3. Scream down the dark corridors
to insanity.
4. Lose yourself in its power, indulging
in violence.
5. Break in its wake,
crumbling to dust.
6. Join the others in the courtyard
playing football.
Articles of Faith
Skills
learnt in prison are meant to
prepare you to assimilate on the outside,
But what to do with
a disciplined anus that can hide a
sharpened nail, piece of glass or even pencil?
How do you apply
the educated guesses; an ability
to predict who will live or die today?
Can you share or even tell
of philosophies and insights gleaned in
silent places of solitary confinement?
And who will buy
the blood you sold pint by pint to guards
in exchange for cigarettes, Coca-Cola or bread?
Your blood which they sold on to hospitals
private clinics, research facilities
and obeah men in juju shrines.
Who will believe
you can compose whole symphonies in your head
waiting the romance of strings and voices, because
here we are forbidden to sing?
Epiphany
An artist,
I
hang all hope for redemption
on ephemeral incandescent dreams.
Roping faith into filaments of light,
I climb on sunbeams
into the very eye of God.
Jacob’s Ladder
Release, alive, from Kiri Kiri
is rare.
They hand you what is left of
your personal belongings
in a polythene bag. Everything
they did not want.
You step out and stand in the
sun thawing like a side of beef
from a freezer. Yet you are afraid
to proceed more than a few
steps from the gate. Convinced you
will be shot in the back,
or that people will recoil from you
knowing you carry the stench
of death on your now paler skin.
But nothing happens.
A gentle breeze ruffles your shirt and
a dog menaces a parked car.
The smell of frying plantain,
carried gently, hurts inexplicably.
Cold, sweet Coca-Cola stings you
to tears.
Postscripts – London
My tongue is heavy with new language
but I cannot give birth speech
Kamau Braithwaite
Eating the Dead
Postcard Pictures
1
Winter’s sun is a sucked out lozenge
framed in the far window.
Before me a choice: Red to declare, Green not to.
But simple decisions consume me in panic.
Customs officers eye me with hostility
under neon lights that say: WELCOME TO LONDON
HEATHROW.
but words are a meditation that eludes me.
2
Coffee percolates the arrival hall.
Signs jostle behind a barrier.
MR JONES, MR KOMOYOTO, SONY MUSIC REP.
I scan the patient group, shrinking.
Memories of prison – a not too distant past –
jelly my limbs.
Families buying their children’s lives
from indifferent demons playing draughts
in the shade of the execution tree,
stand just outside the gates, holding
our gaze hoping to jog memories as we file past.
Names on signs, runes spelling
our future
and just as them,
I am terrified no one remembers me.
Then I am trembling on the cusp of a hug.
3
Hope is a fragile moth wing
unsure in the winter sun, clinging to
corners longing for night’s muted light.
In the spaces between my belief,
cracks too old, too deep for anything
but terror,
contract, filling up with tinsel from
the still beating desperate wing sewn
to rear view mirror by a spiders web.
4
Chance is the random pen scratch of winning
LOTTO numbers, the casual flush hand, perfect dice roll.
an ability to conceive of brighter futures in clichéd
hope,
the deliberate play of a chess piece
altering larger game plans
as chance computes a different trajectory.
Chance is the random smile, gummy
toothless and radiant, from my niece.
5
Grey walls weep grainy tears.
Police car passes me in the street.
Instinctively I hug the shadows,
indistinguishable as a dot on snowing TV.
Stitching darkness into a shroud,
I contain my fear like hair in a talisman
inhaling its acrid smell.
Comforted.
6
Winter rain washes blood
from streetlights into gutters,
icing the tip of my hair.
Snow, feather-light, falls
as bolls from a silk-cotton tree.
Yet seeds, orotund with
portents defying my fears;
a dragon swallowing the sun.
7
The middle-aged Indian woman,
sandwiched between boards advertising
West End shows she may never see,
haunts the fringes of Piccadilly Circus,
hugging warmth from a roast-chestnut vendor.
I imagine Kentucky Fried Chicken diffuses
her soft saffron and coriander scent,
breaking my heart even as her
still gentle eyes give me hope.
8
Victoria Line. Packed. People.
Sweat is the harbinger of other terror:
Small dark room stuffed too full
of desperate men; possibility falling away
with flakes of skin. Where pleasure is
an itch unscratched until the inevitability
is frenetic and love is a sharp cut
to jugular of those too sick to die.
my fear to stalk brushing impotently.
