Possessing the Secret of Joy

Is in those moments when you’re most blinded, you’ll find it possessed, bazodeed, when you’re least aware of what you have. That moment of joy, seeing her standing there waiting, pieces of her blowing in the wind. She smokes another cigarette, checking her cell phone because she’s lonely without you. And when she catches a glimpse of you, all you see is her dimples. And your smile is broad enough that you silently cry a secret joy, because even though you can’t really see, your eyes find each other. You embrace.

Is there such a thing?
Are there moments so sure
that you’re so unaware of?

Find it possessed, bazodeed
with your cataract eyes
incapable of recognizing joy

as she waits there for you
dimpled and broad smiled
lonely for your sauntering suspension?

We embrace, because it’s been that long
since we’ve caught a sighting that spectacular
shooting ephemeral phenomenologies
burning a thousand years away.

Maybe She Just Didn’t Wanna Dance With You Dude

Well thank goodness for dat, cause I woulda been confused
being as it’s a queer disco ball spinning its bacchanal lights tonight
shiny confetti glimpses of why you’re here, staring right back at me
from across the room.

Did you find my gaze entertaining?
One to test out but never wake up to, cause you’re so sure
you don’t want what society prescribes, and yet you’re here
with us, where poverty procures a so call lesser being.
You wait for him.

I’ve become your novelty of sorts, I’ve become your snicker
with your friends in a corner, watching me to see me
build up the gumption, waiting for the right song to cheer me on.

Did it make you feel wanted?
Most beautiful of all?  When I didn’t ask for your name
your number, who you’d like to fuck on a regular
I didn’t ask for your life, I asked you to dance.

After You…

The slow motions
the instant repeats
the lifeless potraits
the ending points

kills the most, since
you become aware

the stillness in the eyes
that’s when you know

her sun has set
the day is over 
and it is now a drawing
of her faded interest.

But like a never-ending flipbook
you wistfully rummage through
the flickering stages, only to create
your own images, after you

an eyesight that is ruthless
with its rapid velocity
as it blinks with a new truth
faster than a hummingbird’s wings

showing off how she forgets you
and you’re left with the drawings
where someone new has her touch.

Looks inside a Skeleton

Save Yourself                                                             Life Jacket

How can I feel thank-ful-ness                    self preservation, something I should have
while I’ve arrived at survival and you didn’t?  learned, been aware of by the time I was teething

How can I move pass the memory                  especially while I’ve absorbed the ugliness
when we both were gasping for air?                  breathing out its dead, its shivering debris.

They never say to give up your oxygen mask                 As a child, you’re never allowed a say
in fact they strongly advise you against it.           unless you have a good law guardian:

Before attempting anything                                I must understand directions
you must first be breathing.                                and consider how cruel self preservation
                                                                        can be.

But then, once I’ve put my oxygen mask on                   It is like while one is drowning and
and you’re left stranded for air, I watch you try to speak without a thought, you reach for

I watch you escape into the open, into oblivion              slapping  for anything afloat, and      
I fight and scream for you to stay with me.                       then grab on,
                                                                                               push, push, push down for air,

                                                                                            for life.

                                                                                   

Ode to the Infinite Burn

To forget, oh to forget, have to, have to
have never touched your open hearth
where luminosity soaks and then soars.

Watch the fire, watch, watch the fire ignite
watch it ablaze and crack, cheat, cheat
cheating my umbra with orange cinders
blue sparks full of auspicious heights

then dies, dies, dies, it does
in languorous pace, unmindful 
of the fingertips it singed, hurts me so

to forget, oh to forget.

Sea of Silence

Wreckless is to give all of yourself to another.
You’d become harshly aware of the unforgiving cold
once they’re gone, and suddenly you’ve been freed to a sea of silence
at the top of a mountain where there’s nothing left but ice
the unfathomable void, where loneliness has encased itself
to no one to contend to.  The sunlight blinds you with tears of longing
bare tears, full of memories, tending towards trepidation.

Chapter 6

Previous chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

She is searching for herself in her father’s steps. Heavy, hard and premeditated–penetrating the wooden floor–the sound of his steps traveling through the corridors, making its way to the kitchen. In Comrade’s steps–the ones that walk over her mother, marching in time to the struggle–she tries to find herself. In her father’s words that rallied people together–one union, one struggle–she is lost in between. Words he never learned at any college, because his parents couldn’t afford the $35.00 entrance fee. “Wen Comrade Ironman speak, he talk the truth.” The people listened. They listened to Comrade Ironman’s cry to shut down the entire country, when management for the electric company, T&Tec, refused to increase worker’s wages.

“Let Trinidad stand still tonight. Let the lights from T&Tec go out tonight and management feel the might of the people.”

And for one day, just days before Carnival, the lights went out, and the streets of San Fernando and Port-of-Spain were dead. The next day the management’s negotiating team and the union returned to the table. The workers were given their wage increase. 

Njeri cannot find what she is looking for in her mother’s sighs, because her mother is the jack-ass washing and ironing Comrade’s blue skirts for tomorrow’s battle. Cooks his food and carried his babies–four alive, three dead. She cannot find herself in her mother, who drags her feet everyday singing, “Oh what a friend we have in Jesus,” since she made a pact with God, and even God had failed.

