My Missing Piece
I have many things I want to say to you,
to free my mind from the torment of silence,
but I don’t know how and where to start,
that’s why I stand before you paralysed.
How I wish to dream of another situation
in which my courage is higher than my fear,
or my life is no longer consumed by living,
or that it plays in my head what I want to say,
to make this situation easy for you and me.
I wonder if my palm kernels were cracked
by a benevolent spirit tracking my path;
but I know that I have laboured all day and night,
and darkness had needled me into paroxysms;
I have put in the labour and the anguish,
paid my price for the blood joy of this day,
and it’s not wise to claim that it’s been easy
after I climbed a thousand unwinding stairs
without my missing piece tugging my heels.
When God created you, he smiled in secret,
He created a masterpiece without a puzzle,
my benevolent spirit, my world, my missing piece.
I’m here to plead that you should miss no more,
but to form an alloy with me and my destiny,
one indissoluble body, mind and soul,
all the things we said or unsaid remain between us.
I do not know why I’m saying these things to you,
but it’s a thing beyond my power to stop
until I flush out the dead queuing for burial.
If I Knew Where I Was Going
I followed the road that went straight,
through the cops of trees and strait of flowers,
up to where the mountain leaned toward the sea;
my heart was a tropical valley of hope,
my hands hung loosely on the clouds
like a cluster of wet clothes on a wire;
I learned to seal my mouth with wads of gratitude,
for the rising of dawn and the excitement of light,
goading me to know where to hijack my feet
away from the blisters and cracks of those
who, without preparation, loitered in vain.
My father armed me well with words and water;
my mother fed me with a spoonful of air and love,
my ancestors kept watch over me with candles
burning through the thicket of bitter leaves;
they did not want my feet to hit against a stone,
nor my head to touch the grass in the fields.
Though I walked through the woods at midnight
and through the ocean in the dead of the day,
I did not touch the sky with my tongue
nor the clouds with the tip of my teeth,
and I followed the trail of my bourgeoning faith
to where the honey hid among the cactus.
By the wayside, the dead were smiling with anger,
the undead spitefully threw stones at me,
they rushed forward with rods to kick me out.
Some men carried posters on their bald heads,
some clutched their long letters of appointment of death
where the date and time of their burial in blood.
My heart didn’t ache for any of their blabbing,
but I arrived home with an ache in my chest.
Grasshoppers and termites visited me in secret,
to ask for their share of gold from the undead,
because they guarded me on my journey
and watched my back while I was abroad.
Nothing was theirs anymore, nothing for the dead,
for those who bought graves by the roadside;
but I arrived home unexpectedly unbroken
and didn’t know how they became my angels
after I survived the gloating of the night.
the poet's billow 