Lyrics

Brathwaite's reading of these poems can be heard on SoundCloud, or by opening this annotation Eating the Dead1But if to live here is to die clutching ashes the fist tight the skull dry I will sing songs of the skeleton I will return to the pebble to the dumb seed the unlighted faces of the fetish in the vegetable kingdom I will knock on the black doors kj kj kj agoo kj kj kj agoo where the cock creaks the darkness open. Come in Brother Spider Creator of silver I need your speed and your enduring cunning kj kj kj kj what other knuckles summon It is the iron stranger Ogun, cloud of gloom, and Damballa with his stamp of doom look, the charcoal fires are alight fed with blood crackled with your sulphur Offer the flesh up time, ruins, relics leaping over the tips over the root tips of fingers offer the failures up sing cry kanzo from this red skin and cradle we begin. 2We begin with the curled embryo that will grow to sweat the eyes that will know what greedy means that will feed on the milk of transistors all day long. Resurrections are stripped from the wings of trees; Bayonets, armoured eyes, clank of the gun-butts obscure the moon. My tongue is heavy with new language but I cannot give birth speech. Pebbles surround me. The beggar glares; his hot eyes burn my thanks. How many islands will be counted in this congress of lepers, how many fathers will revoke the edicts of their daughters? Illegal, illegitimate, I cannot sing. And yet I must bring water to the poxy bucket, its hate scarred like the night's twinkles. Slaughters of my innocence I must take on to bleed the fetters of my tribe. I must devour it all like a bank, cell by cell, vault by vault, blinding to the void. See, the burdens fuse to brine, the leeches depart when there is no more marrow to kill; age is restored and settles back to its primordial, colourless slime; noon glistens like the dew, knees slipping salt like oysters back to their kernel womb. Song, dirge, drag of blood, veins of beginning, need only this throb of a thin transparent crystal. It seems a long way now from fat, the shaking bone, the laughter. But I can show you what it means to eat your god, drink his explosions of power and from the slow sinking mud of your plunder, grow. NegusIt it it it is not it it it it is not it is not it is not it is not enough it is not enough to be free of the red white and blue of the drag, of the dragon it is not it is not it is not enough it is not enough to be free of the whips, principalities and powers where is your kingdom of the Word? It it it it is not it it it it is not it is not it is not it is not enough it is not enough to be free of malarial fevers, fear of the hurricane, fear of invasions, crops' drought, fire's blisters upon the cane It is not enough to tinkle to work on a bicycle bell when hell crackles and burns in the fourteen-inch screen of the Jap of the Jap of the Japanese-constructed United-Fruit-Company-imported hard sell, tell tale tele- vision set, rhinocerously knobbed, cancerously tubed It is not it is not it is not enough to be able to fly to Miami, structure skyscrapers, excavate the moon- scaped seashore sands to build hotels, casinos, sepulchres It is not it is not it is not enough it is not enough to be free to bulldoze god's squatters from their tunes, from their relies from their tombs of drums It is not enough to pray to Barclays bankers on the telephone to Jesus Christ by short wave radio to the United States marines by rattling your hip bones I must be given words to shape my name to the syllables of trees I must be given words to refashion futures like a healer's hand I must be given words so that the bees in my blood's buzzing brain of memory will make flowers, will make flocks of birds, will make sky, will make heaven, the heaven open to the thunder-stone and the volcano and the un- folding land. It is not it is not it is not enough to be pause, to be hole to be void, to be silent to be semicolon, to be semicolony; fling me the stone that will confound the void find me the rage and I will raze the colony fill me with words and I will blind your God. Att Att AttibonAttibon Legba Attibon Legba Ouvri bayi pou' moi Ouvri bayi pou' moi ...