calm confusion

If yuh say we playing table tennis, I could be inna blasted wedding dress (geed) and I will thef somebody racket and slippers and follow u to zee board. I feel Marlon realize this early on, so when he and Chris decide we going to play tennis at the Y on a Friday after ah week of bonding at NACC workshop, I was in dat! Lou Ann the chick from Mayaro back out last minute so Marlon say he going to call this boy he work with to come and make up ah foursome. “He cute?” “He has a certain level of cuteness.” “hmm.. arite” Now this Y holds for me a bundle of memories I call the best independent moments of my childhood. It was where I learnt to swim, I learnt to play basketball, I learnt to run from dog and I learnt to make spit balls and aim at de back of people’s heads. All in all a good 10 years of my life was spent there. For the first two I was a mollusk stuck to de side of the shallow end of the pool fritten no ass to let go. For the next two I was permanently attached to the railing on th...

there isn't a child in Trinidad who does not have close ties to a vagrant by some means, and if you don't have such a tie, is cuz yuh blasted grow up in ah dam cave, shit man. right, moving on... My vagrant collection started with Broadway, who wasn't so much a vagrant as a drug addict my grand parents liked to give roti too. Then there was Raseen , who was really ah drunk Indian lady with a serious case of bronchitis and a gambling problem. She loss many ah goat gambling in de back trace. The clown lady was the greatest. She had flamimg blonde hair with ah black black indian face and red lip stick. She used to give Sera some serious nightmares, particularly since she taught at a Primary school nearby... When we moved to Avocat , i met up with a different breed of Vagrants. These had more brains than fish. They smart fuh so and went crazy and some point from all dee smartassness and end up on de street. Santana used to wonder around Avocat Junction yelling to...

Blanketed in a thin morning fog, the sleepy town of San Fernando seems mysterious. The narrow street ways and tiny alleys, the forgotten cemeteries and huge colonial buildings, it is a city full of unappreciated beauty. Even the people are shittin weird . They walk around with the naivety of a Tobagonian and the balls of a Jamaican, fostering the feeling of a secret cult you will never be able to infiltrate. Must be all the hills. I started working at Royal Bank on High Street when I was 17. It was to be a part time job during July/August, to help them sort out some signature cards. Apparently the staff did not know the alphabet and my mom insisted I could recite it so i got the job. My mother, anxious with the idea of her colleagues encountering her daughter for the first time since she stopped peeing the bed, dressed me in the fashion of a constipated lawyer and sent me off to my first day. She dropped me in front the Bank at 7 am. I stood and looked across the road, waved at my...

Nothing gives me pleasure more than stealing books. Whether i take them from a library or an individual, the thrill is the same. And if someone is willing to actually lend me a book with the expectation i will return it when i am done, the thrill increases tremendously. When I was around 5 my mom seemed to catch on to this. After theffin about five of my aunt's Miles and Boon from de cardboard box under the step by aunty Mels , and trying real hard to sniff out the bookworms, and finally attempting to chew the pages, my mom bought me my first set of real books to devour on my own. It is a beautiful set of Sesame Street Encyclopedias! Complete with a run through every country by Oscar and Telly Monster soap operas.. i was in love. She followed this with a set of Junior Britannica Encyclopedias and a junior scrabble. I wonder what she was pullin , because i was outside making mud cakes with baby powder icing to feed Ren and Mimi, under the two table horse covered by ah curtain ...

When i was 8 i wanted to be a clown. After several readings of Enid Blyton's Mr Galliano's Circus and visions of peddling along a teeny weeny rope on a tricycle, coupled with an exkashun to Suarez Bro's Circus sometime in 1985, i decided this was my chosen calling. I would brave the wrath of the lions (meh parents) and the tigers (meh grandparents) and the elephants ( cuz i be scared of em) and become a famous clown.. code name kerrie the clown.. creative i must say. My sister had other plans, she wanted to be a maid in Scotia Bank, and much to my mother's dismay, we set a course to achieve these high aspirations. After numerous attempts to make my sister disappear, and several dead cats later, i realised it just was not the job for me. My inability to balance due to some kinda weird inner ear problem my sister has ( im a hypochondriac), i could not bring myself to get my two tonne tricycle up on Hanuman's cow rope. Plus it smell like ass eh real ass! Time to change...

Here we are two different souls, going along two different paths, making two different sets of memories, yet on paper we are carbon copies of each other. Two lives intertwined, our styles will not differ. We see the same things from different angles We make different choices Yet we feel the same and know the same she and i ... always in each other's shoes.

We all knew there was no way to escape de lix. He was vex and we jes had to deal with it. All around the yard was scattered with bits of bottle and the entire compound smelt like somebody try to burn ah goat alive. He stood us up in a line against the brick wall of the gallery by age, for all of Siparia Old Road to see. Pacing to and fro in front of us, he kept slapping the whip against his palm and staring directly into our eyes. I looked to my right and saw Gavvy sniffling and whimpering and Nasa grinning and trying to inhale the snot leaking down his nose. On my left, Mimi was staring at Pappy with smoke coming out her ears and her teeth barred, ready to fight, and Ren was sending him kisses and sweet eye. I myself opted for the play dumb facial expressions. Staring into space, blowing my curls out of my eyes, looking at him and nodding, “ yea yea dey was real beinghave bad pappy, real bad.” Suddenly he stopped. Place get real quiet. Cosco dog down de road yelp and then run away, Ma...