the words arrive in a whisper of strangled voices

  close to being mute as castrated slaves singing about It’s

  power, reflection of choruses of fawning sycophants

  so eye am hearing voices carrying true

  measures of music identifying beauty here, ricocheting blues,

  the terrible passage of pitched voices, haunting hoarseness

  from swallowing salt water during the journey crossing

  the atlantic, raises up, side-by-side glowing ghost-hyenas,

  translucent piranhas searching for flesh somewhere

  in fresh river water, in a green place full of blood-sucking flowers,

  gigantic mosquitos carrying deadly diseases known

  only to red-eyed pygmy alchemists—in my fevered dreams

  eye am hearing sacred chants from dancing priests,

  red-eyed witchdoctors, who know secrets

  somewhere in the underworld of death

  will grow into drooping white flowers known by voodoo

  houngans, loas, who alchemize deadly potions,

  serve this milk to disbelievers, turn them into zombies,

  who slink around speaking rabid words,

  eating dirt, or clay

  eye am hearing the arrival of those raised holy voices

  climbing from the sea as african ghost spirit crabs

  arriving in my dreams, eye am listening to their whispering songs,

  melancholy winds bring siren calls, speak to me now/here

  in this place of beautiful waters, in this night of seduction,

  eye am hearing/listening for you to sing, old spirits,

  so eye will recognize something old, something new—

  eye am listening,

  listening to your whispering deep song arrival raising up,

  seducing in the night, eye am listening, hearing your spirit

  voices from the sea, arriving during this sacred night,

  eye am dreaming while sitting on my terrace,

  a wing of this beautiful butterfly shaped island

  dreaming/hearing waves breathing life washing ashore,

  whispering secrets ancestors kept

  carried from africa, spawning in lullabies here,

  living in low, hushed voices swirling in whirlpools eddying

  there on beaches of goyave after flowing ashore

  inside licking salt water curled like lovers shaped into intertwined fingers

  playing syllabic sprays into songs, through vibrating tongues

  winds blow in from mouths of saxophones, flutes,

  where mystery whooshed lost scripts, premonitions,

  undertones of history riffing in my heart

  then eye heard them murmuring of journeys, of crossing

  the atlantic, carrying them here to me now

  ancestors reduced from time’s ravenous hunger, from flesh

  to bone to spirits, howling gale-force wind tongues

  speaking to me like jet flames spitting,

  searing my brain with parables of great-great-grandfathers,

  great-great-grandmothers, those who went on to survive

  became slaves in this tumultuous newborn america,

  their spirits bathing me with sprays of revelations,

  reincarnations inside spirits speaking to me

  in this moment of history, scaffolding cadences

  birthing words from skin-wombs of talking-drum

  rhythms raised by flying hands, tribal memories

  from st. louis, gorée, elmina, cape coast castle, anomabo,

  slaves pushed out chained through doors of no return

  from the gold coast—people from senegambia,

  mali, mandingo, songhai, akan, ashanti nations—

  transported here invisible after the reaper took them down

  to swim inside battalions of atlantic waves, sweeping west,

  crashing beaches of goyave, just below the terrace

  where eye am lost in dreaming, now

  they roar in foaming voices of african ghost crab

  spirits, carrying their allegories transferred

  via metamorphic memory totems in grips of pincer-claws,

  a drummer’s sense of time moved here via instinct,

  metaphors created with drum sticks evoking speech,

  rooted deep in complexity of ancient syllables,

  accents, slipping clipped within a tonal language,

  structured magic, mysterious flourishes, power,

  inside audible multifarious systems,

  listen, listen closely now

  hear royalty passed down, transformed

  through alchemy musical pitches unleash

  cross-fertilized linguistic tones, secret codes, metaphors

  these spirits kept locked inside melody, resurrected

  african bolts of lightning flashes inside a secret

  call & response oral rhythms, antiphonal

  poetic forms, dreams, sluicing tempos, voices,

  emerging from subterranean places, whispering,

  flying on wings of tongues speaking run-on sentences

  inside raging waves washing ashore foaming, breathing,

  evoking spirits to rise—in me—from the wash—

  sweeping syllables ashore seeking redemption,

  a touch of sulfur in their primordial whispers, coalescing,

  winding themselves around faith like octopus tentacles

  spreading out, then coursing inside rivers of blood-fingers

  reaching beyond death, informing voices to raise up

  those who swam alongside fish, streaked silver flashes

  of light streaming through currents holding ancient secrets,

  full of miracles held one to another inside a confidential privilege,

  a deep-song breathing, knowing, singing lineages

  as abused african sensibilities are resurrected here

  from primordial places—history living inside memories, ethos—

  holding onto faith, these lullabies resonate again,

  whisper through trees, conjugating, arriving

  in this new world as powerful, original voices—evoking

  change through reconciliation, admonitions,

  vocalizing alchemy, refusing to go back through the swirling waves

  gathering, listen to their undertones murmurings of It

