DREAMING IN FOREIGN

—after Caliban

Give your throat to everything,

not the word but the thing of it.

What the body speaks is untranslatable,

how always some unpeopled aching,

our mouths closed around the past

like knives.

Jah, mind our words,

our wound. Our runaway climbed deep

into these cockpit hills, kissed his good memory

into limestone, into blue fern-gully, built

that same fire combusting these stolen

margins, our sacred double gaze, shantytowns

slashed black from ear to ear.

Circumstance has made us strangers here,

wild dance we are slowly forgetting; what home.

The Mobay sky a lingering torch to mutiny. Rebellion.

Here I conspire with fish-monster, ignite and riot

with sugarcane, with shame-a-ladies, brush palms

in solidarity with each thorn, each shy tentacle,

our bodies opening and closing eager,

breathing the dark impossible.

How time holds me under

a shadow I cannot name, the bush-music and its sweet

bangarang. Do not wake me. Downtown

I’ll roam wild with the improbable goats,

window-cleaners careening through traffic,

ripe urchin bartering his endless hope:

Each day is usable, I want to tell them.

Our hunger is...