A Long One

Here is another poem, this time a bit lengthy...


Grande Riviére

The remembrance
of things

like an empty life
in an empty night
nightly weeping in sync
with the sound of the sea

like Bill’s night terrors

like surreal sunsets
the sense of detachment
the impotent pen

like an empty life
on an empty beach
imagining Walcott
walking there before me

coquette Natasha, Dani’s smiles

like smoke-herring, orange-juice
the sexual innuendo that came with “bread”
coffee, mint tea, coconut ice-cream
Mt. Plaisir Estate meals

the cooks, Margaret, Julie
smiling, in exotic accents
declaring my own
accent exotic to them

the ascetic roommates, Lenny & Krishna
like Monique’s hips, Jewel’s skirts
like Asha’s and Vernette’s different curls

like (now, smile!) Tantie Merle

like football on hot sand
like missing the goal to murmurs of “Ha’ luck…”

like Robert’s chimerical tattoo the ‘teagle’

like an empty heart
like Jade and her mouth
and her hands and her eyes
that brimmed with Ariadne’s theme of tears
like the abandonment of something
that felt like love

like bar-girl Samantha and her jealousy

like corbeaux, dark as priests
and their morning exaltation
of the rising sun

like the body’s sense of strangeness
a different equilibrium

the tedious horizon
a lone pelican
a grey knife slicing
the colour-swirled cake of afternoon

the insane glare of daylight
the cooling cliché of rum-and-coke

like tourist-brochure,
beach-chair afternoons
the crispness of a Carib
cascading down the throat
the graininess of sand on glass

like midnight’s weeping, for a distant loss,
for an empty life
for the sounds of oily, midnight creatures
tiny flippers on midnight’s half-damp leaves

for the guilt of apathy

an empty life
wanting to scream at midnight
out-roar an ocean not half as deep
as my own inner emptiness

like Rasta boy, Two-ten and his controversial wrap

the sense of anachronism
Bob Marley dueting with Lauren Hill
Turn your lights down low…
under the low lights of the open-air bar

like barman, Ricky
jovial smile in a Neanderthal jaw
smiling, proclaiming his love for Zion
that Rasta girl (de one wit de glasses),
boy that girl crazy ‘bout me

the remembrance of things
an empty life
an empty night
an empty heart
an empty bed

like Zion
the twin-island republic of her breasts
her eyes, stars
reflected on a midnight ocean
like my tongue, a caravel, exploring
her body’s own obscure oceanography,
harbouring between her thighs

like secretly swearing
that each taste of her
held a hidden high

her ganja-laden, darting tongue
the sheer narcosis of her kiss

like midnight, on fresh-starched hotel sheets
the moon turned off
a blanket of stars, a bed of beach
like Zion and her body of
storming, tempestuous, midnight ocean

remembrance of things

an empty life

an empty midnight ocean woman
depthlessly mysterious, dark
deeply yearning to be filled
pentecostal in her passion
crying out Raúl Raúl
to a pounding, colder,
more passionless, than the surf’s

an empty life

three weeks

the remembrance of a time
that felt like exile