In the blue evening
wide rumshop doors open to the pavement.
Men and women are loud and lovely
sparkling in gold and silver
their ordinary clothes styled with flair and risk.
Circular tables with bottles of Angostura 1919,
club soda, limes, triangles of pepper roti.
To a woman in silver sequins a man remarks,
“Hmm, careful with them cutters, like you putting on some weight.”
“Eh heh? You wasn’t saying that last night.”
Her friends laugh.
At 11 p.m. the real conversations start:
“Is not fair, He was already home in his bed. Why they come for him. And he never never know it was to drive them to murder.”
“His mother tell him not to go. And he went. And just for driving Dole he get sentence. Is the fuckin’ laws we have here, make to kill us.”
“Not fair? Why he drive them? He is a real ass.”
“What about the witness? The say protection, but where he end up? That lawyer make his million and that witness end up living in a drain outside the San Fernando hospital.”
The speaker chokes, sips some puncheon.
At midnight, an opening: “Boysie Singh was a killer, yes, but that man had class.”
Whispers conjure images:
a young boy in the St. James market with his mother
across stalls he sees a young girl
selling verdant bundles of bhandhania.
Years later he finds her, still selling.
His present: a green sari with gold thread,
flowing, extravagant, like their love.
“Boysie love Popo and she love he. That is why she never take his money. She wanted to give it to him. Because he is a man who would pay, you hear me. He would pay!”
“The books say he feed Popo grind glass in roti.”
“They lie. That is woman method. How woman does kill. They write that for white people. White people like to hear that kinda thing about we.”
“But if the books say so, is so.”
“Yuh mothercunt! What them know ‘bout Boysie?”
Drunken men pounce on each other.