wake up at six 6am.
grab my phone.
check my feed.

you are always
there.
first post.
always wearing
your beautiful
smile.

maybe the algorithm
realized how
i stare at our photos,
some nights
before sleeping.

maybe he
makes the sum
of our unsaid words
and multiplies it
by those nights
i fell asleep in
your chest.

maybe he
never heard
our fights.
the shouting,
the crying.
or maybe he did
but just choose
to keep them
out of the equation.

maybe he
knows
you are still
the first person
i think of
when i wake.

i scratch my eyes
and keep scrolling.

Love was not shaped like a heart but a question mark
Too many wonders, Too many questions
I knew love was open-minded, love was optimistic
I knew love inside and out
But love remained a question mark, unsure of the love, love found with me.

Love changed
Love silently became an exclamation point
Love had clouded thoughts, twisted feelings
Love felt happiness, sadness, madness
But beneath all of those, love gave out silent cries - I have never heard.

Love, then again, changed
Love took on a shape of a comma
Love became afraid of ending the sentence, ending us
Love made us complex, made us complicated
Love had a lot of pauses in between the non-stop wishing and non-stop desires
Love hated itself

Love wanted to change
And he did
Love finally became a period
Because commas were suffocating and periods end suffocation
But love, love did not just end the sentence, nor the paragraph, nor the story
Love ended us

But here I am, standing in front of Love again
Staring at the Love who's oh so different again
Love was not just one dot but three
Love became an ellipsis
Love wished for more of our story
Love hopes to continue us
Love started wondering about the possibility of having us again
Love wanted us again
Love is slowly turning back into a question mark again.

The ugly poetess
Over the housetops,
Above the dry blades of the sugar cane husks
I have known fear, I have known hunger
I felt the pain of a nail wound deep in my foot
I belted out the blues like Nina Simone
An era of reform: the moments of truth,

On top of the hill, lies a village in Barbados
Acid rain, rooftop leaks on to my bed
It was a rough year:
only food sources were rice and breadfruits
We lived through it all:

It was my destiny:
To love and to hate them:
those old fruit loops

Through the eyes of a uprising poet
The curving of his pen,
Somehow, he made amends, he purge
the smoky air,
the disgusting sight of the pig pens
out of his mind

lack of personal dental hygiene,
the elders lost their teeth
Grinding down on sugarcane, while they
awaits the big meal of the day
Supper!

With innocent eyes and achy feet
I read so many books for inner peace

My stomach was empty,
but my mind was at ease
To dream big while aiming high

Marlene, Delores, and Linda
Known as the vanishing three
Migrated to North America
Where a Barefooted child
like me wasn’t supposed to be
Eventually, I know I would have followed

I have woven my feathers,
while looking upwards,
In my little corner under the old rusty galvanizes
.
At the old country shop the vanishing three mothers
told me that I wasn’t pretty enough to leave the island
Words of hatred, mere words of discomfort
I felt my wings tighten against my rib cage,
My tongue, glued against my jaws

From that day forward the poet smile against stupidity
And spitefulness, she too had come to
Eat her words, the old shopkeeper

The poetess enter another line from that era
Uncaring beauty without brains
Where are they now?

I walked with confident down that street
The misty air moist my skin
The poetess return to the Island of Barbados
Without the sugar in her blood..
.

The prison bus
passes this way

every now and then,
surfacing without

warning—a leviathan
of metal, grease, and glass

its dark windows secured
by squares of rusted wire

its diesel engine heart
spewing exhaust that

turns morning rain
the color of seawater.

The prison bus
does not stop
for stop signs;

red lights are nothing
but violent memories
strung in an overcast sky.

When the bus strikes
something in its path

the prisoners bounce
slightly in their seats,

lifted into
impartial air

liberated
momentarily

by the familiar
co-conspirators
of blood and laughter.

In his dreams,
the guard who
drives the prison bus
circumnavigates the globe,
plowing through clouds
of insects that shimmer
like fuel above the road.

you live in outer space
in a far distant galaxy
millions of light years away

from the eye looking down this telescope

I don’t know where to begin,
where to start,
or where to end
and where to stop.

I don’t know how to tell you what’s on my mind.
There are so many words missing, words I can’t find.
Because my mind is a warzone, it is a battlefield.
And my shield is broken and my weapons are blunt.
There’s nothing and no one to protect me in a war against myself.

I scream and I scream, and my skin, my voice bleed and I hope I wake up and it’ll all just be a dream. But it’s not, it seems.
I feel shunned though I have been told I’m loved, and that those who’re around me, who surround me love me.

But I find it hard to believe it now.

Time flies so fast for me
or does it stand still, I don’t know.
Minutes to hours, hours to days.
And it’s getting difficult for me to see
beyond the fog that clouds my thoughts, my eyes.
So I put on a mask
And do the impossible task
Of waking up every day
as I struggle to put on the play.

But the problem never goes away.

I slowly start shutting myself out from people,
stop going to places that are crowded
all the while enjoying being shrouded in the dark of my room.

I feel doomed.

I don’t like to cook,
I don’t feel like reading a book.
All satisfaction is gone and
I don’t know what’s wrong.

I don’t enjoy the things I used to.

There’s no purpose for me,
I feel.
No motivation.
Everything is just white noise.
Everything is static.

So I stand here now,
tired and weary,
at a path
so dark and dreary
leading to different directions,
all the while thinking

**I don’t want to exist anymore.

Dried flowers catch dust just like Archaic decoration

and You told me you loved me in a kind of declaration


I never wept for joy except for joyful pain

and you never told me anything good

Just made me question sane...