In a sunken seat, past its age,

I sat and watched The Matrix

between The Bicentennial Man

and fools falling in love—Astor.

 

The joy of pubescent cinema,

spicy, sour-drenched egg balls, and

green-bottled lemonades,

eyes glued to images on the run,

 

headed for the virtual border,

wrecking the paradosis into wooden debris.

But, me and my motion pictures, my, oh, my,

we never cracked under global pressure.

 

∝

Jamal G. La Rose is a storyteller: a poet, a singer/songwriter, an actor, a visual artist, a short fiction writer, playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker. He has been shortlisted and longlisted for the Guyana Prize for Literature (Poetry) (2022) and the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean (2023), respectively, and he was awarded third place in the Guyana Prize for Literature (Drama) (2023) for his entry ‘Requiem for the Living’.