Sometimes
I wonder if I am trying to prevent the World from becoming what it is destined
to become. Other times, in the depths of my certainties I am powerless to
create right from wrong, light from dark or even right from left.
Why
do I worry so much about what others are doing? I am not in control of
anything, including myself. If the world is going left, I should only worry if
I wanted to go right.
I am
fed up with people hiding their actions in the brightest lights, denying it all
in plain view, as if your eyes are blind, your ears deaf, and your nose
incapable of smelling the truth.
What
is it that’s left?
When
innocence escapes its cage
And
in an angry rage
Attempts
to disengage
From
the not so innocent sage
Sometimes
my fears, my uncertainties overwhelms the very things I Love, Nothing can harm
you if you worry less and care more.
It’s
not your fault if it goes wrong, don’t worry be happy
Go With The Flow
Things
are only a problem, when they become a problem. Until then they are just
possibilities which don’t exist. Not all problems will cause you woe.
An erudite and emotional reflection in the middle of a long journey.
Last Sunday, 21st August 2016, I performed one of my poems at
Trafalgar Square in London in memory of my ancestors, those who came and
went, so that I could be.
They would have come and gone
unheralded, like most ancestors, simply mythical beings that have been
handed down through the generations until they become grainy pictures in
the mind or just footprints in a sandstorm. The ancestors who lived
through the slavery years however fill me with a great sadness. The
sadness comes from knowing that no matter what potential they had as
they travelled the 9 months from conception to the birth canal, most of
them would not be realised.
In the version of slavery adopted by
the Europeans, the unborn child was also the property of the owner,
which could have kept slavery going forever. From all I understand
about slavery, the idea that a human being still attached to the
umbilical cord of its mother is a slave is one of the most unbearable
things I have ever come across. Before that child is born, before it
takes the first suck of its mother’s teat, even before its conception,
the potential of that child is enslaved. Think about that and imagine
that it was your child.
I am a descendant of slaves. I am the
result of slavery. Slavery across the Atlantic was the starting point in
a new and perilous journey that nature made in my name a few hundred
years ago. I am in the middle of that journey and the final destination
is unknown.
Whether you believe in Nature, Yahweh, the Universe
or whatever you think is worth worshipping, or giving praise to you must
recognise that something fundamental started in 1441, when the European
slave trade in Africa started. The Portuguese captains Antão Gonçalves
and Nuno Tristão capture 12 Africans in Cabo Branco (modern Mauritania)
and took them to Portugal as slaves.
In 1444: The Portuguese de
Freitas lands 235 kidnapped and enslaved Africans in Lagos a city in
Portugal, the first large group of African slaves brought to Europe. It
is now becoming big business. This is some 50 years before Columbus
stumbles across the Caribbean in his search for India.
Those
realities that have made me, also denied the me, I ought to have been,
from ever becoming real. That me, drifted off into a parallel universe
where hopefully, I grew up in the love, security and traditions of the
past thousands of years in the river beds, plains and valleys of West
Africa.
The new me after all this time, will look you in the eye
and proudly say, I was , I am and I will become again, what I was always
intended to be.
This is part of my story and I give homage to my ancestors.
This
poem is copyrighted and is a section of a much longer poem which
continues the journey to the present day. It will be part of a new
collection of poems to be published soon.
The Black Man Song
I
Want To Tell You A Story
I
Promise It Won’t Take Long
It's
About A Tribe That Is Filled With Glory
It's
Called The Black Man's Song
We..The
People Of That Blessed Land
Were
Stolen In Our Innocence
Taken..By
An Unmerciful Hand
And Cut
Off From Our Inheritance
We Had
Our Native Culture
We Had
Our Native Tongue
Suddenly
There Was A Vulture
Forcing
Us To Sing His Song
He Took
Us In His Stinking Ship
Three
Hundred At A Time
Our
Incentive Was His Stinging Whip
Our Food
Just Gruel And Lime
For Long
Long Months..Imprisoned By The Seas
In The
Bottom Of His Pit
No
Recreation..Just His Histories
Us
Tired..Dying..In Our Own Shit
More
Than Half Passed Away On Those Rides
Too
Sick..Forgetting To Be Proud
Bodies
Thrown To The Ever Present Tide
While
The Wailing Grew So Loud
While The Wailing…Grew…So Loud
They
Must Always Be Remembered
They
Will Not Die In Vain
Their
Bodies..Now Dismembered
Must
Illuminate Our Brain
If
Willie Lynch existed, he would have said
“Slavery
Is A Psychological Game
Where
The Master Makes The Rules
Being
Afraid To Die Is Just The Same
For Wise
Men Or For Fools”
For
Three Centuries We Helped The Master
All His
Countries Became Great
Economically..They
Could Not Grow Faster
The
Blacks Just Grew Inanimate
In
Jamaica "Mada Nanny and Cudjoe" Fought And Won
Very
Small Victories
Tacky
Took Over Where They’d Begun
Trying
To Brighten, Our History
Our
Women Took The Brunt
Of The
Master's Attack
They
Were Not Important
Even
Less..Could They Fight Back
Raped..Vandalised..And
Scandalised
Self
Respect And Dignity Drained
Through
Fear They Were Totally Hypnotised
And The
Master's Will Was Maintained
Men
Seeding Children For Three Hundred Years
Painfully
Discharged From Responsibility
Whipped..Flogged..And
Killed..The Scars They Bear
To
Remind Us Of Their Sensitivity
We Say
That Uncle Toms Were Nought
Paradoxically..They
Saved Our Race
Outgunned..Outmanouvered..And
Out Thought
They
Kept Us From Our Final Resting Place
All Our
Heroes Fought And Died
Too
Proud To Toe The Line
Too
Impatient To Wait For The Turned Tide
Survivors..?
