Surinam

To travel too much can only make you sad.

Escape exacts a revenge.

A capuchin monkey in the rainforest-

Me in my head.

Nature is so full of its own obscenity,

Vicious superlatives hunting you down,

Fighting,fornicating,rotting away,

Accursed jungle ready to kill you

And shrink your head into a trophy.

Nature thinks only of itself,

Perfecting its means in herbal dreams.

The deeper you penetrate,

The more the curse infests you,

Sticking parasitically to your blood and bones.


A Maroon sits under a tree,

Cutting the skin of his gnarled penis-root

And inserting little balls

To boost his manhood and please his woman.

Nearby, a forktailed woodnymph

Alights on a starfruit tree.


Blue and venomous as the okopipi frog,

I sit with a drink,

Knowing that everything happens soon enough,

It happens in its own time,

Happens when it happens.

A deed performed three hundred years ago

Is as potent as anything this moment,

Dark chigger lodged under skin.

Avital wrongs howl through the blood,

Demanding to be avenged.


Mercury rains blow across the earth.

In a rotting shack,

With a few chickens and pigs outside,

And mangy dogs lying in the sun,

Mr and Mrs Lopez proudly sell their teenage daughters

To drunken diseased gold miners,

Every Friday night.