Poetry

EVEN NOW


Even now
on suburban terrace
of afternoon brooding
it bruises, even lacerates
those pristine images
of barefoot childhood.

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THROUGH THE EYES OF KAMAU (FOR TRAYVON MARTIN, MICHAEL BROWN, ERIC GARNER & TAMIR RICE)


for precept must be on precept,
precept on precept; line on line,
line on line; here a little and there a little…. 
                        Isaiah 28:13

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TO EDWARD KAMAU BRATHWAITE'S JAH MUSIC


The rumble of drums
The riddle of the fiddle
The clean whistle
Of bamboo pipe
Mento music like news
Bessie Smith singing the blues

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FORGOTTEN STELAE


A kind of self blessing spawns in the glare, 
torn from reflections across a drain where 
raindrops gather to feed water hyacinths. 

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IX—OR ON THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE


I got stuck on the Brooklyn Bridge
and my driver just sat like stone
to the honks and heckles of the horn-head motorist
strapped into his humid summer ride

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UNFETTERED


don’t enclose me
within the palisades of time.
don’t imprison me
within the barricades of your mind.
the constriction
of your limiting web

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IF I WOZ A TAP-NATCH POET


“dub poetry has been described as...‘over-compensation for deprivation’”
Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry

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WATCH DE OL’ MAN


Wunna tink ol’ man ain’t special like he don’t got stars in he back pocket, too

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IT IS NOT HERE


they say

 

it is not here

at this chance meeting

exhausted

in leaky craft.

 

they say it

 

is not here

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THE LECTURER LADY


She says, assuming all of us Miami-ites as well as
               Anglicans, that those of us

who were in church on Sunday August 23rd and not at

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