Please do not scoff when I spit at the fruit of freedom because maybe, maybe my bong was the sound of a wail, and my voice, the anger of distance. -Way Back Home - Sandile Dikeni As we were leaving the Kimberley Hotel, that last night in Cape Town, Brother Ntone held my hand – ‘Wait’, he said; he had a gift. And re turning to the turntables like a priest with his Ethiopian scarf and his boots of brogues and his ringed finger on the fader he played: Fela. Anikulapo. Kuti/who carries death in his pouch. Because that is what we people go thro ugh everyday. Like the poet Sandile who lost his memory and with it a homestead of revolutionist poetry. Who f orgot he was a poet but remembered enough to recite his poem at 4 am that morning, at the Kimberley Hotel. Like the vendors in Green Market Square who were willing to sell us their masks and gourds for nothing. To barter them down was easy. Their resistance was bleak. I turned to go and they called me back - from 10 to 2.50. Each dusk from my room on the thirteenth floor I watch them push their wagons home through old colonial alleyways like poets returning to some corrugated jungle after dancing all night, at the Kimberley Hotel. How did we spend a week in Cape Town and not see a woman carrying water in a straw basket from yard to stinking yard. Must be Town ship jive and township rain, slippery like mud upside that hillside village where my own fathers’ kin and my blood runneth among the lilies and the lizards there. ‘Wait’ he said. And returning to the black cloth of his altar, the DJ plays.... But this was not. This was not. This was not the fifteen minute 12 inch mix. This was not the DJ mix, the 7 inch single mix. This was not the abridged, the edited, the faded to fit on one side. No. This was the full thirty five minute symphony of ‘Shuffering and Shmiling’ and we danced till dawn at the Kimberley Hotel that last Cape Town morning.

for Albert Joseph The day my father came back from the sea he was broke but he was handsome I s aw him walking across the savannah and knew at once it was him. His soulful stride, the grace of his hat, the serifs of his name were ~ flu ttering ~ in my mouth. In his bachelor’s room in El Socorro that year he played his 8-tracks through a sawed-off speaker box. The coil would rattle an the cone would hop but wo men from the coconut groves st ill came to hear his traveller’s tales. Sh op he say he build by Goose Lane junction. But it rough from fabricated timber string. Picka foot jook wood like what Datsun ship in. And in this snackette he sold red mango, mints and tamarind. Its w ire mesh grill hid his suffer well tough. Ti ll the shop bust, and he knock out the boards and roam east to Enterprise village. Shack he say he build same cross-cut lumber. Wood he say he stitch same carap bush. He kin da grew ambitious with wood in his middle ages. And th at night I spent there, with the cicadas in that clear village sky, even t hough each room was still unfinished and each sadness hid. I was with my father and I would’ve stayed if he had asked. Brown suede, 8 eye high desert boots. Beige gabardine bells with the 2 inch folds. He was myth. The legend of him. I reme mber once I touched the nape of his boot to see if my father was real. Beyon d the brown edges of photographs a nd the songs we sang to s ing him back fro m the sweep and sea agonies of his distance. Landslide scars. He sent no letters. His sm all hands were for the fine work of his carpentry. His fingers to trace the pitch pine’s grain. And the raised rivers of his veins, the thick rings of his charisma, the scars–the maps of his palms– were the sweet conductors of his mystery. Aiyé Olokun. He came back smelling of the sea

In the golden shovel, the poet choses a line from another poet and writes a new poem in which each word of the borrowed line appears at the end of each new line. 1. My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically - Andre Breton - Freedom of Love She threw verbs and arrows at my skull till I broke like water in her peninsula, a wife who breathing deep, murmurs, coy-like, with the nape of a question for a neck. The more the heat from the galvanise slapped back and the red dirt blew up, I thought of how hard she suffered on that gospel plough, w/out a suffocating word, with the exact patience of a bird in flight, piercing the web of time, fleeing. I broke her back with an axe of sin. To be buried, vertically. 2. all their syllables of living colour & career thru the water - Kamau Brathwaite - Dear PM gust of sound and sea blast and all the windows are rattling like teeth in their jaws. then the sky lid shifts to dim and syllables of stone are chasing colour from the earth. Fear of thunder like a child, like black dada in their roar of living.The blood in the road below was the colour of molasses; thick black with love & this too, shall be the arc that frames the devils career. Sudden so the junction got hot. Siren rip thru and the sound tears straight to the solar capital, like sorrow, leaving wounds in the water. 3. fling of his wish have caught the sea - Kamau Brathwaite - Master of the Mary Jones Far flung from the fling and the rip and the fever, grass in the scar red hills of these islands. Cut across with cuss until his imagination grew sombre. Wash under wash and wish away from the grief of it, fish and bug and mollusk, to have bliss of it, the dreamscape so tenderly caught In the folds of terror, like a drowned man weeping in the dark abyss of the sea 4. In this night I moved upon the territory with combinations - Charles Olson - The Librarian What changes: limestone strata in the earth.The heat pulse of birds, the drone bee in this tree, the firefly in the litmus of night, terrestrial objects of the heart? I moved upon the air as a leaf to dark waters leapt from the roof to the plum tree, dew wet was the bough: my territory: the landscape, now seemed decreased, and dry with its process of combinations.

