7/15/2023

The colonial architects

Grip the earth by her throat

Still.

Proud child of the soil

Her blood in your veins

Her salt in your hair

Her heartbeat in your waist

We are hers through and through.

So Why then, are we surprised by

The venom of her affliction

Seeping from familiar lips?

Child of Wonder,

The porcelain chains must shatter

One's full strength is required for the healing of Pachamama’s vessel

And to be whole

The colonies must burn

7/27/2024

Mah-Mah and the Dog

They say Ronald Webster could turn into a fukken dahg ehno

I want to tell you about the day white men with fully automatic guns came to kill my great uncle

My grandmother cousin

A militant uprising, they called it. 

In truth, it was an island full of fisherman and goat farmers answering years of abuse peacefully.

The boldest of them put colonial overseers and intermediaries on a boat back to St. Kitts

Zero reported casualties. So naturally, british battleships and marines were the next logical step

A sniper was posted on the school building above the sea rocks

Not a hundred feet from the house I'd grow up in some 30 years later.

They were looking for the infamous ringleader: a Mr Webster.

Myyy grandmother cousin. 

The school children them say Ronald Webster could turn into a fukken dahg ehno.

 And as the story go,
My grandmother wake hu cousin, tell him paratroopers coming–
The boat in the harbour already
Ronald say, das our boat in the bay
Granny say fuck our boat, it's the British, wake yuh ass

It continues on to detail how he ringleader of the 1967 Anguilla Revolution, Anguilla's first democratically elected prime minister, James Ronald Webster,

MYYYY grandmother cousin,

Run in the bush naked and disappear for 40 days and 40 nights, and the british couldn't find him before they leave.

He family couldn't find him eida, but das ok.

Eventually he come back.

But if I think about it, this story is not actually about Ronald Webster

Or the Anguilla revolution 

Or the People's progressive party 

I want to talk about Virginia Webster

MY grandmother that raise a dozen children in a single room house.

Who left my crying infant brother outside overnight to hush

Who give me blows for things that wasn't my fault

Who could manage and butcher her goats well into her 60s

Who wouldn't let a single person walk by the house without offering them a johnny cake

Who sat with me in a bathtub as hurricane Louis took our roof and all our earthly possessions

Who made the BEST macaroni and cheese

Who sit me in a metal pan, scrub me down with aloe, and make me eat some. Every. Weekend.

Who died before I could truly meet her in this life

Who isn't even a footnote in the documented story

Of the political assassination that she singlehandedly prevented

An ACTUALLY - Dis a prayer of thanks

To the heroes of revolution that didn't get a plaque or dedication

No books, no citation 

The sisters and brothers

Fathers and mothers 

Daughters and sons 

The theys and thems

That helped carry us this far

And those here right now

The perfectly imperfect

Beautifully flawed

Humans

Carrying the movement ontoppa they head

Although they cannot, in fact

Tun into a fukken dahg

-----

July 27th, 2024

What is good in life?

To crush your enemies, 

To see them driven before you, and

to hear the lamentations of their  loved ones.

What is better in life? 

To lay hands on the intangible,

Floating around in the ether and 

wrestling it into reality

To cleave to the imperceptible 

and bend it from formlessness 

Into a thing of substance and beauty

What is good in life? 

To reach and grasp the sun. 

To hold it in your hands. 

To see yourself and your loved ones in it. 

In God.

To raise a glass with loved ones

To life, and love, and health,

And to the end of the world.

April 23, 2020

Fire mixed with blood is

an old, fast-fading pipe dream;

Breathing suffices now.

March 31, 2023

The still, midnight soundscape is pierced by the screech of whetstone on honed steel. Sparks dance across the warm soil, turning the yellow firelight white for a heartbeat. The hunched figure is statuesque but appears a roiling specter of soiled iron, covered in stubborn shadows that cling to form as they wrestle with the dancing yellows and reds of the pit-fire dying nearby.

Statuesque save for the loud, well-practiced ritual whose sound is unmistakable to similarly experienced professionals. The sound of a loud conscience's guilty hands seeking absolution in monotony, attempting to strike blood from steel and soul alike. The sound of the wicked seeking rest that will never come. The sound of a fool's errand.

"I was doing what I had to do to survive"

Another stroke. Another screech, another deluge of sparks. Another memory pushed away, into the dark recesses of business as usual, taking the crouched traveler one step closer to blissful forgetfulness, however temporary it may be. They'd lost count somewhere after two hundred perfect executions, fingers flexing and wrist coiling ever so slightly at the fuller to compensate for cosmetic imperfections that came with the blade; a smooth movement each time.

