must do this so often that the hands which come up to brace herself against the assault of your pressed bodies become quaint tourist attractions.  A place for you to visit and imagine a time when such a great nation needed protection from invaders. The girl you are about to meet will some day open her borders to you, tax free.  Her hips are beach towels.  At the sunset of your lives you will find they have spread and you will both still enjoy the warm comfort of them long after your children have played in the surf, built their castles, wrapped themselves in their own beach towels, and put all the toys away.

Untitled

There's a bit too much milk
in the chocolate here. 
They don't understand when
I say cacao just
how deep from within me
the sound of it comes. 
They don't know what its like
to put a spot of
darkness on their tongues
and just let it sit there
melting...for...hours. 
Instead they say things like
"Boy, da girl rel sweet. 
For a negro girl." 
Sugar is poison and
cocoa butter makes
all dark choc'late smoother. 

All they taste here
is so much bitterness.

Tinder Box

By all means;
kiss me tinderly, mother-bird.
for too long now there's been
a tree growing in me
so thirsty for last season's rain
that its leaves are all yellowed
and its boughs are growing withered.
Place your scavenged twigs
into its deepest crooks.
Weave them loosely as you like.
Line them with fruit peels
and fragrant petals.
Make a nest for yourself
just here
where the wind can push all it likes.
You'll be comfortably preening your feathers
through most every storm.

And should some day an hurricane blow,
one of those cleansing squalls
who's winds and rains
make the ground into porridge
and uproot that dry old tree;
then I'll cleave to the heart
of the fallen trunk
and from the wood there I'll make a box
where I can place what's left of
     --your gathered twigs
     --your fragrant petals
     --your cherished fruit peels.
A box where I can keep
your tinder kisses.

     Have I ever told you
     how much your touch is like
     striking flint?

Kevin

(Inspired by ToTO's Catch a Fire prompts for June 2011)

When I was a boy he had
not hands but
cords of muscle,
sinew, tendons,
richly vibrating strings of flesh
filled with liquid-fire spirit
brimming at the eyes.
Even saw it spill out once
when they wouldn't let him hold his son.

He was the fire in our home.
The uncontrollable element
in our family's Feng Shui.
Made winter times bearable,
shielded us against tedium and cold
just from the sound of
     --Hip-Hop blaring;
just from the sound of
     --maniacal laughter;
just from the sounds of
     --the outrageous things he would say. 
Other times, he was just
a fire in our house
and it would break my grandmother's heart
just to think of putting
her youngest son out.

Saw him shave his head once
in the bathroom mirror
between rounds of Tekken.
Saw him give me a look
that was all confusion and anger.
"You scared?  Why you scared?"
Saw it spill out more than once.
Saw him cover from view,
too late,
a mound of Cocaine
the size of his hustle.

Heard a rumour he was dead.
Heard a rumour he was living
somewhere in Mexico or
Guatemala or
some place he had no business being.
Heard him say he hated the medication.
Heard he was taking up meditation
but only ever saw him staring
out a dirty window
on the wrong side of the bed.
That's not Zen.
That's Benzodiazepine.

"That's not how life works",
Hear my mother say when
he showed up to her office
smelling like three weeks on the street
And ready for whatever job she had.
Heard his cousin tell him
"Look, even my dog have to bark to eat."

Now that I'm a man with
not hands but
cords of muscle,
sinew, tendons,
quietly vibrating strings of flesh
brimming with spirit
like so much smoke,
sometimes you can see it
just at the eyes
when I dream of
what it would be like
to not rely on rumours,
but to have him close
without his fire dampened,
but with a mended spirit
and a heart the size and shape
that his son must be by now.

Twelve and Nine: Part 3

Wally's mother gave him twelve dollars. She had him count it three times. A five; a two, two dollar coins, and four shillin. 'I could have di shillin?' he asked each time he finished counting, each time interrupting her grocery list. He knew it by heart by now though. It was the same thing every Saturday: Beans, flour, rice. She didn't tell him but he knew when he came back there'd already be a dead chicken on the table. It would be one of the chickens they let roam in the alleys. It would also probably be one of the ones he'd named, which was why he was going to the shop now, while she wring its neck. Eating his pets didn't bother him so much when he couldn't recognize them anymore. Once, though, his mother had made the mistake of scooping up a peel-neck fowl and dispatching it right in front of Wally. The boy cried for days.

