∞

Give the Devil His Due
A Robber memoriam for the Shadow’s people.

The body of a shadow speaks.

I was born a slave country
marred with ghost on me the Shadow skins
haunted in my hinter valleys
with

‘I am without my Shadow.’

I was laid to rest terrain
flooded with vampire saying
the trauma of taut flesh thought
the void you left at your wake.

We fared on the noise from your remains.

Eluded in my hills and vestiges
like

‘I am without my Shadow.’

I am a haunted place;
good cantankerous evil with red attire.
You’d never take your king for holy
like he was the empire.

I am the burning man,
was flood early in the cemetery,
like how trees considered their bark livery.

I deliver this voice as terse axis:
‘Long live the Queen’s mortality.’

I am like this Shadow.

 

Sentiment

Darting through Sunday rain
even the weather has a cold switch.

Armored with melanin
in a breath of starry oxygen
the spirit exclaimed,
‘I am expanded.’

Dusked
I shouted to free the spirit.

‘We are the perpetrators of this wishful state.’

Lightning struck wool
bearing the leaves of my dead.
Like caged butterflies, complained
the embryo was melting flight.

The ferment then said:
‘This hell burns like the devil was my skin.’

The luminance of everything
operated on this disheveled anatomy.

In here
grew
the body of a spirit.
The beauty of the world was in their faces.

This plunged me into a bloody intimation.

With high mind
the quickest epiphanies, portent,

‘They are the sentiment of my life.’

∞

Kwasi Shade is an artist/New Media Activist based in Trinidad. He is interested in representing the true myriad of Caribbean dichotomies in his stories and testing the parameters of Creole dialect vernacular. He is interested in communicating the Carnival Aesthetic. Recently, he participated in the Cropper Foundation Writers’ Workshop, Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival’s three (3) part Screenwriters’ Workshop with the Canadian High Commission, Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival’s Producers’ Lab and Monique and Kei’s writers’ retreat. He has participated in three group exhibitions. Kirschmann Gallery, New Orleans, “Between Stitches”, Alice Yard, Trinidad, “SYOS”, and Granderson Lab, Trinidad, “For so is so and also”. His writing has appeared in Pree, Moko, New local and Culturego. He is a 2010 Trinidad and Tobago film festival Ident award recipient and a student in Film and History at the University of the West Indies.