For Annesha

Mama settles in the shadows, her prayers
curl through the ornate burglar bars,
dance above the flat concrete roof,
then dally over the Gardens, the smell
of a rotting dog in the dry gully,
mingling with the sweet comfort
of burning weed and jerking meat--
the pepper, the pimento, the sugar;
and Papa Leg’s sound system shivers
the dense clustering of mango leaves;
and God knows the broken bottled
path along Marcus Garvey’s pocked
drive, up towards the mountains
into the narrow lanes someone
called the ghetto--this clustering
of havens; from outside stoic,
voiceless facades; inside, like here
where mama kneels in the shadow,
a shelter of crotons, aloe-vera,
hibiscus, and garish rose bushes;
all limp where the shot is still
lodged; this shelter, this temple,
where an altar of gleaming
bleached rum bottles stand
in a circle on a cruciform
platform, raised above the earth,
where an enamel pan of fresh
rain water strewn wuith petals,
these quietlt pristine bottles filled
with water caught in the last
rains; in this haven, mama’s voice
carries high against the news;
and someone is whispering to me:
“Father Holung coming for you,
baby girl. Is your time now;
the priest in white with flaxen hair
coming for you. Your time now.”
My cocktail of Baygon and rum;
my cocktail of bleach and tar;
my cleansing, my purging,
my fire into this worthless soul--
“AIDS a go kill me; AIDS a go
kill me.” Poor Mama, how tiny
her voice wailing for mercy;
asking God how come, how come;
and me praying for my daughters;
mercy, mercy until the shadow comes.

It was Christmas time,
the balloons needed blowing,
and so in the evening
we sat together to blow
balloons and tell jokes--
the cool air off the hills
made me think of coffee,
so I said, “Coffee would be nice,”
and he said, “Yes coffee
would be nice,” and smiled
as his thin fingers pulled
the balloons from the plastic bags;
so I went for coffee
and it takes a few minutes
to make the coffee
though I did not know
if he wanted cow’s milk
or condensed milk,
and when I came out
to ask him, he was gone,
just like that, in the time
it took me to think,
cow’s milk or condensed;
the balloons sat lightly
on his still lap.

These days, the language of death
is a dialect of betrayals; the bodies
broken, placid as saints, hobble
along the tiled corridors, from room
to room. Below the dormitories
is a white squat bungalow, a chapel
from which the handclaps and choruses
rise and reach us like the scent
of a more innocent time. I am
trying to listen to the plump
Palestinian man with his swaying
rural middle-class patois, this jovial
servant, his eyes watering at the memory
of an eleven year old girl brought
to die inside the white walls
and cheap fabric of this place;
her small body fading, her eyes
fiercely flaming with light, with hunger
for wide open spaces--decades
of discovery. Her mind is still
unable to calculate the treachery
of rape, to grasp how a man
can seek revenge on her tender body;
why as he wept when they took him
away, she wept, too, like the day
she wept when they took her mother’s
empty body away, the disease
leaving her with nothing but bones,
thin skin, the scent of chickens.
There is refuge, I know, in distraction,
the chapel of charms down the hill,
the pure sound of my youth,
when cleansed by the perpetual blood
my sins were never legion enough
for despair; when the comfort
of the Holy Spirit was green as this
sloping escarpment, thick with trees,
cool against the soft sunlight; these things
she saw before her body
could not cope anymore; her laughter,
her laughter. The plump man brushes
the gleam of tears from his cheeks.
I think of the simple equations
of compassion; I think of songs,
the harmonica, the strained
harmonies, the bodies of the dying
shuffling past, eyes still hoping;
the van waiting in the shade
to take me from all of this;
the long ride through rain and dark
to Kingston, to sleep and more sleep.

How it had me
I couldn’t talk.

This what you hear
is like water flow.

How it had me
I couldn’t walk.

You might a call me cripple
but this cripple can walk.

How it had me
all I wanted was to do

was crawl in a ball
and dead like that

but see me here now,
see me here now,

man must live, iyah,
man must live.