“If you make dem stop fightin, den I’ll go to church every Sunday.” Njeri waited a whole year for God to perform what to her seemed like a miracle, but the miracle took too long to come. By the time she was seven, she was estranged from and unmoved by the word every Sunday. “Dere ain’t no fuckin God, and if he real, he could hold he ass.”

She can’t imagine herself as her mother, who had to ask someone to write, A C H A I A down. And Njeri’s own name–that unconquerable name weighing down her shoulders with too many expectations and requirements–she felt foreign when she heard it in its entirety: Njeri Ironside.

All of this–Comrade’s heavy footsteps, her mother dragging her feet, God’s betrayal and that unconquerable name–in a rush they glide around her head. Now, as Njeri struggles to remember what she was like when she was unconscious; before she started school, before anything. Like the time Joshua pushed her off the hammock, and she flew–hitting her head against a large stone. For awhile there was nothing. Njeri feels she has lost something–something is missing.

Her seven year old body sits on the toilet seat. Staring at the ceramic squares, she wonders how long it will take for her dangling legs to reach the floor and her beginnings to exist. She aims to go back, but all she sees is a blinding white vacancy–lightening, flashing, fleeting moments. She remembers her first day of primary school and how prepared she was not to cry.

I remember yuh first day of school and how yuh wouldn’t stop cryin. I remember. Ah was puttin on yuh school uniform, and yuh just wouldn’t stop cryin. Yuh fadder try to make yuh feel better by takin yuh picture. He even let yuh ride in front with him wen he was droppin yuh off to school.

But as soon as her father left and seeing all the other girls were in tears, she couldn’t help herself. The teacher came back and said, “You too, I thought you’re a big girl, and look at you, crying like de rest.”

She sees a hazy image of her mother throwing a grapefruit, hitting her hard in the stomach. Then there was the time she was lost in the supermarket–the fright she felt swimming in a sea of people walking past and through her. But these memories seem unreal. She tries to remember her birth, or when she couldn’t speak, because Joshua claims that he remembers being inside their mother’s womb. But all Njeri remembers is a feeling. A feeling of fear that comes with the shadows as they thrash around in the dark: loud sudden crashes, bodies slamming against walls, the sound of out-of-breath screams, and the silence after. An eerie silence, similar to the sound the beach made early in the morning and late in the evening, when all the people were heading home. The quiet between the waves coming in, crashing into the sand; the silence that was never without sound because the walls cried every night. Her heart racing with expectations of something breaking, someone suddenly screaming, “Oh God, look at de blood, so much blood!” This is what she remembers, but it is not enough. She cannot find herself amongst any of these memories, amongst a feeling.

Njeri gets up and looks at her reflection in the medicine cabinet’s mirror, and for a quick second she cannot recognize her face.  The image grins and jeers at her. She hears something whispering, “Yuh stupid girl.” And then, she feels someone or something moving behind her, but no one is there. She turns the lights off, and feels the person or thing’s eyes were nailing her to the wall. She doesn’t know what it is, but it makes her feel the sickening sense of nausea  inside her stomach. She searches for its eyes and body but it ends when her mother comes knocking at the bathroom door.

“Wha you doin in de bathroom so long, girl? Is hide you hidin from house work so?  No man want ah woman who can’t cook and clean, so yuh better come and help meh in de kitchen. Come cut dem carrots and sweet pepper for de fry rice,” Achaia demands.

“So yuh ask yuh fadder bout goin to de beach tomorrow.”

“No.”

“Wha yuh waitin for? Yuh doh want to go on de beach?”

“Yeah.”

“Well yuh know he will do anyting for you and Serena. You and your sister are his girls. He doh listen to me, so why yuh doh ask him. We can go and get out of dis house for one day? You should ask him wen he come home tonight. O.K baby, you know dat mommy loves you.”

She is Comrade’s girl. Njeri thinks about this as she cuts the vegetables. She believes that it is true. Whenever anyone wanted anything from Comrade, they came to Serena or Njeri. Her mind wanders to the time when her picture was on the front page of the Sunday Express, holding a placard–“One Union, One Struggle, Unite”–in her hand as she marched side by side with Comrade to Fyzbad on Labor Day. Even Comrade’s friends from the union said she was the spitting image of her father, and if Comrade ever went crazy and said Njeri was not his child, they’d have to jail him.

“I have his dimples, and red hair. I’m brave just like daddy, so brave dat I doh fraid lizards and frogs like Sreena.”

It’s not enough.  She still feels like a stranger invisibly walking behind Comrade’s foot steps, stepping into his enormous black shoes that Joshua spit shined for him every Sunday evening. She can’t be a jackass as her mother called herself, cooking the food Comrade won’t touch, “This is stale food you giving me.”

Njeri wants to be as powerful as her father.  The man who could shut down the entire country if he wanted to because the people believed in him.

It’s all about the bands

So last week I had my belly full of music.  Starting with this indie rock/alternative band from Paris called The Novels on Thursday night at Trash Bar.

Some photos of The Novels:

And then there was Saturday night when partially, my dream came through (thanks DJ Mojo).  I saw two of my favorite bands play on the same bill at the House of Yes.  It’s been my dream that Renminbi, Object and TSTAR played on the same bill, so imagine my delight when both Reminbi and Object were sharing the stage.  It was freaking awesome, here, check it out, first up is OBJECT:

RENMINBI

Some photos of Renminbi: