This wasn’t the way he promised it would be.

Bare floors, five to a room, babies’

faces lined with hunger, piercing

cries towards an empty oil lamp.

Love squeezes out of lives.

Boys shooting boys as regular as angel

dusting on banana leaves, long

and glistening. Violence standing

caged on corners with broken

standpipes, living next to dread.

The seething and faltering silence

as the dreamed for life

bobs on a distant horizon.

The moon is nowhere in sight.*

*Laventille, Smokestack Books, 2015