Failed Light

Amid a ratcheted, alloyed ghost, I returned stares in the blackout that clogged the podium a bore was harping in dead metaphor the horror of colonial heritage. I sunk in the dark, hemorrhaged, and remembered the peninsula of my sea, the breeze’s a capella, with no book but the open water I waited for dusk, a weak bonfire, to spread cool across the entire island its plain poetry; no electricity, just stars pulsing over shanties, and later, an inextinguishable moon, invisible in this dark NYC room a tweeded rodent scholar lectured on his authority of “Caribbean Culture,” phosphorus Caliban, switching dialectics in a single line, praising and cussing metrics: Rhodesia now, Zimbabwe after; he real cool, a true, heretical dapper, but in the surprised blackness, his soul exposed, the façade recessed, I saw the face that stewed Pelops in the Antilles to straddle the ivory laps of liberal, money-giving chaps with an itch for the unscripted Folk and Oral Tradition, a hot spoke in his spinning radius unveiling the veil of the shroud of the curtain, and with spectroscopic effect, he has dazzled all and proven to be ebony solid. His mouth soured winter, his neck hung with silk and not a speck of truth, that I almost shouted, “Please, be honest with your lies, disease,” but only stared at this wine-for-rum, lectern-for-veranda, brilliant scum who shook when thunder shocked away Edison’s filaments: a dead watt. Inarticulate at the dark lectern, he stood grasping what he had learned in all the colleges, but he went hollow and I heard his breath in shallow bursts the way a firefly’s ticks amplify a lonely room, each tick signified his mother back home, who still, after many years, her only skill, cleans uptown houses to knuckle out a living; another tick, his supple, ever ready sister, breeding at the first attention by a name-brand-looker, diamonded single-earring rude boy, hoping for foreign, like him in the dark, hiding behind his varnished gibbet, he who had stretched out his hand to let me shake it, smiled, said, “Friend,” when before he gibbered, “Nemesis; vermin” to his tail-gawking, maggot rabble. Confounded, silent in his Babel, power returned and dragged off the dark and showed his face caught in a childhood glare the kerosene shielded flame, the only light to be seen in his world, enchanted his shadow on a wall, proof he was two in tow; jackal and man, duel umbrage, scavenging years have taken to forge into one chain; yes, Christ, chain, he is chattled within them again. “Applaud the fluorescence,” he cried. I couldn’t, those bulbs hurt my eyes.