“Yuh musn't tink ih soffy-soffy.” Explained Miss Pearl. She baked bread on Sundays and Wally's mother would always bring back a few loaves in exchange for some eggs, and some motherly advice. “The things dat po lee bwai done sih at such a young age? All the violence around here, and his father...Chile just feel good he still have some kinda consideration for gods creatures, yerr?” It was with this in mind that Wally's mother always included the four quarters. She didn't say it, but Wally set off for the shop every Saturday, knowing they were for him.

Jun-Jun knew where it was hidden. He'd seen it taken from its hiding spot and put back there countless times. It wasn't his. He didn't bother asking for it, he just took it. It was the same thing, every time. The boys would find him in front of the shop when they'd come to buy their papers. He'd have just managed to scrape up enough coins for something to eat when they'd hold him by the back of the neck and rifle through his pockets. And the only reason they got away with it was because they were older than him. Bigger. Closer to being called men. But Jun-Jun was already a man. They couldn't just disrespect him like that, just because they said they were from 'Back-a-alley' didn't mean they owned the damn place. They'd slap his face and cuff his head, but he wouldn't cry. He was a man. They had to respect him. He tucked it in his waist, under his shirt, and the weight of it made the back of his pants droop. They'd have to respect him.

Wally had the flour in its own bag hanging off the left side of the handlebars. He had the rice and the beans together in a bag hanging off the right side of the handlebars. He had seventy five cents worth of sweets overflowing his pockets and a long pink ideal hanging from his mouth. He was preparing himself in his head, getting ready to right himself on the two wheels and slowly start pedaling. The boys came up from behind him, walking in wide legged gates despite their baggy, sagging pants. As they walked past him, one on either side, one of them laughed. The other called out to him. “Peely-Batty-Pauly-Wally!” Wally smiled. The ideal dropped out of his mouth. He bent to pick it up.

Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! That's what it sounded like. That and the sound of scuffling feet. Of sudden, frantic screaming from the shop just behind them. There was the popping and then there was the sound of an entire neighborhood in panic. In uproar. There was the sound of running, then stumbling, then falling. The boys from Back-a-alley didn't even know what hit them. They didn't even see the shooter. They heard the pops and their brains instinctively told their feet 'Flee!' They only got a few yards before their lungs gurgled and spurted blood. Their hearts said 'No more. No more. No.' There were the pops, and then there was the sound of plastic bags hitting the ground, weighed down by so many pounds of flour, beans, and rice. There was the sound of a bicycle falling, spokes and pedals clattering. Chain rattling. Then there were the same sounds in reverse as Jun Jun snatched up the bike. He walked with it a few yards before getting on, and even then he pedaled slowly. Perhaps he was waiting for the sound of respect. The respect he deserved. It sounded like people screaming. It sounded like a little girl running through back alleys. Running to give a mother even more bad news. Wally was 12. Jun-Jun was 9.

Racism in Belize

Its a lot like beans
cooking on a Sunday morning
in the biggest pot
in the kitchen
to be eaten Sunday Night
and all of Monday
and maybe even Tuesday
or Wednesday
if you can keep it fresh,
or for the rest of the week even,
if you know how to do it right. 
Its not just beans,
but rice and beans. 
Refried beans. 
Scrumptious egg and ham,
and some beans on the side
just so you know its there. 
Fried jacks or toast
smeared with beans,
or stuffed,
depending on how much of it
you intend to swallow.

And you don't even have to see the steam
jetting out of the pressure cooker
to know that there's a pot bubbling. 
You can tell,
sometimes even in dreams,
sometimes the very moment that
your eyes are opened to the real world,
or as the boys who hang out
under the house would say:
'Stop Sleep Up.' 
You can tell
by the invisible aroma
all around you. 
You can tell
by how it makes even
the bedroom sanctuary
that much hotter. 
You can tell
because no one wants
to be in the kitchen right now. 
Even the sister at the pipe outside
would rather scrape her knuckles
on the scrubbing board
than use the fancy new washer
mama get for dollar down
and deal with that heat. 
"It wash better anyway",
she says "And ih nuh bruk down
as often as da third-world piece a ting
so and so in deh."

