or that it carries petabytes
to be unlocked via psychic probe
or verbal passcode
unraveling is a course of our flow
that which stores us is undone
only we get to record the path
in curling fists of language
if you can’t make sense of what
the rhythm of time seeks to say
then it wasn’t for you
postcard 20xx, where there are no dirges
the streets can’t help but sing our names back to us. it
sounds like a
Mother’s Union choir rising out of the mango roots, a well
geysering with love. every tanty’s voice was a procession orchestrated
* * *
to keep the block stone-still, to remind us of when the
lapels would plot
to kick the dust out of the pavement, to paint it chaconia
by
at least six-thirty, to write the words SOMEBODY
CHILD in chalk, certain
* * *
of the justice of wild and swinging pain. i remember when the whole gang
of boys on my block come to see the ancestors off, our
mothers and the leaders
of every mass muttering under their breath, Lord, make sure to take them in,
* * *
the streets are a frigid region. we sing every name, craft
Johnnie flambeaux, the
ice boxes burst open with juice and rapid comfort for the
aches, we slap hope
against we thighs to keep the rhythm as your granny dance
in the kitchen to
* * *
the sound of your father’s name. all of us boys remember
the night we get
our mother scared the first time, her writing our names everywhere, whispering it like a national
anthem into the corners of the house, hoping the bricks
would lend us support
sometimes my brother would venture outside our garden’s
edge into the
castle that the past had built to store the children that they
didn’t plan
to make soil of right away. he would stare at it for hours,
try to
pull loose bricks out hoping he would destabilise
the wall, say he was just making sure that all of the
spirits got free. he said he hoped they swam the whole sky above the country,
* * *
that nothing kept them still but their mothers. he and
the others wrote the names of the men without children,
put
the papers together as kites, let the wind take each by law.
every evening he found a new one, gazette paper abiding,
he made sure the evening got all its forsaken citizens
before our mother called us back in
* * *
for dinner. And he’d eat like for all of history’s harm’s
done, he let some names live forever, in our mother’s way.
hunting dog
in the dim
the name on my box
is of the expected dead
missed and still invisible
* * *
don’t study how easy
they rise up foam of spit
of drunkard journalists
bylines growing hot
* * *
their names fresh-wet
on the door of my casket
once, it said Sean, and
muddy water filled my mouth
* * *
silence smelling of sugar and blood—
it said Keyana, cloth dragged
from my chains, I smell
sweat and tears, muffled agony
* * *
rings through my ears—
then Dana, and the links
round my hand electroplated,
judgment-light pours out stigmata.
* * *
and each morning I must bear the
ignoble sacrifice of waking
sober-faced, no wolf-teeth,
no quenk-head, justice does wait
* * *
for nightfall for me to hold your sins,
Simon helping Trinidad to bear them,
listening to them wail on my back,
what kind of monster?
indeed.
me, chained, a thing with fangs—
* * *
a hunting dog, with birds on my back
—and then, become so cursed
as to look like you.
* * *
let me tie you to their names.
smell and sip their unmakings.
your blood does taste better chilled anyway
but you better learn before I consume.
Hastur Asks for Lord Kitchener’s Autograph
Far stranger things have revealed themselves
in the spaces between the mundane and the much-more-than,
where bees unlock voix celeste,
where the dead just want All Fours partners.
He done learn sometimes the unknown
just need someone to sing in their direction.
When the guest holds out a tendril,
say ‘my daughter loves your work’,
Kitch already grinning.
Whatever words share in this moment
I could only believe:
song-stories from new and wilder places
trade in the breaths between uncapped marker
and stained vellum skin. Hastur nods.
How often do you get the chance
to share a moment this grand?
It must have stunned him to pure silence
thick enough to be mistaken
for dread.
the lagahoo speaks for itself
you think I is the monster?
nah—I is just a funeral procession
with canine teeth.
I does keep the lists when
you forget your children’s names,
I growl them low in the night.
I am a rabid memorial—
one that does snatch the mournless from their beds,
one with breath that stink like remorse
I know the scent of every dead girl’s close male relatives
I could sense the sour of trigger fingers
in the alleys at the edges of hotspots
and the sticky-sweet of six figures
in the conference rooms with the hotshots
and all of them left residue on the dead
still fresh-wet on the bones,
stones slick with your wickedness.
you think I is the monster?
I don’t eat my young.
I will, however, feast on the
tight-fisted and apathetic how I please,
calling their names over the dinner plate,
breaking all your headstones into my palms,
picking my teeth with the memory of your name.
Lovecraft Thesis #2
(Splendor & Misery, Face B, Track 2)
* * *
Violence makes good background noise
for anything. Even for knowledge.
People suffer for knowing all the time
in your stories—you know, the ones where
something shrouded in shadow stalks the
corridors between neon and dancing
with its eyes on everything gentle
and its tendrils on everything glimmering.
How dare you tell me this is somehow
unfathomable?
* * *
What is the block, child?
What is it if not the night
turning liminal, sliding into the dark upper sea
where we hold back knowing?
It batters the bones of things
that want to see beyond their horizon,
it is the
storm that walls off the new edge of the world,
the barricade that blurs treasure or threat
outside your reach.
* * *
And yet you still wish to know.
To venture beyond fear’s camp.
To lose your mind in its gyre.
The corner will cry in its usual way,
cry copper and betrayal,
cry having faith in what you know,
* * *
but you will cross the threshold anyway.
