Carnival

Every Carnival I get so homesick, the rhythms and the smell of fresh paint from the midnight robber's collection box, but is when I hear that Pan Kaiso I does realise how it wasnt my choice to leave Trini in the first place. I does ask myself - 'Why you lef' Trini boy?'. That Pan Kaiso is the soul of Carnival and so the soul of Trinidad. Lord Kitchener did know that. De Fosto know that. David Rudder know that or witness 'Dus' in dey face'. I leave and it was like being swept away in the torrent of a dream. Cast up in a net and sent, like we always leave our paradise for suffer in the cold of Europe and America, thinking life would be better in these winter wonderlands. Is only now, listening to calypso semi finals from Skinner Park I know how sweet Trini really is. Even with the gun crime and the kidnapping, home is home. Boil corn still hot and nuts man still chanting 'Fresh and S a l t ! And we shivering up in London, missing the mas again. Last year a say next year, this year a say next one. Trini calling me. I keep remembering how it feel like to know a country loves you. To know that you belong. Not nationalistic is just that these islands are elegiac, yes to live there rugged if you don't have coin and I have things to do here first, but that pan kaiso and that biscuit tin drum like it calling me home. So why did I leave? I left because everyone said I should. Because I saw frosty the snowman one xmas morn as a child and it held me, because I used to see skyscrapers on Kojack and Cannon and wonder ways, because my grandmother knew me and the old bull would have to lock horns one day. And it was what everyone was trying to do, to escape.