Night-mare

Sound of thunder
That surges violent storm of wakefulness
And will flatten our frowning bedsheets
Of stringent terror seizing sinews
Neath her bounding of silvered heels.
Lightning will lay scorch as it travels
Bolt through bracket bones of bare flesh
That hovers amassed in silhouette stature
Like blackened skins of clouds so lofty.

O’ lumbering lady of mirth, now eclipsed
Take the groaning bitter of darkness
And saddle now its poignant promise
Of broken dawns we’d yearn to see

Cast recall of dreams you mounted
Failures flung from whithers so steep
Thrones of kings brought crashing at her feet
Buckling at her fetlocked mercies
And of blissful hopes now trampled
Soft memory blown through her muzzle
To breath of howling storm, exhaled
From blackened belly nursing your dreams

Lady of moon and macabre misgiving
Will thunder in nightly swarm as you sleep
And spine of bounding mane, entangled
Stabbing fears deep into psyche
That laces regret through formless memory
Of the rider you once knew.

Lie-ability

It’s easy for you to claim that it’s truth
Merely bending onto its own frame
Perfection at its best
And nothing else...
But not for me.
Bitter be last of those days
Swooned over your slicing of syllables
Days of vaulting those virulent vowels
You said were harmless...
Beauty set to sleep by your rhythm
Razor of grass as blades of your tongue
The bullshitting babble buttering your lips
All gone
With irony, that synchrony of motion
Writhing hip touching hip as you parted
Slits of legs to give you liberty
With all i had left...
Nought but frigid breath of lies
I devoured thirsting and trusting your depth
Could sanctify truth
Ungodly, and lied to
Like puppet clenched between your fingers
Bending must be heaven for you
And hell beyond that brazen fantasy:
Everything I’d ever wish to see
Can only live on the tip of your tongue.

Temporality

In this world
Eternity begotten, not made
Forgotten
And played with
Far too often.

Years are yearning
To have you back
Between their jaws
To grinding pulp
Of bitter moments
You pressed within

Months become monsters
You cringe at counting
Twelve to 1
Three-sixty plus 5
In this world
Days be numbered
Dates on calendar you flip backward
Do lie closer than they seem

The hours are "we time"
Between us only
Keep it like this
Or loose what it means
To love
To be

A minute, just that - minute
Miniscule
Misused
Muse
And gone

Seconds don't always
Give second chance
Make most of them
For first time round
Is last you see
In this world.

Shards

Mirrors are fragile...
Bending as borne lassitude of image
Cracked as irony caved on its own weight
Broken, but laced well
If it jams, you force it
Or rein-force-mentally frame it -
Bits and pieces of you
Peep through spiked ‘n cynical boarders
To shield what then was reflection
Of yours
In a thinking far too fragile to endure
Stones of truth bombarding conscience
Only to catch yourself in splinters
Over and over
Tossing and twisting shards into your slit palms
Subtly embraced in the ecstasy of bleeding’s
Tepid feel
Of crimson flow
Pooling glass at your feet
As footpath
Made to bless heels in what bleeding
Began with piercing edge of denial...
Caustic blades of untruth being told
And one pain pane of glass you shattered
In battle of self

Demon warfare

There's a war
Staked among silent orbits
Of atoms and their dances
Choreographed
Glint of silver, pressed
Beaten and cured to concrete bullets
But this
Won’t stun vampires anymore.
Through mastery and masonry
Forged of black steel
They sharpened
Swords for stung teeth, ironed
Against their withering tongues
Took heed of wisdoms...
And details
Patterned in dreams of slumbering cities
Caught our vices
Cobwebbed, hanging
Draped our skeletons, dangled in chaplets
At bedsides
And beside our closets
Cramped of solitudes
Snide n’ sinful secrets we held store
Blasphemies of all sorts –
And metal,
Shards piercing flesh as arrows
Stifled echoes we though best to swallow
From being heard...
But they have come to learn what’s clandestine
Casket of fears we hid behind, mirrors
Beckoning rebirth of these chided demons
Biting and twisting silver like smiths do
Turning and shaving angles off bullets
Till quietly seething warheads within us
Take mutiny against our own skins