Safe, knowing these doors will open, spilling
us at the next brightly lit station.
9
The policeman stops me on Kingsland High Street.
I resign myself to the cross, arms raised up.
‘I see you know the routine,’ he sneers.
My shame is a hot tear splattering
the cold metal of my saxophone, hissing
in the heat of his contempt.
10
When I first arrived,
everyone spoke of the Angel at Islington.
I went seeking redemption but found
only an old bum searching the bins outside Burger
King.
And I was saved.
Things to Do in London When You Are Dead
1. Ride the Circle Line endlessly, chasing the dragon’s tail.
2. Count the dots on your fuzzy television eating a late doner kebab.
3. Stand in the centre of Oxford Circus and scream. No matter. No one will see you.
4. Tell everyone you meet you are a poet. Someone will eventually put you out of your misery.
Field Song
Memory is a never-ending pain,
two by four catching your breath
in a sharp exhalation and you
are
falling, falling, falling.
Tomorrow is almost a hope too much;
wishing-bone wish torn from chicken
and you are
praying, praying, praying.
Haunting
We return. The living.
Again. Wearing grief in gentle
bouquets, laid:
We return. The living.
Not the dead. Fast flitting shadows rifling
between mental gravestones trying
to fix a thing unbroken.
Easter Sunday
Will I turn fifty, still haunting
fading cafés, clutching my manuscript,
creased, stained and much commented on,
in dirty nailed hands
bumming bland too milky teas
off youngsters.
Charming them with my tales of
the establishment; rolled-up cigarette
half smoked, my life a continuity of middles,
ending inked out in the second draft.
Too afraid to even become an alcoholic.
Returning from Croydon
The train rolls over the Thames
where lights skate the uneven lap of water.
Gas towers are boils festering the skyline,
lanced by the trains running between.
A train going the opposite way holds
out the promise that life does not
go just one way, but
retraces its steps faithfully.
Babylon
Standing on Embankment bridge,
I search for the courage to jump
into the Thames sixty feet below.
The water is choppy and cold and my pockets are
heavy with guilt.
I’ve seen this on TV;
If the drop does not kill me
the cold will and if not that, there is
the pollution: fail safe, you see.
My grip on the wet railing slips and
my heart plummets first.
My fear is a howling, challenging the trains
screaming past behind me.
Dog’s bark pulls my attention to its busking master.
An old rasta strumming a near-dead guitar,
its last two strings winding tenaciously onto life.
Face scarred by regret and too much living,
voice rough from so many tiny daily deaths,
eyes blind with need and the salty dissolving
aftertaste of faith:
There is a land far far away,
There is a land far across the sea, hey,
There is a land, where there’s no night only day, hey,
There is a land, far far away, hey,
And his song is a gentle coaxing that pulls me
back from the abyss, tugging me tenderly
until I collapse at his feet, face buried in his dog’s fur
sobbing brokenly.
Changing Times
‘These are the days of miracles and wonder’
Paul Simon
Graceland
Three minute spaghetti. Boil in the bag fish.
Pot noodle. A mug of Batchelor’s instant soup,
amaze me nearly as much as
microwaves, my new laptop and the
enduring power of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme
and Miles’ Kind of Blue.
It’s not that I have lowered standards
with a too grateful palate
or that much espoused masculine
fascination for new toys and old jazz.
But I am learning to taste my life
without judgement. I think.
Days of Thunder
Celibate for five years –
except for that one time with
a prostitute, whose incessant chatter
about her son conspired with my Catholic
dread of Gomorrah to rob me of an erection.
Not a Love Song
Dreams stalk me and my cry
is a bird, wing broken.
Her gentle breathing beside me
is a warmth straining my terrors
into harmless biscuit crumbs
that I brush from the bed.
A Definition for Tomorrow
‘If this is all I have
I can travel no further’
Kamau Braithwaite
Shepherd
There is a rumoured funk of damp earth
misting my friend’s small garden. Snails
crunch underfoot as he leads me to where
his cat, Tiddles, was buried in a biscuit tin
six years before.
Huddling under a tree, sucking on a cigarette
he says: ‘See, I know your loss.’
The future is the rough bark of that tree
rooted in my father’s bones.
First published in 2000 by Saqi, London
This edition published in 2007
eISBN: 978-0-86356-878-7
© Chris Abani, 2000 and 2007
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