Staceyann Chin

Home and all jazz...

I am in Jamaica. Been here for days now. The warm. The patch of burnt skin.

Funny how skin forgets
it once lived under this hot torment. This war
of wine
inside of wit and stories of cousins and sisters and broken words
whispered
from inside of me and you

and all we ever wanted was to write

to tell stories
of windows and being lost and cold water
and jazz

and she is coming to me
in just a few days

and her mother

although my mother is crazy
most days

I am crazy
writing
careful

not really writing important stuff
I should write
more stuff

stuff myself with words
and this gel which oozes from me

nightly
washes and daily talkbacks

respond to me

all I ever wanted was you
listening

Rhone and Forbes and Lewis
and Ellington

I grew up with your voices

how they made words sound like gold

pocketed between
faces with Histories
and futures

all I ever wanted was to write
and maybe a girl to paint

between the lines
nothing too hard in her expensive brushes

just a bunch of cool colors
shading me towards
self

discovery is why I pull my body from slumber
at six

each morning I open my petals
at dawn
wherever I am

I have learned to miss
the smell of you

sharp
and always a lover hovers

crisp in the wit of me pretending

you always know when I am coated
lick me

dissolve me
perhaps

something of me will chip

something of us

all I ever wanted was to write
you love letters

painted in sea green
and monkey-yellow-banana-peel

all I ever wanted was
to write

my grandmother
and these mountains framing
the beggars

the children smarter
than death

and men with swift kind hands
and women who raise other women's children

and the words tumbling star-apple bursting on flat kitchen floor
words constructed
ladder

like houses in Portmore
small compartments
pressed too tight under the arm of a New highway
making way for a new journey from

Montego Bay to me

Kingston
all the way to how we use the love of women from Portland
to Clarendon

clean clothes for women like me
water-logged fingers for women

like none of you know
except when you make it here
for spring-break

they keep those white sheets white
the tiny squares of mango

the sterile surface of your smiles
exotic aren't we

not me

I escaped
the reality but the dreams come

every time I come home
the dark hands are too much on those
not-quite-white-vanilla babies

who cry for the help
more readily
than I

Home is where
the heart hurts most-------

from the belly of my motherland,
Staceyann

Posted by staceyann at April 3, 2004 09:35 PM