And its happening. 
Even when faamly come visit
from New York or LA
and stand at the back door
fanning themselves,
too scared to go wander the street outside
and too naive to know why
the heat is so hot;
its happening. 
Its happening in houses where
the beans are red and shaped like kidneys. 
Its happening in houses where
the pots are filled with pintos and culantro. 
Happening in houses where
fat butterbeans melt enough to be ladled
over perogies. 
In houses where
the split peas get nice and thick,
and the pig tail meat falls
right off the bone. 
Where black beans stew in one pot
and bamboo shoots steam in another. 
The Secret to Good Chili
is a fresh jalapeno
(not the canned stuff)
and a tablespoon of Sharps.

Cherry

I'm always caught wishing
I could just hide myself.
Only, unlike those that
want to hold out until
the storm has passed and some
outside force tells them
'Its okay, little children.
You can come out now.';
I want to stay inside
even after that.
Even after after that.
I want to ball up and
hide until either the
world changes or I do.
And faced with the entire
spinning globe as my
stare-down opponent,
I'm pretty sure we all
know who's gonna be the one
to feel the sting of
mortality in their eyes
and blink.

So let me be the one
to change. If such a thing
is possible. Let me
be like the deluded
girls I knew in high school
who gave up all they had
to the world early, then
hid,
thinking they could grow back
their mangled purity.
And why not? Its just a
bit of flesh. Its just a
splash of blood. The pain will fade,
given enough time.
That's what we tell ourselves,
isn't it?

---

July, 2009

Cherry by Andre Marsden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Poet's Braggadocio

I could take the disarrangement of stars
and fit the universe in my throat.
I could spit out constellations
and have them line up obediently on paper.

I could make metaphors
out of valleys of lava and sulfur
and cradle the unattainable in my arms
as if it had just been born
into the raw and tangible.

And i could do this all
with little more than an empty field,
the crushed,
bleached
and dried remains of a tree,
the feather of a bird
and something to dip it in for ink.

Yes,
my god loves me,
and he lets me borrow a little taste
of his power
in special moments
that I call inspiration.

---

Written sometime in July, 2009

See there, the Grackle

See there, the grackle
with its golden eye fixed tight
upon your delicious own?
See the scratching claws?
See the razor beak?
But most of all see the plumage.
They've made feathers out of inkwells.
Made down and flight out of blackest night.
They've taken sticky liquid fright and made it into a bird,
smooth and slick and powerful enough
to shrug off gravity itself.
See it slip between wind drafts
like a thief through louvers.
It is a thing of beauty
if you can brave staring into its golden eyes
while it stares into your delicious own.

See there the grackle.
See it rest on the perch above your head
too far to touch but too close not to be frightening.
See it puff to a size three times its own.
See it raise feathers along its everything,
along its very being.,
See its golden eye gleam brighter
and more darkly all at once,
see it seeing somewhere deeper
into its very own soul,
into that black pit that only black things see into.
See what mammals know as rage
written on both rigidly held wings.
See wrath spelled out on splayed tail feathers,
see the promise of vengeance for every hatchling
falling its nest before its time
from every public park tree you quietly watched them chop down.
See it open its jaws and reach down into itself
letting out a sound that danced on that line
halfway between funeral wail and battle cry.

Now see the grackle smooth itself.
See it make itself into an oil slick
resting carelessly on water.
See each feather go back in place
like children after curfew.
See it shrink, three times, to its own size
and see its eyes dull
to something more like a living thing
and less like something set afire.
Most importantly, see it forget,
as if it could never harm a soul.
As if the entire second stanza
has been just a cruel human work of fiction.
As if it could not possibly be capable
of feeling such rage.
See the outburst and the aftermath,
as if you were watching two different creatures.
Now see the sweet grackle turn to you.
And flex its dainty talons.

And when my son asks me
what we'll eat while in the forest
I'll show him the trees and their leaves and bark,
how to spot it at a glance and know good plants from bad.
And when my son asks me about women,
we'll talk about the birds and the bees.
This is how I see it.
He'll ask me questions too big for classrooms
and I'll point him to nature,
where all the answers present themselves to us
like open books.
And when my son asks me where his people are;
when he points to pictures older than I am and asks
where are all the dark, smiling faces
who used to drink cashew wine at parties
and make music with their own hands
and the things men throw away,
and where are all the people
who used to brukdown and bram,
the ones he's heard stories of,
the ones he reads of in his atlas.

