Chilli-mango.

It took me coming home to come
of age, or was it the going and the being
away? In the space between where something broke
and mended
and broke itself again, I learned an awful learning: that we
have lived life skimming the surface
of a building volcano hopping over hot stones laughing into steam, trying
to ignore the impending danger of the black cauldron boiling
under layers and layers of sedimentary rock and earth and grievances and dead roots and bitter soil, thick blood boiling
and popping bubbles of poison underneath, and I like a waif skip-skipping
and tripping light of foot, trying to evade
the inevitable
calamity.




I unlearned a lie and learned
we are poor, and have always been poor, dirt-poor,
in love, in life, in the in between. Has it always been
so, or have I changed so, in an year?
that the sun has dimmed in the garden
where a white dog leapt and now
there is only shadow,
and misery breathes in through the cracks in the walls.




What a child, what a life
what a loveless luck
what a luckless love
what a joyless fuck,
like a fruit through a knife




(you didn't get to wait
for the fruit to ripen, to cut it;
it cut itself. Clean.) Such is life, robbing us of such
minute

satisfactions.


We don't let no fruit go to waste,
So we make chilli-mango
Chilli-mango on the tongue,
sweet-sour- then burns a hole right through




Ah I am tired of tiptoeing along cracks, of being
a fairy-waif on the edge of a volcano, smiling, weighing its own weight with a nervous grin
treading light lest the ground gives way and gives in, tap-dancing
to the invisible heat underfoot
on the edge of a volcano smiling.