  like birds singing through vibrating reeds twisting—

  tongues through foaming waves with rage after being chained

  to death, starvation, unspeakable horror of a shark’s open mouth,

  its fearsome guillotine teeth clamping down on necks,

  heads of beloved kinsmen

  listen to these solos of salt waves foreshadowing

  voices of john coltrane, jimi hendrix, albert ayler

  roaring apoplectic, frothing love on shore

  in a torrent of scalding notes, chords, screeching solos

  listen to the caterwauling history in the scaffolding litany

  of sacred voices beseeching sea waves thundering all the way

  from africa—in gospels, in sermons, in speeches—

  frederick douglas, martin luther king, jr., malcolm

  stokeley carmichal—hear foaming voices cascading ashore,

  spreading over this foreign, yet native, place

  spraying droplets of rain riding on an eagle’s wing,

  soaring across the breath of this bold novel experiment

  carrying new gospel fed an ancient manna

  hear the voices swirling out of the atlantic,

  listen, pay attention to what is being said

  IV.

  TRANSLATING THE DREAMS

  each day the sun rises, ghost voices foaming wash in,

  over sand, rocks, carrying primordial history to this place

  of reinvention

  soar through space whispering, spraying ancestral

  evocations into the air, misting inside memory

  constant linkages—language, culture transferred here—

  over time embedded within sonic dna rhythms,

  music reborn here, now—

  (can you see/hear shadows of tower clock hands tracking

  backwards, recovering sacred voices hidden in time?)

  witnesses carrying dreams anchored in history

  of those who knew the beloved ancient spaces absent

  in the west, who knew time is both enemy & giver of breath,

  why artists try breaking through fear, create metaphors, evoke

  sweet beauty, love, struggle each day the sun rises

  bringing forward poetry, trumpet voices, guitars, saxophones, violins, bassoons,

  pianos, oboes, harmonicas, a conductor’s baton a symphony

  every day blues singers, mezzo-sopranos raise their power,

  move time, measures inside brushstrokes of painters

  rhythms of music, poetry, the synchronicity of a dancer’s movement,

  joy in creativity shaping images, reminds us of the beauty

  we all share, the same gift of breath on this planet

  we cannot take for granted because survival is not guaranteed

  here—any other space we know of—life breathes here/now,

  speak to us ancient spirits, raise up your voices,

  the truth of collective memory, why ghost voices fly

  around the world as birds sing in springtime, summer wonder—

  beauty can bloom, flower in people when they remember

  mendacity can be overcome with faith,

  when people dream, become agents of change,

  beacons of light through acts of imagination, creativity,

  forgiveness can anchor itself inside transformative love,

  african ghost crabs can transmute their spirits,

  metamorphose inside people in this new place,

  fuse one to the other, breathe, create in them a new ethos,

  endure slavery here and survive, transmogrify

  into new spirits/bodies, sing, speak new

  words rolling off tongues, neologisms as vessels, as rebirth,

  create another language and thrive here,

  birth fresh rhythms

  when transferring the old to the new—like me, you too,

  reader/listener—who were once blood kinsmen

  who had to rename themselves as they recalled old histories,

  had to relearn, reinvent themselves on this strange new soil

  absent baobab trees, familiar villages, ancient rituals—everything

  transfigured into new forms in a future coming around the corner,

  somewhere in the ether—where? no one knew where—

  something different was being created here/now

  their spirits told them, they would find It somewhere—

  where? we didn’t know where, we only knew to keep on

  going, keep on seeking It, keep on listening, looking, keep seeking It—

  V.

  THE NEW DREAM OF GHOST VOICES

  where does life-force go after flesh falls away from bone,

  does it evoke itself only in memory, metaphor, spirit,

  recollection dissolving within disposition,

  perhaps it’s there in a tangle of disconnected wires,

  loose ends prevailing in minds of those living in the fog of alzheimer’s,

  amnesia, the willful erasure of recall too difficult to digest,

  so a counter argument is articulated

  disrobing myth, history, religion,

  events—real or imagined—a cover up for madness, murder,

  plunder for chests of gold enslaving people to gain power,

  we see beauty, karma slip away, greed washing through

  weak minds, callous men love mammon, blinded by evil, malediction,

  unable to feel the cleansing truth

  spring rains heal earth’s frozen skin after winter,

  the rabid furnace rises all over the globe singeing hearts,

  spirits of those lost, whose skin color, textured hair

  triumph, creating lasting gifts of music, art

  there is always the possibility of rebirth through imagination

  struggle, reinvention of narratives, as voices sing themselves,

  cradle wonder, joy, magical power (always the option),

  voices swelling beyond boundaries rich with risk-taking,

  love, cleansing, healing, something faith can embrace

  beyond structure, religion, crosses personifying false myths,

  tastes, invented legends, tongues recreate themselves,

  fuse inside serendipity, differences embrace linguistic vortexes,

  marry sound of local idioms to “high speech”

