By sunil1970

It’s been a while since I last ate the Cascadura. Some, like me become strangers.

Disengaged, detached, floating, expelled, placenta. Who am I?…. [Who are] You? You are, I am.

We are . LIMBO!!!!   The land of limbo. Womb, cradle, my nativity, my place of resident exile .

Oh! your forests, waters, your shining sun, Willed to me by my Father’s hands. Patriotism embraces

and haemorrhages. History and politics, complacency and complicity won’t allow me all my days

to sing in praise.

So my eyes make love to this créole Indian amerindian hybrid red-man chinee in the mirror I see.

That’s me. It all bleeds through the layers and it tastes of nothing. And some, like me, become

Strangers.

June 20 2009
© Meida Teresa McNeal

On the edges of love
On the rise and fall of hate
This intercourse
Unveils a many-pronged desire
Sex, violence, creation
An exorcism-cleansing-catharsis-crystallization of epic memory
Witness the aftermath of a volatile coupling
The forces of Shiva-Shakti intertwined
Penetration while folding over/around
Groaning under the weight of
Possibility and delicious destruction
Marked by its own uneasy equations
This theory of pleasure
Implodes, explodes and slow smolders
A combustible entropy
Scattered before recombining energies
Defining a knowledge of the sensuous sacred
Spill/sweat/eruption
I know you through skin and tempo
Strong and weak beats, stresses and accented asphyxiating silences
Proximity and bass
I unleash my greatest pain in 4/4
Aided by diva screams and crashing hi hats
Lick-thrust-slam-sway-simmer down
Undulate to find your way to meaning
A spread-eagled display of exposure and vulnerability
Friction and heat
Contest, conjure and supplication
To affirm life, you must confront death
Mmmm, we do it best when dancing

She dives into sensuality
Curve of hip rolling
And full breast rising
She is a hot roller coaster
Leaning to fall
Now she hovers
Hovers
Hovers high low long hanging
Til she feels herself riding gliding sailing a gully
Carved by the energy she brought into being
Manifested by movement’s anointing
Toes spreading like earthclaws
Blistered impact along the surface of feet run raw
Hawkeye circling
She switches energy flow
Thick legs slice through air
With the strangest combination of lightness and weight
And the roller coaster takes another hill and valley
Overcurve again leads under
Punching gravity with low torso drive
The delight of streaky sounds caused by lift, thrust, drag
Downward to rebound
Up
In all this wicked lovely commotion
Breath and perspiration
Are beloved adornments
The sacred bells
In this altar of space
That welcomes her home to motion

” To rise, Sweet Spenser,
Therfore live we all,
Spenser, all live to die,
And rise to fall “
(Quote unknown)
Sunil 18th Sept., 1998.

THINK,START/STOP,THINK

So I don’t build on these expectations. Tomorrow’s ground is uncertain now. Thoughts are like the waves that run back and forth over the shore. They take you, they drift you : they bring expectation. Each one holds the promise of taking you away. And maybe someday it will. One of these tomorrows will take me away. But for now you say “how nice it is to be here on the shore….” Water and Earth embracing here. But so much life there is beyond, beyond this….The full circle, the future, the ocean, beckons….It only ends on the sand. Adn when you turn around again you realize too that this is where it begins……..

Sunil, October 1995.

Feb 22 2009
© Meida Teresa McNeal

We are suspicious of love
We scoff at hugs
And optimism is a mostly useless cotton candy cloud
The bitter iciness of cynicism
Seems a better bedfellow
A safe partner and taste for this skeptical palette
We don’t have much to expect
We are content with that
We understand failure and discord
As our normative horizon
And we settle for that
We make the nonporous pleasurable
To swallow
Much better in fact
Than the itchy scratchy space
Of contact

Mind Travel: Chaguanas to Port of Spain
Sunil’s Journey to a Place

The geography of a place affects the mind in many ways.
Physical, social, psychic geography…
And these “geographies” change
From village to village
And town to town…

The body: Head, eyes, running fingers across neck, shoulders, skin…
Su looking out – the street from his home (panning, long shot)
Quick landscape shots of Chag, along the driving route, POS

Commuting between Chaguanas and Port of Spain had always been about adjusting between the two “cultures”
Or two kinds of collective consciousness.

