Night in the Gardens of Port of Spain

Night, the black summer, simplifies her smells into a village; she assumes the impenetrable

musk of the negro, grows secret as sweat, her alleys odorous with shucked oyster shells,

coals of gold oranges, braziers of melon. Commerce and tambourines increase her heat.

Hellfire or the whorehouse: crossing Park Street, a surf of sailor's faces crest, is gone

with the sea's phosphoresence; the boites-de-nuit tinkle like fireflies in her thick hair.

Blinded by headlamps, deaf to taxi klaxons, she lifts her face from the cheap, pitch oil flare

toward white stars, like cities, flashing neon, burning to be the bitch she must become.

As daylight breaks the coolie turns his tumbril of hacked, beheaded coconuts towards home.

-Derek Walcott

Confusion Say

Feeling curiously out of sync with everything at the moment and it’s not just because I’ve decided to lay off the heroin. Hearing THE THE in my head like a message from the greater mind of subpop…errr I mean subconscious. Afray-afrock…mental illness everywhere and not merely my own— hovering over my travels in the USA. Inability to communicate, inability to connect…try avoiding the disconnect when you're confused and not sure you really understand people anymore. I languorous sub-torpor followed by cloud clearing moments of suspect clarity where I wonder if maybe my capacity to understand has in fact grown and what that has revealed is of course that I understand less than ever and then… I experience a little chill. I am disrobed. The warm frothy bath of self assurance and pride has evaporated. Standing here naked is colder than I thought it would be. I'm trying to warm my hands on the coals of my renewed wisdom but if they generate any heat it’s on a frequency that I don't sense.

Warmth, as it turns out, is not a colour.

“This man, on one hand, believes that he knows something, while not knowing anything. On the other hand, I – equally ignorant – do not believe that I know anything”    Plato- Apology  

 I'm trying to be a better person. I want to question my assumptions about things. Question my assumptions about people. But oft I just fall back -- Instead second guessing, retracting and rewriting….keeping my fuckin’ mouth shut…

The benefit of the doubt it seems is, well, more doubt.