S P A C E D O U T

I've made friends
In dark 'n cold space behind doors
Neatly hung on those walls
Of dispensaries.
Names are hypnotic
And have tricked me to believing
They won't play my psyche
For too long...
But Mary go round,
Came round
And landed my footing right
Where I started
To reality realizing
She only keeps coming
Back
If i take her down again
And again
With Johnny Black
Over, and over
Till i shot stars
And hung their halos
Round my eyes
And skull
Gazed in awe
Of astroidal collisions
And meteors
And how they gnawed
At planets
As i did my own skin
Created
Craters for hiding
My very life inside
The bombshell I made of it
Desperate to find within
Shrapnel of me
Who i was before
Meteors i sent hurling
At myself
Exhausted
Like footpaths carved
Solid by comets
And trailed regrets
Like stardust
Till i force
Me to swallow what
Emptiness i've found
In loss
And spaces -
Vacuum
Airless...
Me
No more.

Atonement

1. FELLING

Godless...
In dust, even, is found the humblest of images. That i am not. Of me is neither dust, nor ashes, nor cinders, nor soot. I am, and most dreadfully so, the likeness of dirt. Quietly must i lay, scorned infertile, refuse of earth and despised of creation. Onto me is offered the flesh of swine, thick hide of mastodon figures, forcing structures through my substance. Baptised in the gutter, indwelling of lakes, residence of clotted drains, confined, here. Stench unbearable, sight ungodly, host of rotted, putrid carcass, purpose...lost in slough of silt-forms, muck substance of soil minus worth. My God bears not the image of dirt. But manure, perhaps, dignity of soil and ash, even dust to him, pleasing. Of dirt my image was not made, but rather became what i am, for sin, for world and flesh, and festival and fame. I dirt became, and shall claim no likeness to my divine master, detach now mine from His being, sacrifice of life and limb, for sake of Him and His infallibility, don’t tell me, i’m His. For dirt is not of Him.


2. ASCENT

Found
Guilty
Repentance
On grace return
For dances speaking
Nought but love
Twisted heels
Backward bend
Back is douen
Forward is Christ
Yet
Few are chosen
Of grazing men
Wiping the sky
From the grass
Grieving storm
Of past...
Convictions
Sending prayer
Upward heaven
There
Focus
You
Sin-ner
Sin never
Again

Character (Election '10)

Life theatrical
Plat-forms a world of actors
Campaign now playing

And you, Trinbagonian…what are you looking for?
Entertainment? You’ve got it
Excitement? You’ve got it
Bacchanal? You’ve got it
An experience of a lifetime you’ll never forget? You’ll get it.
The election campaign is geared to meeting our whims and fancies
And we are a people of festivals and fantasies
Of J’ouvert mud stain melodies
Of Tuesday masquerades
And of Ash
Wednesday Mass
Of Dimanche Gras
And grandeur
Of costuming kings and queens of carnival parades
Of reigning monarchs of steel and soca
And calypso fiestas
So we swallow theatre, and force characters down to the pits of our stomach
Digesting bacchanal as crab and callaloo
It’s almost culturally fit that our politics preaches
Of playwrights we’ve all seen before
Actors on platforms who pass through a different door
To take the same mic-
Stand
Gesturing crossed hands to cross out villains
Of heroes born and bred to save us
Of a dawn of motherhood, to rising “girl power”
Of an abusive father
Who repeatedly raped his daughter
Then lay her festering corpse in bondage
Beside her love and his bleeding
Hart
Pillow of thorns and dollars and cents
Do So to ex-it
To scene of shredding a scarlet promise
Lyricist begins to juggle his vowels
Bending words to shift their spaces
From truth
So we never discern that the jargon had its root
Set deep into this fruit of lies
We’ve all seen these actors die
Only to rebirth as magicians of another kind
But still of the very same mango
Seed
A play on diversities
Beggin you to either switch over to curry
Or simply keep suckin red pulp
Till dry
Stain teeth if you may
Both are lies
Artificially flavored themselves to entice you
Sweet talk served with an ounce of honey
Anchard masseured in thyme or shado beni
To leave us a people in drooling tongues
Twisting deep in this irony of culture
My only fear is the poisoning of theatre
By politics
Or rather is it
Of politics by theatre?
That we have grown so deep into their characters
That we don’t speak issues
Anymore

The Price of Blood

What is the cost of blood?
Simply...the cost of life.
But what is the cost of life?
Simply...the wage of death.
But what is the cost of death?
Simply...priceless.

