THE RED SEA

The blood
bubbling
between my thighs
remind me of my connection to cycles,.....of how desperately scared
i am that someday i'll wake up...and find
i was supposed to do something, seize some opportunity, give birth to someone, give form to something, let go of care, lay down my sword, but / i didn't /
know how.

i didn't do it. Or, i did, but not when it mattered.
i only marked time, crossing and recrossing this red sea.
i didn't connect the right information, merge potential with action.
i didn't understand the ways i could be betrayed by life, link, love, mind, body.
i didn't understand the ways i could be co-opted by working with those more schooled....in the patterns of privilege and domination than i could ever be.
i didn't measure-up to ambitions i haul around with me everyday but can't articulate, to visions i have but can only see in hindsight, to whatever function i'm here for.

The blood bubbling between my thighs
tells me i have time.
Time for children.
Time for giving shape to what i see in the mist.
Time for planting and maybe for harvesting too.

But i'm Haitian and we've had 300 years of slavery and 200 years of containment-in-poverty, so tell me, do i get time, and talent too, for understanding why
and extending that understanding?

Time to participate in creating a different history?
To undo given reality and not just stare at it?
To undo the web of social constructs, the sterile lump of derivative knowledge, the dead weight of abstractness?
Time to work out the pain of not knowing reality's whole cloth.
Time to make meaning out of the battle waging in my head - lwa ki lan tet mwen yo. - a battle undaunted by the ephemeral, evil globalization vapors of economic enslavement and political vexations? Time.

Do i get time?

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