Why is it that you inspire me to poetry, Port-Au-Prince?
Is there even one single unit of beauty left in your withered bones?
Is your sweat full of a sweet fragrance I cannot smell?
Are there diamonds sparkling in the mountains of rocks called roads?
The ti machann arranges her previously used pillows on the ground, for sale,
on top of the rubble that has been here hundreds of years
The rebar is a relic of the most brutal French colonialism
You used to be adorned with pearls,
but now your necklaces are made of plastic bottles and candy wrappers
on a string that has almost but not quite given up
Maybe it is your new tarpulein dresses laced with the latest prints of USAID
Or, the UN gunmen from Sri Lanka and Canada and South Korea
who are driving around with nothing to do but point their guns
at no one and everyone
I think that it must be that apocalyptic grin that seduces me
That "this is what the end of the world looks like" knowing in your eyes
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