There are some things money can’t buy;
Far less return
Like a little girl’s dignity stripped
Off the face of her soul when daddy injected her...
Molested her...
Imprisoned her...
Profaned her...
Defiled her...

Or the rustling echoes of rusted hours
Slipped so neatly between vacuous moments when you
Once thought you knew who you were, say
From then till now you’ve changed
Better or for worse your outlook
Your dreams
Your vision
Your soul
It’s all rust when you’ve lost it, then
Cash be futile here.

Master Card has nothing on this one...simply
Who can purchase life with pennies, saved
Or worse, hoarded?
Say, the earning of life by sweat over brow?
Falsehood!
To purchase life is to have purchased divinity
Or to have at best conceived either as possible
Spent soul searching litany of wastelands
To have...
Built your ego of bronze and fine gold
For worship, say, to have purchased yourself
From yourself
Thus becoming the irony of your own slave
Trade yourself in repayment for silver
And have lost in loss
Like rich man’s bid to back-purchase entry
Through fierce and threatening needle’s eye...
Better the camel whose humps amass in graces
Stored forgiveness
Pent up piety
Grossed uprightness
In wait of drought or guava seasonalities.
There are many gods
To which you may offer your debt
By your death...
But solely one God
In whom your death is transfigured to resemble naught
Of what it was before you began living within
Him
And His blood
You drank in thirst of cancelling who you were...
Drunkard
Prostitute
Adulterer
Murderer
Thief...
Sinner born of Eve’s ungodly womb
To re-create, or translate your death into His grace
To life, unscathed, of purity nestled deep into Eden’s Earth
Flowing from the reverent sanctity of her offspring
Of Euphrates meandering courses round foliage
Of Tigris enveloping tree of rooted knowledge
Of life giving itself back to Adam’s rib
Back to flooding breath back to lungs
Back to undone...agonies of unsteady childbirth
Reversed transfusion of His blood into ours
To His plasma pouring and gouging out vessels
Pooled mercies into still venous caverns
And death making backstroke to back-course timelines
Giving back life into red marrowed bones
Ad infinitum, bounty beyond my purchase
In awe transcending crucified image of He
Of bleeding skull and sides and wrist
Of dying He withholding my debt...
To risen He who restoreth life
Not of my earning, but of His within me
Ad infinitum; forever am I in debt to His love
Forever am I in death to His love...
Ad infinitum; death into His precious blood
That my life into His love...
Be measured in pints.

Fleshed Out of Haiti

Porous bones line the inner sanctums
Clotted sorrows in corridors of flesh
Rivers of death
Tear skin to carve notches on cheekbones
Grinding teeth on gravel to brimstone
Valleys
Cut like knives in terrain, twisting
Rounding edge into bellies
Beneath these...
Cracked and sunken shanty abodes
Haiti
Lay prisoner to bars of brown earth
Mulching to what remains of her breath
In broken lives to (what) livelihoods left
On oil drum skins...
On stilted legs they spin
Broken shacks to signify shackles
Crotches ‘neath arms to keep sentiments afloat
A people left to fade, stone by stone
They, withered spines on black hills
Toting vacuous eyes that cling
Visions braving the shadows to vigil
For how many bones
Twisted on steel beams to hang like chaplets
Pit gravel to skin knees, and prayed
In Mantras quelling the flames of atrocities
Rhythm carving fingers to fish hooks
Threading black soil for signs of living
Hands a shovel to bear lacerations,
Soon
Turn upward fold to catch manner from heaven,
Till
Stomach churning a massacre, digest
And spit
500 for thousand to rest
And still
They offer thick blankets to wrap you,
Haiti
And see you die slowly

In its folds