Calabashmentisms

This may be one of my shortest blog posts (bar the video ones, possibly) ever.

I'm in Jamaica; I spent the most amazing weekend at the Calabash Literary Festival in Treasure Beach where I listened to words, met Kei Miller (and his resonating poetry), reconnected with old friends and got the worst sunburn I've gotten in the past six years (and didn't care).

I blogged my experience for Nicholas Laughlin over at the Caribbean Review of Books blog, Antilles. If you're interested, check it out there.

A side effect of listening to all the literature was the drive to write a little of my own (I know... I know... what am I, twelve?). So here's a little something I scribbled on the last day. As usual, it's baaaaaad poetry. But I think it may actually be poetry, of sorts.

The starving thing that lives in my chest falls

and breaks

too often and often too self-indulgently,

through no fault but its own.

If ever I have an undoing,

that scalded armadillo will be its cause.

I spend too much time trying to mend this

broken, hyperbolic thing.