Welcome to JP Melville's review, experience, and statement on foreign aid and the international development industry. A conservative faith in family. A love affair riding the riotous tensions between money, personal freedom, the majestic travesty of our specie's ecological footprint, and economic politics. Selected writing of both prose and poetry, anecdotal travel log to rhetorical essay, dating back from the 1980's to the present. Enjoy!

Monday 1 April 2013

Tropical Sky



 Four months the tropical sky above me, hazy, washed blue from horizon to horizon,
The sun, detonating in silent perpetuity, the heat bearing down heavily,
My life, the one I once believed I had,
A woman, mortgages, investments, the colour of my car, the surety of progress,
Has slowed, stopped, evaporated amongst the humidity.

These past few days I have slept, three, four hours in the afternoon,
Early to bed at night,
Up with the dawn.
No dreams.
And during the sweltering days,
Though sheltered on the porch,
My thoughts wither.

I watch a fly land in a patch of sunlight,
Streaming from a rusted hole in the tin above,
Land on a piece of paper;
It rubs its tiny hands together, then flies away.
The ants have come,
Clambered up my small table,
Scurrying where my cold drink has been, sucking up the sweat.

From outside the courtyard,
Drifting in from the still foreign quartier
I hear music, voices, motorcycles, grinding mills,
An ever present cacophony surrounding me
Though far, far removed from me.

Occasionally, the wind dancing in the banana fronds and coconut palms
Reaches across my porch and cools my skin,
The heat from the sun so intense
That I notice the smallest swirling breeze wherever it touches me.

I find, oddly, that I cannot think beyond what I see, feel, hear,
Even the wet taste in my mouth, slightly bitter from the tonic water I drank.

As though I was that person I once thought I was.
I seem to wish to find meaning in the pageantry around me.
But I find no meaning.
My thoughts stop at sensation.
As the person I once thought I was,
Appears to have stopped at being.

Or, maybe, maybe,
The I is just beginning to be.

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