gave you and your cousins others.

To novelists: Savage.

To pamphleteers: Cannibal.

To scholars: Anthropophage.

To your captains: Seacunny, tindal,

syrang, topaze. Or mostly

as you swabbed the deck:

Cocoa-faced rascal!

You call yourself names

in the three tongues you speak in your sleep:

Lashkar. Tandel. Jahaazi.

They crowd us into the damp, shallow cradle

they call the fo’c’sle. Silly name. Phana, we call it,

phana: the hood. The wide fan-spread hood

of this coiled sea-cobra we’re sailing.

At the Belvedere

for Sandeep Parmar

The seaweed farmer from last evening

swung into the Belvedere again tonight,

this time asking for a Liverpool Gin

– citrus not watermelon, he specified

as he pulled the moonless key

to the alphabet lock

from his frayed trench pocket,

the hurricane lamps loud behind his glasses.

He dropped the key and a sand-crusted trowel

on the bar. His fingers had guttered out.

‘Let’s call it quits, shall we, mate?’

he nudged me. ‘I give up. I don’t know what

to call it, this mewling, this barking,

this mad overhead windwhack cackle of the gulls.’

Sycorax

Woke up trapped in a tree trunk,

speech slurred, though all I’d drunk

was berry-blood. It must have been the old man

with his cursed and cursing stick, which spanned

my rainbow-shored island in tight, cunning sweeps:

swamps, jungles, rivers all measured in leaps

and leached, cropped, dammed to suit his will,

the magus in his coracle, his eye fixed on the kill.

He has caged my bright-billed birds in new names,

mapped ash from his crucible across the flames

of my volcano, tamped it down. My skin is bark

on which his steaming slaves will carve his dark

memoirs of war. He will claim eternity as his own,

raise his monument on my stabbed muscles, my powdered bones.

A Constantly Unfinished Instrument

for Brian Eno

Begin with the creeper.

Follow its rustle

as it uncurls across brick, bark and thorn.

Go out in all weathers, craft a score

from the grunts and growls

that escape the world-beast in its sleep.

Stay the course until you’ve caught

the quick, true surge of the ocean

that’s felt the fire harpoon pierce its hide:

until you’ve heard the ocean flail, lash and roar

through the creeper,

heard it again, and heard it right.

Night Sky and Counting

for Teju Cole

You are in the dark

looking up at constellations and shooting stars

finding traces of adobe roofs and walls

at the eye’s radium rim while grass

tickles your back. You notice

some celestial objects move faster than others

sorting red shift from blue note

You are the samurai of wide open spaces

they scan you in their eyes you’re a ninja

betrayed by body heat you’re that grey-

glowing-to-orange smear in minutes

you could evaporate

leaving heat shadow

printed on the ground to mark the spot

You thought you were the subject the locus of consciousness