Improvisation: “Adjusting” in outside locales,,,external clothes & body posture, leaning/adjusting on structures

The hub of departure is “Busy Corner.”

Panning shot of “Busy Corner”.

Sitting in a taxi on Busy Corner bound for Port of Spain brings expectation. It’s very unlike sitting in a taxi going to San Fernando or Couva.  You are going to the capital city after all.  You feel happy and important as it were, to leave the mundane-ness of Chaguanas, the out-of-touchness, the sight of people going by wearing dictated fashions, ‘brands’ and hairstyles and gender roles largely prescribed by the media.

To leave this and head to the centre of where everything happens – Port of Spain.  It is a happy escape.

[Getting in car, closing door, walking down/thru Chag.]

Facing the Northern Range as you head North on the Uriah Butler is to suddenly become attuned to the notions of our country, our history, our nation, as nebulous as these may seem to be.  And these are often marred by the asinine driving habits of taxi drivers and the general public.  Highways in Trinidad are the scenes where the confoundedness of a people who show blatant disregard for country respect, life and the law is demonstrated minute by minute, hour by hour.  So much overtaking, speeding and shoulder-driving – past swamp vegetation that takes me away to my childhood – is seen as one says Psalms and tries to distract the mind with the beauty of the Caroni Swamp and again the mountains standing in front of all this witnessing, remaining quiet and silent and majestic as mountains always do.

[swamp, billboards, beetham, sealots]

[lighthouse, downtown on henry street – marion street (where he was born)]

Billboards demonstrate our brand of consumerism.  They seem to me to target the ‘other demographic,’ those from the more “townish” locales and are markers in the transitions from Chaguanas to the Northwest of the island.

But the highways in Trinidad run next to communities that are visually not very amusing.  The houses are more about nothing than about tasteful style and design.  So this offends me.  And I think back to some point in history – the oil boom – that led us to being so unconscious about tasteful architecture.  There was money, wealth, and extravagance among the ‘masses.’  The lack of order and neatness and planning in our houses and buildings had been concreted into history and stands now for one to look at and lament.  I suppose I equate pretty landscapes with quality of life.

The La Basse, the hills of Laventille and the community of Beetham are not pretty landscapes but are the prelude to Downtown.  It’s the “fallout” of politics past placed there.  It seems in stark contrast to the downtown business district, the ‘have nots’ on the outskirts of the ‘haves.’  Almost every city in the world has a ghetto.  The houses in Beetham always had these doors and windows in strange, bright, playful colours of red, blue, orange.  As a child, I always found this palette of colours inviting and wondered who lived there and wanted to meet them.  Each time I pass it I still sort of have that response but I feel that those colours are about blocking out the drudgery of ghetto life and a rudimentary way of thinking, existing, living.  Beetham connects to Sea Lots and Shanty town-by-the-wharf.  Half naked bodies bathing by a standpipe, their robust rough beauty belies the very poverty that would have them bathing by the roadside.

I wonder about a life without conveniences and comforts.  Is it a life of contentedness without worry and concern like the one that I live?  Would I be happy and better off if I didn’t know the restless onward urge of civilization to be someone, something.

How about poverty-humility?  How about cheap rubber slippers and nondescript white bread from the parlor for $2?  How about tacked-up hovels that smell of damp?  How about no sunblock so I look 37 going on 60?  How about bathing with blue soap?  How about filth and moss around my door?  How about the appeal of the rotting smell of the waterfront?  But sorry I eh kill no priest!  So, the lighthouse beckons and pulls you into the city.

Oh, and the terribly haunting solitary appeal of the lighthouse.  I would like to climb its spiral staircase and get stuck and remain there and spend the night there as a blustery squall batters the port and then be rescued by some Samaritan who brings food and drink and anxiety.  So much happens to me as I go past that leaning obelisk that is the boundary line between the edge of Port of Spain and the rest of the country.