No. Heroes..Fine.
Slowly
The Tide Began To Turn
Toussaint
L'Overture Beat The French
Slavery
Economics Was Now Being Spurned
The
Europeans Couldn't Take The Stench
In 1838,
We Thought We'd Come To The End Of The War
Must tell you about a trip we took to Cascais earlier this month. We had never
been there before, normally go to Algarve. What have we been missing? Cascais
is a beautiful part of the Atlantic coastal region of Portugal, about 40
minutes from Lisbon Airport and 20 minutes from the capital itself. Also near
the World Heritage site at Sintra and the biggest casino in Europe at Estoril,
if you like that sort of thing.
We were looking for a Spa type hotel, well my wife and daughter were anyway. I
was just looking for a holiday of wondering about doing nothing. We were both
satisfied.
We arrived on the night Portugal won the European Cup and in fact just as we
were booking in, Portugal scored the only goal of the match and we just joined
in the celebrations with a fantastic set of staff at the Hotel Miragem, where
we stayed.
What can I say about the Miragem that has not already been said? It is simply
amazing. The organisation, the meticulous processes, the food, the professional
staff, the facilities are such that you can see why we met the Man of the match
of the final game of the Euros there. I understand that another famous
footballer who shall remain nameless was also there a few days before. Miragem
is undoubtably one of the great hotels in the world.
I am looking for an excuse to get back there in September or October. Don’t
tell the wife though, otherwise she will want to try somewhere else.
You’ve probably gathered
from my last post that I am supposed to be writing a book with the rather grand
title "Rhythms Of My Life".
However, I have been
stuck in stasis, that place of motionlessness for such a long time, I am beginning
to wonder if I will ever finish this book!
I have done 50,000 words
and the creative pool from which all my words come, seem to have run out and I
cannot find another pool to dive into.
I know the ideas will
return, maybe I am being punished for being arrogant and living on the
assumption that all I had to do was take and the pool would automatically
fill up again, with even better and bigger words than before.
If that assumption is
true, then a full pool is a long time coming. However, I wait, I mind-map, I walk,
do all the mental exercises that forces the brain to think differently, but
nothing changes.
I will continue to go
fishing in the pool, and in the meantime, here is part of a true story from the
pool when it was full to the brim.
It is a section from
my current book "Walking In The Shadows Of Death" available on
Amazon, see link below.
"It was 5am on Friday, 22nd
December 2000, when I woke up with a bit of a start. I felt, from the time my
eyes opened and my head cleared, that my old adversary was in the room. Since
my stay in the hospital, I always seem to wake up at the same time in the
morning. This time, however, it was different. I knew something was seriously
wrong. I felt nauseous, faint and out of breath. I automatically checked my
wrist and could not believe what was happening. The VT had returned. My
heartbeat was up at 140 beats per minute as opposed to the 55 beats per minute
it usually ran at.
I went to the toilet and sat down and as I was
about to get up, a hand from the netherworld pushed itself up my rectum,
grabbed my heart and started pulling it right out of my body. At least that is
what I felt was happening. What was really happening was that the ICD had fired
its first shock to bring my heart back into its normal rhythm.
The pain was intense. It was not of this
world. It was not just painful. It was without any redeeming features in its
remorselessness. It just was what it says it was. Absolute pain.
I screamed and in my own head it sounded like
the voice of death. I felt that I was dying again, only this time I knew all
about it. My first scream woke Sue up. She looked at me, sleep still in her
eyes and she must have seen in my eyes what I was feeling because she quickly
changed and, even as she was changing, the second electric shock sank into my
heart and literally lifted me up from the bedside table, where I was
frantically taking my socks and underpants out to prepare for the ambulance I
knew would have to take me back to the hospital, and threw me into the middle
of the bed. I weighed fourteen stone and I was lifted like a grain of salt and
thrown.
