FIRSTS
The poem starts
after the fight
when I go
down on my knees
and caress
the flower
of your forgiving
cock
remembering
the first time
we kissed
empty streets
confronting us
with our selves.
When I’m laid
in bed I see
you most clearly
but I see him too
all the versions of you
jumbled up like the
Pitch Lake’s detritus—
cans, branches, minerals.
I didn’t realise
there would be
so many firsts.
First kiss:
her lips absolutions
for sins not yet
enjoyed,
for being
unreachable.
Then,
the beach that yawned
with serene rage
and spit a man at me
his hole
harboured
my fealty
held me
until I saw
in him a mirror
a wet face.
Then,
the Professor whose
library was a manifesto
of yearning
for whetted fingers,
for marble hardness
and I made room for
his
a new country
where every day
was the first day
of something
and every night
seagulls flew tall
as dreams
over fields singed
by Birds of Paradise
all of the new
all of the old
knowledge a
budding candle,
candle turning
to blaze.
I didn’t realise
there would be
so many:
days clear as
coming out
days of
coming out
and coming out
and coming out
because we are
all of us
stars that come out
too soon for twilight
too late for dawn
and even after
they die
there might
still be
light.
ORNELLA
She knew—a camera phone is a shield against the onslaught of lies and rumours, she saw what was happening, the savagery trained on their bodies, she thought of the child in her belly, how one day that could be him lying in the dirt next to the highway or slumped in a car with his birthday cake or shot in the back with his hands up in surrender. Not worth it, her mother said, Come back inside. But what kind of world was it when police could shoot an unarmed man then say he asked for it, then shoot the protestors, then silence their critics, when million-dollar CCTV networks see nothing, when body cameras don’t work, when authorities have no authority, when they probe and investigate and inquire and inquest and still cannot see what phone cameras can: son after son after son, the same poem written again and again, lines
cut like lives sliced, the poet deranged, images of blood making halos around smashed heads that will never dream again, and after each death, each unjust killing, the Cheshire Cat Commissioner of Police, brings a red rose to the funeral and puts it on the casket. Ornella, her Italian name, meaning flowering ash tree, said to come from “aurum”, the Roman equivalent of gold.
Andre Bagoo's latest books include The Undiscovered Country, Writing through Siddhartha and The Dreaming. He lives in Trinidad with his dog Chaplin. andrebagoo.com