And for just that instant
when from Hope Road

we watched the rainbow cut
across the robust body

of the Blue Mountains,
the way the sun seemed

filtered and the light clean
as peace; when the gleam

of quick color bounced
giddily off the cars;

in that instant we breathed;
and I was glad we could

share this together--
this fleeting lasting thing.

Kingston settles on your skin,
the grit of wood-fire and exhaust
on your body; you know sin,
the pleasure of untrammeled lust.

Kingston is green in November,
so much rain; the water creeps
to the surface. I remember
the taste of june plum seeds.

Most of my friends are dying--
the thing is they know it,
and the others are busy nursing
the dying: God’s cruel edits.

So many saints frighten me
and I grow silent, disease
has a name: HIV/AIDS.
We are caught up in a breeze

that grows to a growl
crossing the water, dragging
the belly of the sea--a howl
shattering the black evening.

I stand in the storm,
let its battering break me;
I know now every form
of death; no more mystery here.

The eye passes mutely;
and while the earth vomits
and shingles cartwheel
around me. I doubt it

all; the conspiracy of death.
I will live to see the wasting
of my flesh; my last breath
will be in a calm season.

They will know my sins,
every betrayal; those I killed,
those whose voices begin
whisper to me until

tears come, until I pray
to slip away like night,
a frail man limping
towards morning light.

“…while inside she knew the cold river was creeping up and up to extinguish that eye which must know by now that she knew…”
“Sweat” by Zora Neal Hurston

1.
Nothing like the surety of death
to make a skinny short man’s
open hand seem like dust, an empty
weight on the skin. Look at him,
gabardine suit flopping about
his scrawny legs, loose shirttail
hanging, and the pride of chains,
rings, chaparitas. He is dying, too.
The same treachery in her blood
makes him as ordinary as dirt.

2.
One year now since she gave up
the stone in my belly,
swelling into grotesquery,
a universe of errors. One year
now, since the gurgle and greed
of his mouth pulling at anything
suckable. One year now, since
the confession that his fainting,
his vomiting, his skin curdling
is AIDS in his skin. One year now
since she heard the news
of the end of her life--and now
no one speaks, no one has words
to offer her, no one can console.

3.
Look at this short man,
ruler of his kingdom of worms,
reduced to this preening graveyard,
a man hustling some change
so he can eat from day to day,
and man who will sit and stare
into the sky, his eyes empty
of meaning, a man pleading
for her mercy while she eats
her own meal in front of him;
a puppy begging for a morsel,
but she hisses her teeth,
leaves him sniveling,
it is easy to be cold like this.

4.
This is the equation of death--
she fears nothing, she laughs at his
vanishing body rising with violence
and she watches as he crumbles
to tearful nothing--at least once
the fear was part of the sweetness,
the assurance that something firm
was anchoring her; this is the way
death simplifies things; death will take
us all, she knows this all too well,
and her single prayer is to be there
to see him ask for his last sip
of water, to be able to take the glass
brimming with white light,
and let it spill like libation
into the earth before his bewildered eyes.

I promise myself simple things;
like to fight to the death for my vanity;
to always chase after the damned wind,
for to live fully immersed in one’s vanities
is to surely live. So I promise
that Rachel Eliza will bring her satchel
of cameras and film, and drive me
to an open field between two mountains
near a cottage with its sky blue walls,
when I have reached perfection, when
I have been sculpted down to one
eighty six pounds, and my hair
has been trimmed to a dark gleam
over my skull, and the veins
in my arms are coiled beautifully
over the last breaths of muscle
before my bones take over. For
two weeks of elegance, I will
gambol and cavort shirtless, and lewd,
offer my flat-bellied profile revealing
at last the ribs I had lost so long,
so long ago--and my navel
will be a tight knot, jutting
slightly after being so long
in the dark well of my stomach--
and in that sweet interim, I will be
as beautiful as I have dreamed to be,
and everyone will adore the shape
of my splendid emaciation--all this
before the joints bore against
my worn out skin, this before I join
the bone-yard of the walking dead.
It is the one promise I have made
to myself, and it must come on me
just when the pouis trees begin to yellow
and blue, and the world is in glorious
riot, and in that moment, everything
will be right with me, I promise.