I'll say: Look, son.  See the Grackle.
Really see it, beautiful and horrible as it is.
See its blue, brown, black plumage,
See its golden eye sizing up your delicious own.
See its rigid wings.
See its splayed tail.
See its sudden gentility.
Now see yourself.

If the grackle knew how
our mouths have been shaped as little children
and how they reached in past our gullets
so that we said the word the same way that we vomit.
Black.  We still say it like vomiting.
Like calling someone Black was the same as
leaving sick all over their shirts.

If grackles knew how much we hated their blackness,
they would lighten their feathers to grey. 
They would practice to sing the songs of other birds
in voices and accents that don't quite fit the strict patterns of Kiskadees,
but they would persist, painfully. 
Painful for everyone listening but none would be harmed more
than the grackles themselves. 
They would destroy that thing that made them grackles,
and instead they would be simple-minded mockingbirds. 

If grackles knew how frightening they were
they'd never smooth their feathers,
but wear them raggamuffin rugged
They'd fly only in threatening dives
and steal food from your mouths
and your children's mouths
the same way they do other grackles.
That's right, not even other birds would be safe.

And if grackles knew how frightening they were
perhaps they'd spend all their time
dipping into that pit in their gut
and acting only from their rage.
And perhaps then they'd be hunted, killed and caged.
Just like us.

Against the Light - Part 4

"Carl, I'm cold." She said in a tone that was nothing but fed up, and added a final sounding "Lets go home."
"Home?  But we just got out here."
"Yes, and had I known it would be this cold we wouldn't be here at all!"
"Aw Marie--"
"Oh Carl!  You can't even see!  Jesus!  There!  I've said it!"

She'd said it.  After months of dancing around the subject, months of flaring her nose and knitting her eyebrows at him, just to see if he would react.  When he bumped into the kitchen table for the fifth time in a row she'd pretended not to hear it from the next room.  When he came down the stairs one morning she told him that she didn't like the color of the t-shit he was wearing, that he should go change it.  She hadn't said anything about it being inside out.  And she would have told him off about giving all that change to that mediocre subway musician with the missing teeth.  She would have scolded his ear off from central Park to East Greenwich.  But he missed the guitar case.  And despite the satisfied smile he wore Marie felt his embarrassment.  Felt it at her own.  She could see it in his eyes.  At the very least they were still good for that.  Still wonderful windows for looking in through, is what she began telling herself when her kind, purposeful ignorance began wearing thin and the urban path-finding grew more tedious.  It lingered at the back of her mind but popped forward every so often, threatening to make its way down her throat and out her mouth but she refused to say it; to make any mention of it, as a kindness to him somehow.  To protect his pride and his dignity.  But now she was saying it, and he was suddenly aware of how long she hadn't said it.

"What is this?  What are you saying to me?"
"I'm saying this is pointless.  You're blind!  Lets go home."
"So I should give up then?  I can still see, Marie.  Shapes and colors maybe but I can still see."
"But Carl--"
"And while I'm ion New York I plan to see New York!"
"Carl you're blind!"
"Listen to you!  Listen to yourself!  If you've been holding this in for so long you might as well say what you really want to say; That I'm dying."

Marie said nothing.

"I'm dying, Marie.  There, now I've said it.  I've said what you're really afraid of.  I've acknowledged its existence, are you happy now?  The worlds still spinning!  The City's still Spinning around us!"
"Goddamnit Carl!" Marie seethed at the spectacle they'd now become.  Tourists were turning to them now, distracted away from the myriad lights to the old man waving his hands and shouting, but Carl just kept going.

"It hasn't changed a thing!  I've been dying all this while and it certainly won't make the ending any more pleasant if we pretend to be surprised when it comes!"
"Well you could bloody well act like it!"  She screamed back suddenly and Carl bellowed back a moan of frustration.  They were both shouting now, in Times Square.
"Act like what?  What the hell for?"
"Act like a dying man, for God sakes.  If not for mine then at least for your own dignity!"
"Dignity?  DIGNITY!"  Carl was throwing his hands in the air in mock resignation and in a sudden flash of a camera bulb he nearly lost sight of the grey, black and tan shape that was Marie, who had her hands on her cheeks in both dismay and as relief from the cold.

"I'm dy-ing, Marie!" Carl said, as if speaking to a child.  "Its one of those progressive verbs, It'll take a little while.  I aint dead yet so what's the use of turning in and burying myself?  Whats so dignified about that?"

And then, after forty years of letting his wife have the last word in any argument, Carl decided that this was the perfect time to storm off.  This, he hoped, would be his last chance to walk out on top, and so he did.  Marie called out to his back after he turned and started walking.  Carl pretended he couldn't hear her.  He pretended her shout of Carl, where are you going was distorted by some German tourist making impressed noises too close to his ear to be polite.  He pretended his wifes pleading of 'Carl, be careful' was blasted away by the horn of a yellow cab.  And when he heard her shouting 'Carl, you have to wait for the light!' he did his best not to let her see him flinch or see his shoulders tighten.  "No one waits for the damn light."  He muttered angrily and, emboldened by his own indignance, he stepped out into traffic.  Horns blasted.  Tires screeched.  Onlookers screamed.  The sound of the sudden bang made Marie's heart stop.  Miraculously, the vehicle hadn't struck Carl, but the other way arround.  Carl had slammed both fists into the blue and white bonnet just as it stopped about eight inches from clipping him at the knees, and for good measure he added a practiced "Ey!  I'm walkin' here!"

All his anger and bravery disappeared in an instant.  The blue and white shape of the bonnet suddenly gleamed red, then white, then red again, and Carl was suddenly aware of the swirling lights hovering just above the vehicle, and two darkly dressed men stepping out. 

Written in a weak hand

The following takes up two journal pages as its written mostly perpendicular to the page lines, in pencil, in a weak hand.

• I wanted to see if writing hurts less than talking + it does
• Want a whites
• If you can find straws
• Why did you all allow _____ to be the first thing I saw when I woke up
• Later I want u to look and describe the scar to me
• I still want gatorade + credit
• straws
• money is in purse want $60
• print
• my spine hurts too
• Body causes fever in reaction to injury

There's something here.  Something that I can't put into words and probably can't express to anyone.  These pages are special to me.  Writing them down doesn't do it justice.

Twelve and Nine: Part 2

Jun-Jun was nine years old.  His real name was Kenton.  His mother knew this.  It was also his father’s name, though his father was also called Junie.  Junie-K, to be exact, since there had to be something to distinguish him from Junie-B, Junie-C, Junie-J, and Junie-L.  The five Junies made up the head of the “Back-a-alley Gang”, and had, through a matter of technicalities, been born the day Junie-K was born, which, incidentally, was also the day his father, Kenton Wallace, died. 

While most people blamed the state of affairs in the back alleys on the gang, even Kenton Wallace, when he was alive, could tell you that things were always bad.  The families that lived there had been put there; set aside like a pen or a set of keys that were sure to be lost, by the government after a hurricane had destroyed their previous homes.  They’d built ‘temporary’ shelters; quick, piecemeal wooden bungalows that would keep the rain and other elements out, until they could properly rebuild their old neighborhood.  Years later, their old neighborhoods were memorial parks dedicated to those lost in that devastating storm.  Their temporary shelters had become permanent homes.  They all shared the same square plot of low, swampy land, which soon became a city block even though the swamp was still there, in the back yard that all these houses shared. 

When it rained water invaded the bungalow houses, barging in off the streets right in through their front doors, then settling in a little too comfortably among the rest of the muck at the back.  Inevitably, flies did the same, spawning mere feet away from the kitchens, sucking the life right out of them at night, spreading disease.  if the flies were bad, then the people who acted like flies were even worse.  Just like the mosquitoes, they rutted in full view of kitchen windows, and at night they preyed on the people who lived there.  Kenton Wallace could simply wave his hands over his wife’s swollen belly in the evenings and swatted them when they landed on her thighs.  In fact he took great pleasure in doing so.   He tried swatting a man one night.  The experience was considerably less satisfying.

He’d come into the kitchen for something cold to drink and as he stood naked in his own house he spotted a curtain move without breeze to blow it.  The curtain took off running, bursting through the broken back door it had come in through, and Kenton Wallace chased after it.  So great was his rage that he couldn’t be bothered to make a fist.  He swatted at the man with a heavy, flat palm.  The first time Kenton Wallace swatted him, the thief dropped a toaster oven.  The second time, it was a blender.  The third time that Kenton Wallace’s palm, tough as tree bark from his job at the saw mill, came down on the back of the burglar’s head the thief swung round and dropped a knife deep into the naked chest of his pursuer.  Kenton’s wife found him dead and, dropping to her knees, felt a warm water draining over her legs and puddle in a rut in the yard.  Junie-J, the oldest of the Back-a-alley gang, was twelve years old when Junie-K, the youngest, was born. 

The Junies grew older, and, tired of mosquitoes and men who acted like mosquitoes, they began filling the yards.  They brought dirt by the wheelbarrow full, from schoolyards, from river beds, from most places that were none of your damn business.  One day, Junie-L and Junie-C came bursting in with loads of sand they’d stolen from a construction site, along with a sign that read ‘Future Site of Barclay’s Bank’.  “We rich now!” they’d said.  “Dis da good ting!” 

They spread the sand in all the ruts and mosquito nests.  They leveled off the back yards and shored up the front yards too.  It was the boys that made the swamp disappear but, now free to walk from one house to the other, it was the women who’d actually formed the pathways and alleys.

The Junies started wearing black gloves and carried cricket bats and clubs.  “Time fi mek wi staat do some dirty work, fellas.”  Junie-J had told them while handing out the cloves.  “But that nuh means we fi get dirty too.”  They didn’t ask the mosquitoes where they came from.  If they found one, they swatted it.  They treated the strange faced men they found in the alleys the same way.  Occasionally, one of the Junies would leave the Alleys at night and not return.  Occasionally the police would come wandering through the alleys; either looking for one of the Junies to take away for years at a time, or to tell his family that he’d been taken by someone else.  There was always someone willing to take his place though; always some young bwai who wanted oh so badly to be a Junie.

Pretty soon there were no invaders in the yards and houses.  The only ones walking in through front doors unannounced were the people that had grown up there.  The only flies people found in their yards were lit roaches.  Junie-B bought a ticket to L.A. the day before the Police came to the Alleys looking for him.  The day after that, Jun-Jun was conceived in full view of his grandmother’s kitchen window.

Twelve and Nine: Part 1

Wally was twelve years old.  His real name was Christian.  His mother, brothers, sisters, teachers, and school friends knew this.  Unfortunately, years before he was ever a tall, gangly twelve year old he was a small child who failed to see the importance of being fully clothed.  He considered the scratchy shorts and faded cotton shirts to be a nuisance and his family members would often find him stark naked in the street in front of the wooden bungalow house, swinging sticks with the other boys or spinning marbles, his bare bottom hovering mere inches over the dusty street.

“Bwai, get yuh backside indoors, yerr?” His mother would shout, swinging a kitchen towel at him as he skittered through the wooden gate on the zinc fence.  She’d gather the fabric of her wide, twice-stitched, thrice-patched skirt in the fist of her free hand, lifting the hem above her knees so that she could chase after him and herd him in through the screen door.  The little naked rascal was more likely to just run through the back yard and into the alley, where the fast-girls and the weed-smokers would only encourage him by laughing and pointing, and shouting “Peely-Batty-Paully-Wally!” 

His father wasn’t much help as far as his mother was concerned.  He’d meet his son outside wearing nothing but what he was born in and grab him up in his black-gloved hands and swing him over his head, exposing the boy’s nakedness to god and everyone.  “If ih da wa bad bwai, yuh fi beat ah.”  His father would say.  The argument, to his mind, was that simple.  “If not, then leff di lee bwai lone.  So what if ih want mek di work know weh ih got.  Da wa lee-lee bwai, mek ih have ih fun while ih young yet.”  And, later, when they were both alone on in their rooms and their clothes had all been folded and put away, including the pair of black gloves his father kept next to his shoes and socks, and just before they both fell asleep on the mattress on the floor, sweaty and tired, Wally’s father would say to his wife: “If you neva want wa lee bwai weh woulda give yuh trouble, weh yuh gone name ah afta me fa?”

 And so it stayed, until Wally was at the proper age for school and school uniforms, which, conversely, he never wanted to take off, not even in the light of physical threats.  By then, however, the name had stuck.  The fast girls, the weed smokers, and the men who played dominoes with his father outside the kitchen window all knew his as Peely-Batty-Pauly-Wally.  The name was later broken down to either Peely Batty, or Pauly Wally.  Over months, the latter won out, and was further shortened to just ‘Wally’.  In fact, it was so popular a name that on a particular hot night one June a neighborhood girl was heard shouting at the screen door, “Wally-Mommy!  Wally-Mommy!  Wally-Daddy just get shot!”