Best Scummed Poems
for Andre
Casting out my sonic deep spell to you,
dreaming over water on the opposite side
of my ocean, you were the flip side of my coin,
and even if sometimes, love does not last,
one hopes to become less cynical. Romeo,
in another incarnation, scaling the wall of my
chaste seclusion, or rattling the shutters
of some house I used to live in, its north
windows scummed over with salt and spit,
the wind howling its dissonant script, eyeball
to eyeball with the sea, Lovers we were
in past lives the seers say, and we are ending
now. No more preceding me like a young prince,
will you place your cloak to soften the steps
to the pedestal from which my head flew grinning,
spitting final syllables, or, leaping to your feet
will shout to save this Salem sorceress.
Guinevere to your Arthur, did I merit your
trust, if indeed I am your idea, or any-
one's idea of who I was yesteryear,
and will be tomorrow?
The pain of my people,
it flows through my pen
The shouts ... the screams,
the wails from
generations of suffering
I spirit heard the painful call
of the first foot fall,
when my people disembarked
from long ships in chains
onto strange soil
Had our native tongue
snatched from our lips,
then was told to serve and toil
Beaten into submission with whips,
and our scarlet pain stained the virgin soil
Ever since then,
the kettle of our pain has been on the boil
And the burning clouds under the heavenly skies
were like a cast iron altar, upon which my people’s
painful prayers turned into dry evaporated cries
Even now, after so long a time,
the pot continues to boil
And I dip my pen into the scummed bones of tears,
overcome with grief
from the blood ink that flows
For my people were stolen, and given no hope
Seven years of servitude wasn’t enough cattle rope
With a chain of certainty around their neck;
knowing they would live their whole life as a slave,
many desired the tender mercy of the grave
And that spirit of hopelessness still remains —
witness the dope coursing through my people’s veins
Taste the apathy clotting the flow to their brains
They chose to overdose ... to let the numbness reign
And it’s killing me slowly to see my people
throw themselves under the tracks of a genocide train
My people’s pain has driven them collectively insane
Sorrowful tears of my people falls like brimstone rain
Now the precious pain of my people,
it overflows through my pensive, piercing pen
And the tortured slave dreams that my ancestors had,
is etched on the faces of their rejected children