Port
au Prince
((The
Leprous touch of time) (in, Poetic Prose, a strange narration))
Port au Prince, Haiti, 1986
(Photo by the Author)
When I
disembarked the plane in 1986, twenty-eight years ago,
in Port au Prince—
How much I loved the city’s old ways.
Quaint with dirt-rock
ridden streets, and a mystic lore of Old London,
of the 9th
Century!
In those days, not so
much turmoil, as those of less nobler days
(like now and
before…).
I loved the busy
crooked alleys,
narrow gray
ramshackle thin houses with tin roofs, slumped.
Many old folks, like
live corpses, whose outward shells,
preserved by a
skeleton, somewhere inside, surprised me to be alive.
Along the docks,
squirming with slime, the very air that seeped into
the city, choked me
with sea-green pong, it reeked to the high-heavens—
And in shantytown, it
was liken to the leprous touch of time.
At night I walked the
city’s solstice skies:
everywhere staring
dark eyes, spelling some voodoo occult,
some lore unguessed.
Men walked with
pitchforks and axes on their shoulders,
with open shirt
breasts… Made for strange shadows.
The shifting mood
made strange shapes, too… over the city of the voodoo!
And from the
Caribbean, coils of sliding mist flowed over the docks,
onto the roads—
And every night came
the voodoo drums… much as regular
as the bells of the
nearest church!
The folks wonder
about the night as if in an eldritch spell; some burning
embers, creating new
smells.
Some selling a Coke
or Seven-up, ice separate, but it costs.
In an afar-off corner
of the city an ancient woods, sugarcane fields,
Hills, dirty roads
laced with rocks, and snakes and buckboards drawn by oxen.
The heated grass
deformed and oddly outgrown upward—thick like brass!
As if the roots
themselves were cursed by the earth.
A malformed and
monstrous looking sky, all best left alone, the unknown.
Everything here grows
crumbling, so it seems, —
Everything,
everywhere in the air smells with a touch of the dead, bloated fungi.
This is the world
within the city of Port au Prince—
Where the Black Goat
walks, talks and sleeps, and intrudes in dreams,
to make nightmares
for men and women...
Where the Voodoo
priests hide in attic rooms: like Baby Doc, Papa Doc and Aristotle too, along
with their assemblage.
For many a place of
airless gloom.
It is a city where
walls and rafters lean with rat-holes gnawed at its seams.
All lean at some
crazy angle; in short, with some magical geometry of course!
But nothing freighted
me, during my stay in Port au Prince, in 1986.
I slept on the top roof
of an orphanage, of all places:
Cockroach infested,
mice, mosquitos, and spider too—
Roamed that rooftop,
at night, hidden by the dust and stink,
giving me bites…
And voodoo drums too,
—but it didn’t bother me, I slept like goon.
To be truthful, I think
the Demon Star hangs above high in the sky
over Port au Prince!
A cold, arcane,
malign demon watching with a Cycloptic eye;
In serpent skin and
with a rotten smell,
as if he came out of
some abandon well.
As if he was some
dead thing once buried underground.
Here he brings the
vile corruption of forbidden wisdom—
The city trapped in
sinking sand, what can it do?
Who strayed apart
from Godly men… must seek like Nineveh
God’s pardon once
again.
Lest it wait, and the
night will come, and it will rip again.
No: 4351 (5-23-2014)