They adjust their position ever so slightly, releasing a breath that sounds suspiciously like a sigh. A practiced flick turns the blade to begin work on the back edge.

Another stroke. Sparks dance as the stone begins to sing and the smooth screech ends midway as the ceramic edge catches an unfamiliar notch in the blade. A token of failure from morning past. The wages of a sloppy backswing with hasty edge alignment; blade meeting bone and chipping as it skittered away from its mark. Unnecessary suffering. A mercy kill. Another voice crying out for quarter, repeating endlessly, to join the nightly din.

"If I hadn't, someone else would have."

They managed to avoid eye contact as their victim failed to avoid the heart-seeking plunge. This new specter will be faceless, at least. The realization is enough to draw a mirthless chuckle from cracked lips.

Another stroke; this one adjusted to perfection on the fly, as any professional's work would be. The first of a hundred more perfectly aligned passes, with echoing rasp and shower of sparks to match. Their eyes follow an ember as it dances its way to a small satchel of leather, sagging with the weight of the worth of a dozen human souls. Their grandmother was a scholar and the thought of what her horrified face would look like if she knew is strangled and discarded, but not before the damage was done.

Another stroke. Or, the beginning of one. A deep breath. A long, hard blink. Another sharp inhalation, held for two-score heartbeats and released over four.

"I'm just trying to survive.", they whisper to themselves in the darkness. A single bead of moisture carves a salty path in the dirt of their ashen face, past sunken crow's feet and around teeth gritted in apparent agony. Others begin to well and flow.

"Them or me, This is the only way."

The flames flicker out.
A sound like choking sobs is swallowed by the wind.
The air smells of blood and lies.

Yea

though I walk through the valley of the shadow of

Life

I stop in the quiet places, away from the sun, and search for your face in the sky.

I have held the sun in my hands

I have wrapped my fingers around her neck and twisted

And laughed as She smiled back at me.

But you, Luna;

You do not cause me to shield my eyes

Because your eyes are locked on mine

I have run, danced, and fucked my way across the plains with the sun beating on my shoulders

But tonight Luna, I sing a gentle song from the back of my throat. 

To you.

To the promise of cool rain

To the gentle glow that outlines our bodies as we kiss and bite and suck and thrust our way to the sunrise we never saw coming. 

Give to Caesar what is his and give to God what is God's? 

Well Sol, my body is yours. Always has been. Likely always will be. But yours alone no longer

And to you, Luna, my heart

Thuds against my chest, beyond the coquis and confused roosters of the night. 

Past the quiet whispers and sacred moans, the rustling of sheets and truths better left unspoken but not,

There you are, holding my face in your hands, not quite radiant but magnificent all the same

Lighting up the whole night. 

March 27th, 2020

I swear to drunk I'm

Not God but I love you miss;

Rum break mi shame box

---

shame box: (n) an internal organ present in most humans. Primarily functions to protect against embarrassment. Known to malfunction or shut down completely when exposed to large quantities of alcohol.

November 30, 2019

Hope is

Hope gives

Hope believes

Hope sustains

Hope is.

Hope is a fragile thing.

A beautiful, delicate, almost indescribable thing.

It is coaxed from ashes and withers without water and care.

It shatters in singular moments and takes entire lives, dreams, movements, and our most precious moments with it to the abyss as it goes.

Like the patterns of a snowflake, a single touch can spell disaster and the river of life takes what's left to to Styx to circle the drain for the rest of not-so-happily ever after.

But to the ones brave and foolish enough,

Hope is.

Hope is the vision of clear water before the one drowning in a sea of sand, pushing forward as they're called insane by those too weary and fearful to follow their lead.

Hope is the thing that heaves weary, broken bodies out of beds that they deserve, and ancestors know they desire, and into the storm that we have begrudgingly come to call home.

Hope is the thing that defies logic, circumstance, reason. It drives the madfolk toward the invisible horizon and imbues them with this intoxicating, insufferable, absolutely inescapable marriage between love of life in all her forms and reckless fucking abandon;

It makes battle-hardened champions of cowards and infiltrates even the stoniest hearts, turning blue blood red and giving life where there is none.

A man much older than me once said that fairy tales are more than true because they tell us that dragons can be killed.

Well tonight I stand on his shoulders and scream that hope is how we slay the dragons

Hope is how we heal our islands

Hope is the tie that binds us together

And as our enemies are broken to pieces on the reef called revolution,

Hope is the tide that we will ride to shore.