Poetry Month
Each April forcing
my nib against
paper like feet to a
treadmill I feel a daily
whore skin up on cue
moan on the offbeat
Verse should come like
slime insistent embarrassing ill-timed like
a cockstand
Not every stroke of a clock deserves
a poem
Calabash
The Tourist Board representative at Sangster
was painstakingly polite
to the point of stiff
Pico Iyer
had eluded him
cleared immigration
found the waiting VIP taxi
unchaperoned
nothing to do
his sign turned upside down
he spent his attention on me
escorted me to the lost luggage counter
through customs
lingered
as my driver
brought the compact car around
for the misty trip over the Blue Mountains
he softened and
I noticed the beauty all over the momentary closeness of him
lamented packing-all-my-clothes-in-the-one-lost-bag-and-nothing-but-books
in the one that had come with me
on the flight
he smiled
with his face and his body
offered
Then you won’t be naked
The poems of Colin Robinson cover more than three decades of movement between his Trinidadian boyhood home and New York City (where he once was “illegal”) and appear in film (Marlon Riggs’s Anthem; Sekou Charles’s eponymous Riding Boundaries); dance (“Lessons,” by Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence); and print (Caribbean Erotic: Poetry, Prose, and Essays [2010]; Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles [2010]; Voices Rising: Celebrating Twenty Years of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Writing [2007]) and online (Calabash, Moko, Zócalo). His essay “An Archaeology of Grief” is forthcoming in Black Gay Genius—Answering Joseph Beam’s Call.