  within cadences of poetry metaphor is fashioning

  a new voice, marrying old images with the new,

  the unexpected arrives in another space,

  wandering comes dressed in amazement,

  recognizing, blending cultures, changing time,

  creating new dialectics

  suddenly clarity is raised, ethos reinvented in

  clear, compelling rhythms evoked by drum masters’ sticks,

  raising fresh sounds through skins,

  machine gun onomatopoeia, vowels shot through space

  exploding into shrapnel flying inside word

  bombs blasting in choices people make

  using language as syntactical force, a new,

  pure form of communicating

  the moon rises from its dark grave,

  lingers mysteriously above the promise death keeps

  locked inside tombs of atlantic salt water

  down there in the darkness before healing

  rays of the sun break through, bathing earth in light

  healing songs of sunlight,

  hear voices of the future arriving

  VI.

  CHORUS: AFRICAN GHOST SPIRIT CRABS CROSS KARUKERA (GUADELOUPE)

  we arrived on this butterfly island of beautiful waters,

  flying as mist through trees, as crab spirits

  crawling sideways across this island,

  we were invisible, shadows, flocks of flying ghost birds,

  crawling sideways, as is our way over the ground,

  we made our way through weeds, thickets of grass,

  abandoned dirt roads, narrow paths snaking through

  places where a few people with skins as white

  as the moon glow in starlight gathered

  we saw a few who looked the way we looked when

  we were alive, with skins the color of midnight,

  eyes soft as the love of mothers, aunts, grandmothers,

  many looked bedraggled, were chained,

  their eyes sad, heads hung low as beaten dogs

  or birds with broken wings lying on the ground,

  still some of us stayed because of the beauty of this place,

  others decided It was not here, so kept on searching for It;

  where? they didn’t know where, but they knew It wasn’t here

  despite the beauty, so they left in a spray of mist

  bursting through space, moving from tree to tree,

  gathered in open meadows where some crawled sideways,

  others made their way flying, moved across land—

  forests, swamps, mountains—through air,

  kept on crossing toward where? they didn’t know where,

  but they knew we were going, flying, crawling,

  moving toward somewhere, looking for It

  somewhere out there; where? we didn’t know

  where, but we were going, seeking It somewhere

  when we came upon another big salt water

  though this water was warmer than the huge salt water

  beneath the gray sky of no remorse, towering waves,

  savage, relentless storms, shipwrecks, disjointed,

  unhinged, leering skeletons peeking from silt,

  gazillions of bug-eyed fish, streaming everywhere

  we crawled sideways toward where? we didn’t know where,

  but we were still looking for It, though we didn’t know

  where It was, nor where we were going, we just moved on,

  crawling sideways, looking for the mysterious It,

  that gift, searching everywhere seeking signs of It breathing

  until we came to be reborn

  VII.

  TRANSITION: GUADELOUPE (KARUKERA) TO THE GULF OF MEXICO

  ghost voices left the north shores of the butterfly

  island of beautiful waters, they rode crests of curling waves

  shaped like curved fingers, rode ships crossing the caribbean sea,

  blown north by blustery tonguing breath, riding wings of birds,

  backs of dolphins, crawling sideways through silt, sand across

  the bottom of the sea, swimming in salt water,

  catching vortexes of spinning hurricane winds, rain storms,

  day & night riding waves of howling demons,

  lashing sprays of God’s breath

  whipped bitter voices of slaves—kinsmen—shipped north

  chained to ships docking in the dominican republic, haiti, cuba—

  by chance african ghost spirit crabs meet another spirit on the beach

  at jérémie, where a wizened old black man called legba is sitting,

  a small pipe drooping from his mouth, he tells them

  he controls the crossing over from one world to the other

  says he holds the keys to what the ghost crabs need,

  tells them he can make a way for them to find It,

  only if they listen, follow his directions, his commands,

  waving pincer claws up & down in affirmation

  the african ghost spirits nod yes

  they ask legba what must they do to find It,

  he introduces them to a beautiful spirit named erzulie,

  wearing three rings on three fingers of her three husbands

  —agwe, damballah & ogun—

  legba tells them she is the voodoo goddess of beauty,

  love, all things human

  her first husband agwe is sovereign of the seas,

  both are loas, like the african ghost crabs, so they are connected

  metamorphosing, transmogrifying their shapes, forms, fusing

  one into the other, part loas, part crabs—new entities altogether—

  now the ghosts can go forward, they have become

  hoodoo spirit crabs

  they go forward into the future transparent

  seeking the promise of It,