Capybara

Cool and dead like long brown shoes in an Akashic coffin.
Rimmed like a nation of Baptist promises and desirable bells.
With sapphire skin, thin skin of night.
Who hurried back to San Juan?
Whose right side of hip belonged to pleasure?
Who came
shuddering
in the dining room
on a black leather chair
deep in athletic water?
Who humming birds
in black pitch bush
died alone in the house of the Capybara?

And Trinidad,
pinpricked with departments
at The Ministry Of Light,
push those waves of fizzing foam from your throat.
Your sister waits in those Hindu hills.
Her laugh, and see her airport uniform,
nestled in the footfall of that nauseous heaven
like dust on the roof of time.
Every subtle twitch, her very intention
remained in the church.
But the Deacon brewed the turbulence
of an ill fitting Jesus. In Port of Spain
the cold Capybara’s brain is lifted up and eaten.

Its eyes still flash.

Venetian red in the latitude
of these cruel trees.

I fall in love
too easily.

from Rubber Orchestras (Salt, 2011), © Anthony Joseph 2011, used by permission of the author

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