Academic Confessions

Sometimes when the calypso music explodes Shards of memories glistening with my pain My heart like a rhumba box sits silent again Where slow surfs lap granite doors, genius erodes The barriers that dreams could stream and rise Like sprays fogless flowering the coastal skies. And as academics meander through misty thoughts Turning to me, inviting my precision of words I am in the web of comparisons caught, herds Of histories shepherdless now in stagnant paths Tremble in the shivering winds of changes here I represent the hopes anchored in ancient fear. My education did not come the common way But from libraries and borrowed books I took The knowledge that in high schools would hook No test, using baitless syllabus to stairs the day Upward from ghetto streets and gang embrace Scholared by ambition, I get my college place. I am a kite today, with my string grounded still In sugarcane fields of happiness, loud streets Where sellers hawk their wares and love meets Twinkling eyes, signals to a secret fruiting hill Where school-less days I set my mind to change The arguments that listed you and I as strange.