That Business They Call Utopia, Part Two
I’ve witnessed that business they call
building a utopia for so long,
higher up the Atlantic where yearning to breathe
free meets committal at the gate.
I’ve been so frightened, friend.
They say over here that we catch the other nations’
colds across the water in the storms, so
* * *
often I wonder how to ward them off:
what warmth but a hearth of good-mornings,
what vitamins but the scent of fruit
from neighbors. I’ve witnessed this
utopia-building business bake bricks from
screaming, friend, and I’ve seen the masonry
trade grow on it, shake down big spenders
* * *
for iron, for foil tents, for rations,
for tears with which one churns cement.
We keep saying that this is like a fantasy novel,
the ones where there are great houses or great cities
or great castes, the ones that cast us castaway,
the ones where the aching children free the phoenix
from their ribcage and torch it all.
* * *
We keep saying it’s a poorly written one,
because look at the dialogue, look at the
mise-en-scène, and look, there are so many children,
but where are all the flames? And friend,
I have seen the utopia business pick up
outside your house, I’ve worried about the shape it takes,
worried about whether the scenes resemble
* * *
the shouting on Market Street
or the shouting on Tragarete Road,
whether kingdom’s copper foot
lifted from the waters of war
and crawled to the shore with
all its crows. What else can my soft hands
give but worry? And is saying so even
my right? But if the stories taught me
anything about how to prepare
for this moment, it’s this: everyone has a little
fire to spare, a neighbor for whom to share it,
* * *
someone for whom hope is the phoenix
still waiting, pecking at our skin while we call it fear.
And you can have my fire, but first,
have this other thing:
I love you, friend, and I love you more with each flambeau-word your tongue waves for your street,
with each phoenix-word as you throw the weighted consonants against the glass walls of this.
* * *
Take both. The stories say when we can spare just those,
one beside one, two beside two, there’s no wickedness our clasped hands can’t split, even when
beside is an island in the other direction
where you cannot hear my heartbird
crying out to yours, be safe, be safe,
but burn those bastards’ pillars down.
And it sings, it sings
the song the poems say it would sing,
for you, friend. You.
Birth, Place
I made this land myself.
I put dirt in my own
mouth and hoped it
would mature; you made
manure of the bodies
of our mothers, asked
us to chew the remains,
and on our tongue they
whispered, Babalú-Ayé,
make my children potters
* * *
of a planet, give them
farmers’ hands, and turn
their captors into meat
for sand.
I baked the
soil myself, let the dough
of it roll in my first language
so it would taste sweeter,
coated it in seeds of faith and made
heat of my heart enough
for home to cake around me.
* * *
Your legacy’s already drowned me,
you dragged me along water not
fit for baptism and my brothers
swam anyway; cold wind
cracked their bones outside your windows
and our daughters grinned
and took it. We asked Yemọja
what rain would work to water
a home, and she said
Whatever sea is in your mouth
will season your final island.
* * *
Know that my landlords are
greater than yours. I
made this land myself,
a recipe written in the heavens
and taste-tested by ancestors
and peppered with ashes.
Shade will one day grow
in the place where your father’s
bones once called me low.
I will plant a time I cannot see
for children I will not know
among those bones,
* * *
and what grows, laughing,
will not be as easy to pluck
as I once was.
Cthulhu Reminisces Upon The Mighty Sparrow and Lord Melody’s Autographs
Sometime in the late fifties
I was just lingering in someone’s fear of flying
when I noticed them: rum in their cups.
huddled over scribbled lyrics and laughing
from Piarco to New York City
on their way to let Belafonte plant calypso in the Garden.
I think Melody just figured me ugly,
some more kind family’s well-meaning man,
offered a tea-warm smile as his pen skipped paper.
Sparrow dances a marker over the
corner of the sleeve of The Slave
without a glance. Not like he was being cold;
under his breath he mutters how he’s
tired of obeah following him.
I thank them, they nod short,
and for a moment, they fell quiet.
Then their muse’s fury flares anew
in tighter whispers—before I
could lean to sneak a sight of the results,
Mister Francisco hums a tune
and the shadow I came through starts to close…
postcard 20xx, of our garden and beach
a thousand sunrises after the miasma, the sea was a glass wine
wind, but
we also had other things. when we could dance on soil again, we made dances of everything. you could see it
in a child’s firm touch of their parent’s hand, in the infinite closeness of lovers’ lips, it is
* * *
indomitable space, ruled by wild poinsettia and paphinia
cristata, thwarting what is difficult.
the navy blue lapels used to stop us dancing, tanty used
to say. they’d wait for
a boy hued like me in his school uniform, or any neighbour
too small for the
* * *
shirt on his back, shout why he was greedy for sun. she say
they police
the rations of breath itself to
each of we by the way the mountains intervene
* * *
the wind. but that was a thousand dark clouds ago. because
my tanty and her tanty chanted our names on the wind, it
is
owed us well. we water the green-streets, each living
pavement is
* * *
all of ours by the sun, never begging any of us shade in
private,
no longer a plantation-right, or a baton’s secret guarded
property.
Cthulhu Asks for Kendrick Lamar’s Autograph
Each sheet fills with sound,
funk throttles the margins’ throats shut—
finally something is incomprehensible
to this, to the size of stars.
Something worth recognising.
* * *
It is noisy, it clashes
with every corridor of doubt,
it claims the empty space with a
pompous shout.
* * *
Maybe even too pompous—
it cheers, takes new names
Can You Sign My Tentacle? Page 2
