Indeed. And so much has come and gone. Finished my MA, been on tour, from France to Morocco to Germany to New York, New Jersey, been on travels reading and chanting the Voodoo funk with The Spasm Band at a multitude of festivals and it was all good experience. In the process now, of writing new material for the next album.
Been to Trinidad, first time home in 6 years and 3 weeks went like a green blur, gone, head won't turn left enough to view her, went up and down the east west corridor, eating good food and drinking wild rum, had to wait till the last friday night to taste some wild meat in Diego Martin, generally illegal and protected species in the battle hills of Paramin where time stands still and there is a concrete road that leads to Maracas Bay, those blue hills and rainforest where torrential rain blew and years ago my brother and I walked along the long asphalt all the terrible way home, went to my grandmothers grave and found it overgrown with razor grass and rayo and a sadness pulled my face down, there in the misty avanues between tomb and cathedral bush and bush and the heat of this island : Home is an Island.
By the end I had to ask, how many photographs can you take? How many roads can you drive a rented car along? How many embraces can you keep? How can you consume this place, keep it in my secret underlung so that it won't fade and even now I am filled with the sad blues of longing. I miss Trinidad yes, of course, but what is more, I miss the person I was there.The person I begin to become after 3 weeks there, when my skin gets its colour back so that I pass unnoticed.
At the barbers, same one I went to in 2001, in Cantaro village, in fact the last barber I went to since then, him, thick foot and balding himself, always grinning, he shaved my head with a razor blade and then sprayed some stinging shit on my head and said, 'Dis go sting lil bit' and when I really ketch the burn so he say 'Dat is to let you know you in Trinidad'
And I saw my brother and my father...my brother was not the clinging embrace I needed and I sighed, same old struggle. My father...in his stiff pressed security guard uniform, aloof and under a guise of mischeviousness,he laughs, but under that bridge a muddy river flows...embrace him.. his whole self, rum, his bible and the lash of it.
Here then, there are some more photos here at his Flickr set