Beyond words or destinations, visual and multiplying, intricate and persistent, they found a faraway place in Paris. Its potential splendour hid sequels and contrary sex in the early hours of 1960. Proclivities of struggle and synthesis within the most complete utopia of fire and speed. Dream letters were drowned in invisible stars. Silent suburbs of Jazz and primitive hell were spontaneously glimpsed in rigid cities in which these souvenirs were read at t he Chicago Public Library shu ddering loosely on the avenue between Greene and Zion. These are the definitions of the palace of signs. These are the masks with which I hitchhiked across the wonderland and travelled by radio to resemble that mask eccentric and boundless in the image of you. Past stairs and doorways, past Afro-American ruins, bamboo by the dozen among those denizens of marvellous film. Dead yet actually distant. Exhilarating like dissident blues swung from the Zydeco to the brutal suburbs of Pharaoh Sanders. Emerging from light into some literary response.

Sun Ra was on the ark. Prince Nico Mbarga, he was on the ark. So was Art Taylor and Sonny Simmons, Bessie Smith and Superblue, all on the ark and Joe Tex and Mitty Collier, Leon Thomas and the Roaring Lion, even Robert Aaron and Lou Ciccotelli were abdominally on the ark. The original Defosto himself was also on the ark, beat rivers of song upon the omele drum, just a cutlass carpenter, no skill with timber, four eyed fish were on the ark. Who playing war and fraid blood? Who playing mas and fraid powder? Who prevaricate and ruse, throwing holi powder as ritual upon the ark, but don’t want ink or powder to touch their clothes? Who else was on the ark? Max Roach was on the ark, and Chick Webb and Buddy Rich, Ras Shorty I and David Rudder, Belafonte and Eric Dolphy, them was high up upon the ark. Babatunde was on the ark, Olatunji, mama drum, say you coming to come and you never reach as far the leader house, his records and sawed off speaker drum, to boom dub roots box all round the village, bachelor life, and then you hear he bulling some woman in the congregation, and then your hear the shepherd sanding crook-sticks, and tapping his foot when the hymn swing, but is suffer he suffering in silence, because the woman bulling is and he don't need to be a see-er man to see, so he burn his own house down, he was on the ark and the ark was almost full. Iron tete was on the ark, and Railway Douglas, the wild moon, fever in his throat. both were on the boat, the ark was full, but more was to come and coming still. Ethel Waters was on the ark singing ‘Carib Gold, Octavia Butler, hip good, high up on this boat. Slinger Francisco, the Mighty Sparrow, robed in African wax print and dancing as man, Eric Williams, dead and living same time in secret, also wrapped in kente cloth, Larry Lee, masked and southern drawling, Fats Waller, Art Pepper, Sonny Criss, Miss Bobbye Hall, Gang Gang Sara, blown from Guinea to Les Coteaux Tobago, who climbed the great silk cotton tree in Culloden with intentions to fly back to Africa, but fell to stony death because she had eaten salt, she was on the ark, as was The Mighty Spoiler, The Mighty Terror, The Mighty Broclax, in proper soft pants, same dead living among the dead, as taxi driver or stevedore, leaning into a cacophony of whores, and when the ark had two days to go before it reach Southhampton, here come John La Rose, here come Charles Mingus, here come Woody Shaw and here come Rashaan Roland Kirk, Jean Michel Basquait, Bo Diddley, Beryl McBurnie, even Olive Walke could walk upon that ark. This was years long since the firearm ban, when the river washed down and cleansed the city, and who eh drown waterlogged, and who not dead, badly wounded. Jan Carew was on the ark, and Dominique Gaumont, as was Milton Cardona and Rosetta Tharpe, Odetta, Mandela, Biko, Toure, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, all upon the ark. but not Kamau Brathwaite, he was not on the ark, instead Baba, the great teacher had long since evaporated into air, into language, into sound, into the sex fruit of poetry; oil does not dry upon his tongue, nor honey on the tips of his fingers. And I saw Steven Samuel Gordon, stood high upon the bow, and the ark drove down to Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester too, it swooned to Alaska, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, Barbados, Suriname, it moves like a crown upon a board, it care which way it chose to go. Look, it pass through Aruba, Trinidad, and Grenada, up the Orinoco river, and never wear neck tie yet. It come up from the southern Caribbean all the way up to Pascagoula bay in New Orleans. Yes, I saw the brother Spaceape, he was on the ark, and he was blowing the big abeng!

I am in the land of iguanas and buzzing heat of Joh nny Babwah, Ice Cold Coconut since nineteen, leaning in the culvert, savannah side, while the dread with the bandaged thumb hacks my nut with t he edge of his blade and says, ‘How long you been gone, red man,’ like you losing your skill to suck.’ And how did he find the gap in my tongue that slip in my language, the twang long gone. He sell me three mammy apple, remind me how to eat them, wait two or three days, till it get soft. Peel off the husk. But in 24 years I have forgotten how to keep up with a place where everything happens at once. Today I watched my aunt coming down through the coruscating light of her village; cumin scent and the water truck, the new road still coming. At seventy three she takes wise steps, avoids gulleys and thorns, she only goes to the beach, she says, when I fly down. And all of this written from memory. And all of this made more luminous with distance. I have lost touch with my own people, I have forgotten the heat. And all of this written from memory and all of this written of an island which has long ceased to exist except to the poet on his way east, pickin g out places and saying : This h appened here, that happened there. In the white heat of mid morning two iguanas are passing on the hotel wall To see them I must stay completely still and then I can see them between the hibiscus tree. But if I move too suddenly or if I reach for a camera, I turn away and they are gone.