for a moment as a hurricane in your bosom, where forlorn no longer stretches me between sleep and nostalgia, i’d rescind the very beat of my circadian. exhale. let my belly go. run wild and unruly between the rows of sugar cane in your demerara.

would disrupt a colony of marabuntas and relish the discomfort of their sting to be the broken portions of fertile soil beneath the shade of a coconut tree. if only essequibo would drip delicious the sticky of spice mangoes around my lips, let the cow’s moo be music, crash violently into east flatbush the quintessence of kaiteur, i’d ingest a plate of stuffed corillas, lick my fingers of their bitter juices, then clap eleven hot roti’s and offer as restitution for this six year absence from that place of first menstruation, libation, love found and lost like milk teeth and precious things…

wash away the petals of these forget-me-nots around the temple of my familiar. be my undoing my becoming my get it together. O bourda, where are your sweet figs and sapodillas for the angostura swimming in my america? saturday market neon pink sounds of “nuts! nuts! Come git yo channa nuts!”  or   “celery! fresh celery!”  pronounced "cell-ah-ree. fresh cell-ah-ree"  maybe  “genip! genip! Come tase an buy yo genip. me gat di sweetest genip in town!” have been swallowed in the morose grey silence of supermarkets.

psydium. sweet pysdium, jamun with your purple stains upon my fingers, I can’t find you in these carefully labeled rows of cantaloupe and kiwi tastes acquired. No pomegranate trees to shake. absent cashew whose rosy wine red skin peeled away with incisors and not so much canines, revealing pristine white juicy insides my child self delved into. holding hand still while head alone circled the seed until all is consumed. done! are an absent fact of my here and now. a wisp of my bygone. like the caddie ole punch kites made in the backyard, beneath neighbor’s houses, and hoisted in forest green pastures littered with holstein cows and wild flowers. competing against each other to see whose is most flamboyant, whose will rise the highest, sing the loudest. but mostly for fun.

even the sounds of foul cocks’ 6am crow, or crickets informing all of sunset, the smell of rain approaching and toads’ cosigning cry, masquerade the recesses of my mind as much as the annual mashramani carnival. steel pans marry the beat of my heart, floats and revelers in scantily clad costumes passing by turquoise and other brightly painted houses haunt me when any semblance of warmth comes with spring or summer.

if only you could suction every droplet in your lamaha canal. still me. lull me. bring the rapids of whitewater and somehow siamese mend your hilly sides to these low coastal plains. the once sour of five finger would turn star fruit sweet preserve because i yearn with passion immeasurable to be home in your arms.