I stayed in the middle of the bed, lying
foetus-like and
minimising my size and dying.
And death laughed at me. It said I was a coward who could not take a little
pain. It said did I really think I could escape him by going home? Did I not
know that he knew where I lived? I lay there foetus-like, trying to get back into my mother’s
womb, where there would be no pain, where I would be safe.
I lay there and screamed as the third shock
came and I heard Sue knocking on our next-door neighbour Simon’s door, and Simon, who had
already heard the scream and was coming down the stairs as she rang the bell,
came over and helped.
I heard Sue’s frantic call to the ambulance and
their controlled information gathering, which was more than Sue could bear,
when the fourth shock slammed into my heart and I screamed again. I glanced at
Simon, who was sitting on the stairs, with his head in his hand, looking
totally helpless.
I screamed for the fifth, sixth, seventh and
eighth shock and wondered whether any God would let anyone suffer so much pain.
What, I wondered, was in it for him? I was now waiting for the shocks to come.
I thought they would just keep coming until the battery in the ICD ran out or
my heart stopped as it had done before. Only this time if it stopped, there was
no cardiac crash team to leap to the rescue. There was only Sue, my by now poor
hysterical partner, Simon, my next-door neighbour, and my two youngest children, lying fast
asleep in their beds, downstairs.
By the ninth shock, I would have welcomed
death. I would have gone over to him and said, “It is a fair cop, just take me
and let me not have any more pain, and release Sue and Simon from their
nightmare. This fight is between you and me, keep them out of it.” Only in that
dark, stark moment of total and absolute despair, when I looked for him,
actually sought him out, death was not there".
I am in the middle of writing a book. An autobiography which focuses on the music that inspires me and how collectively they have nurtured me and ultimately, changed my life.
I have been in the "writing void" that place of emptiness, for 8 weeks and although I have written and tidied up other things, I am finding it difficult to get back into the "pool" where all my words and ideas come from.
I know if I keep writing at least 500 words about anything, that it will return, hence starting this Blog site. I have placed some of my poems which have been videoed onto the site and would love to read your comments on them.
I am hoping to write at least the 500 words every day. 1000 would be nice, but I will settle for 500.
Have a lookout for my current book on Amazon in paperback and kindle:
" Walking In The Shadows Of Death" - (Copyright Roy Merchant 2015)
"The Rhythms Of My Life" - (Copyright Roy Merchant)
"By
the time I was nineteen, I had had my share of gropes, pokes, one night
quickies, married ladies whose husbands had gone away for the week and everything
else. Let’s say that I was no longer a virgin. I don’t know that I ever was
one.
My
first real love was for a married woman from Argentina called Anna and it
started in the Fireplace nightclub on Orchard Drive in downtown, or should I
say uptown Singapore. I knew from the moment I first laid eyes on her that she
and I were going to be intimate. She did not see me, but I saw her and it was
in her eyes. The eyes that incessantly scanned the dance floor looking for
something tangible, something she could hold on to, a challenge to occupy her
thoughts for a bit longer than the Chinese guy who was holding on to her as if
his life depended on keeping her close. He was so afraid of losing her that he
had already lost her.
It
took a while for me to create the situation that made her notice me. It took a
favour from the DJ, it took my friend Neil going over and asking her for a
dance, with me just ignoring her. It took me sending over a glass of Drambuie
and lemonade and giving her my best smile when I raised the glass to her as she
urgently looked all over the semi lit club to see who had bought her the drink.
And
Anna and I danced to Sam Cooke and then Otis Redding singing “You Send Me, one
after the other and there was no going back after that.
She
was blonde, with light tan complexion. Not the chalk white complexion of the
china dolls, but more a Mediterranean look, lithe and dressed in an ivory
kimono like dress made of silk.
She
was killing time and looking for fun in Singapore, whilst her husband rampaged
all over South East Asia, making this fortune.She lived in France, was over in Tokyo with her husband doing some
business when she decided to take a 2 week break in Singapore.
She
would tell me that Tokyo was too claustrophobic for her, too hemmed in, almost
too western.
She
loved me because when we got too deep, she ran away back to her children in
Paris, abandoning me to the quizzical look of the manager in the Mandarin hotel
where she was staying and when she could not stand being away from me anymore,
she came back to the Mandarin Hotel in Singapore, where we played lovers for 3 gorgeous
months and then we said our final farewell in the summer of 1969. And it broke
my heart for 3 years. I had not heard of Millie J at that time, so I listened
to O.C. Smith and Derrick Harriot’s “What Can I do” until the pain went back into
the background from whence it came".
