As knowledge deepens, so sorrows increase.

Tired of islands, women, psalms and poets,

I lounge with sailors, drinking seven seas,

those mad ones howling in their shacks of bone,

lit always by the glitter of the wave

that breaks the blue depths of their solitudes;

not for them the quiet agony of

years spent in dregs, attempting to atone

for black self-loathing, but surfeit of love

for all things that labour under the sun;

whose lips are full of music, mirth and wine.

These are the ones I wish to lay me down

In an old skiff at lovely dusk to burn

at journey’s end, unknowing, and alone.

Then Chiapas. San Cristobal felt like home.

Troops in armoured cars patrolling, AKs

cocked and poised. I stood out like a sore thumb,

all aggro in a soiled Zapatista

t-shirt, egging on the federales

as we posed by scrawled dirt wall graffitti:

¡VIVA LA LUCHA ARMADA! And murals

of ski-masked men with rifles raised. To me

it was déjà vu: race/class warfare live–

old anti-Indian red scare politricks

revisited - though you dismissed as bluff

and ‘divisive’ my road-block theatrics,

you laughed it off later as ‘instinctive.’

Windmill tilting. Lashing out at the pricks.

Once again, love, the vague rapture of doves

cooing and clawing in the sunlit eaves,

and the air-conditioning fan that purls

like a pleasure craft; like wind in the leaves

of moist palms swaying in mute hosanna

by wood frames cast open to fragrant seas

that thundered every night like spilt champagne,

dreaming, leagues out, I heard night winds repeat:

"All things on earth as they are in heaven..."

Darkness was departing, as the transport

parted miles of bright, Dominican cane

while I slept on your breast in drizzling light

that nightly burns for you, my dusky one,

somewhere still in the grey-dark of the brain.

Dusk ignites over El Cielo. Drizzle

washes the dust off roofs and satellite

dishes, a lone blackbird sings its heart out,

the orange groves flood with light. I stand still

as a held breath watching the white moon climb

clean of her chains. Intimate transience.

A lonely church bell peals in the distance.

Bougainvillea blazes for the last time

tonight...The blue night drifts like a houseboat

at anchor, teeming with stars; trolling late

through those desperate cantos by lantern-light

I enter your tongue...Aquí te amo...

To be here, and happy, lost without you...

Stray sea winds bang the shutters half the night.

Lovers skank all the close green tropic night,

captive to the labouring of the dance;

in the transient moon’s pale tidal light

they move in time to the measured cadence

of old roots goading, again and again,

persist through the fires of circumstance

towards the soundless centre of the tune

at the trumpet’s blast, when the downpressing

drum beats like feet the earth’s enduring skin.

See, at dusk, unlaboured, they are going

into the one dark place and still they burn!

Still the elder warns of dread times coming.

"Come out from her, children; leave Babylon!"

he wails, remembering you, O Zion.