A Thought/Maybe

I’m thinking of all the stories that might begin with perhaps and end in possibilities, and my guitar stands in the corner phallic; black and strong. However, I’m not sure if I possess it, or if it possesses me. Of course, looking back at my initial train of thought, I don’t know how my guitar go into this; my intention was to write on some relevant social issue – well, they are all relevant I suppose. Like housing; like poverty; like the Cook Street apartments; like the poor deserving of living spaces that don’t resemble stables or bird cages; like rich men in seats who deal the cards to whom and what we each deserve.
My guitar reflects like glass my reflection, and I wonder about their own reflections, and what their classist lies may reveal. You know yesterday in between sexthoughts and possibly more sexthoughts, walking through Woodford Square, I was thinking of the night with its many possibilities, that will probably end like 75% of all my nights – alone. I see a building the color of the sky, and in its invisibility I wonder if poverty takes on a similar shade. And someone has been trying to externalize the internal classist beliefs that we are fed and nourished on. Strong like the blue food that they think grows cheap, the kind that you never feel nauseous on, so that it never really stares back at you, but only intermingles with your strength, and becomes invisible.
My guitar still stares black; phallic and strong like half the poor you’d meet. Although I had no intentions of having these thoughts dwell entirely on the poor/poor housing/poor deserving better situations, they have. And since we don’t live our lives in happy co-incidences there has to be a point to all this. So I pick up my guitar in hope that an answer may come out of a song – but off chords emerge, and bitter words belt out bitter solutions, while buildings such at the one in Cook Street stand phallic and strong in Black John John, while the poor are humped in a free world class democracy and invisibilities hide the embarrassments that can’t/shouldn’t be helped, like the street children in Port-of-Spain. Maybe soon they will have laws like “no feeding of the children” – they die faster that way.

cause loneliness bores
like the darkness
when the rain refuses to cease
bores like the scream of a hungry child
who doesn’t understand political satisfaction
and when night’s acid tears drip on wounds
left open by years of fallen expectations
we are stripped naked of our tears
because even crying
then becomes a political act
that is forever internalized
because politically
it is the economics
that takes precedence
i say kiss your cars
embrace your town houses
we will fuck your material world.

Paula Obe Thomas