“Tepid dawn of ancestral virtues”
- Aimé Césaire
I
bitter-tasting speech used to be indigenous like lavender
and lips from old civilisations enraptured the history
of long-winded oceans
and antique sunlight
and mountainous frailties
with bulging eyes inflamed from an ancestral dance
a phallus nigger used to do
until some light descends on a continent
that was never there
a regressed continent of livestock
superstitions
wild beds of twigs
shallow entrails disguised as impromptu delicacies
flamingos that explode into pigments of bright air
when wildebeest conglomerate
detonating into life from the potency of rivers
II
Today it’s quite formidable to regress from rhetoric
as it was for adolescent back-alley foreplay.
Synchronically I don’t posses the instincts for Western themed surprises
just a discerning earlobe
and the freedom to say nothing
but infringements on a family of 10 under a corrugated roof shack
from the English colonial hum-drum
would sell off the same fable in a Wiltshire corner shop
as some decrepit foam from a priori to Hippocrates
whilst two decedent, afrocentric, yellow-orphan niggers
transcend twelve October / February relatives
from the same tree bark-
now how can I ignore that shit when I’m still alive?!,
discard any theatre and contempt for the Third World-
how can I sell that shit
so that we might strip them down to the phallic stage
and scorn them
and think how wonderful
so that during the day we’d probably be right
“but being black and yellow isn’t superficial”
they might slur from the bottle heads of their fixated
macabre inflictions
