DISILLUSIONMENT MANTRA
Isn’t it beautiful, what loss
does to a body?
How it is too wretched
to put into letters.
Consider the man pulling
off a stunt at this roundabout.
His grief, too grievous
to be named.
The cars, and every moving things
move the center of his misery
to the world. Ask the
Believers answering the call
of adhaan from the old
mosque. Or the men,
who says faith is a façade.
They know loss is scalar—
all magnitude and no direction.
As for the eagles
flying overhead. The chicks
are still wary of what death
looks like. Their mother,
as if it’s not enough that flight
will mock her, prepares for a fight.
It’s not enough that, at the end,
I’ll survive my death.
I want to be remembered
for the proof of my struggle.
Look at my hands.
They are all wrecks for what
I have become.
They are all wrecks for what
I am yet to become.
Isn’t that the logic to outliving
everything, even oneself?
Tell me how to live without
counting my grief
I won’t reserve
my right of refusal.
LOOK, THIS IS NOT BLASPHEMY
after Joyner Lucas Devil’s work
How am I to believe I am God’s favorite creature?
Grief, as lacking as it is,
knows how to mock us with faith. The woman,
stinged by her son’s death,
still mourn in my head. Sometimes I pretend
I do not hear her splintered voice at night.
Each morning, a witness to her lyrebirds embroidered
pillow case soaked in tears.
Others, I listened to her ask God why He has
stripped her naked.
I heard the imam who came for her son’s burial said:
a leaf won’t fall of its tree without
the knowledge of its creator. I have long pretended
faith is enough sustenance for my misery,
pretend I have swallow the pill that will save
my soul from damnation.
But what is enough saving for the damned if not poetry?
If not the soft whispers of language?
Look, this is not blasphemy. Only that I have dwelled
too much in my sadness
it is beginning to feel like home. My mother still asks,
as if it was yesterday,
if I remember his bullet splitted body. How the guns
went silent with the night
as if claiming innocence. How the gods, as graceful as they are,
pretend Lekki Tollgate is still
as pure as a white shirt before a stain. Dear Lord,
I have long stayed in my sadness
to believe you will offer my misery a little kindness.
But if not anything, let me continue
to find solace in language. One day, maybe, I’ll find you again
in this malady—
this white wall where I pretend my brother is alive,
whole & healthy, mocking his own death.
NOTES ON FIRST DESIRE
The trees think they’d be fulfilled if they could reach God,
Each trial, a failed attempt.
This body thinks thesame, though I don’t say it.
Like the trees, I worry something is broken inside of me.
I keep reaching for my first love in every woman I laid with.
My brother says it’s not a failure to love. It’s about desire.
My thirst, too wild it could gulp the Atlantic ocean.
Lame thing: hard animal softened by the knife that
once killed it. That blue morning, instead of prayer,
I counted the syllables of her shrill laughter.
I am startled by the tingles of her waistbeads. Her small,
rounded mold breast. I have sought God in her chocolate creamed skin,
soft as a baby. Look how I submitted willingly to her holiness.
As if to say, I am the sacrifice before the altar.
I know I’ll remember this innocence splitted like the ram
after Abraham’s knife withdrawal. Lord, you know you
offered us this knife & called it desire. See how much
I have tried not to be sharpened by my first wound.
Believe me, every first desire leaves a home inside
of you to build a more quiet one. There, growing & growing.
There, waiting to split you open again. You have been
there, too, sculpted by this hunger. Ask the trees. Ask yourself.
If you were to reach God. On arrival, His hand brimming
with miracles. What would you give back?
My first girlfriend called today to ask if I would love to meet
her again. How much silence should I give to tell her no?
HOW LOVE HAPPENS
They say it is not love if birds do not flutter in your body,
but I suspect the opposite might be true,
that certainty ruins things, even in love.
Look at the clover plants in my garden. Their helplessness,
even when it rains. How, in the absence of hands,
they too will wilt as if the water is not enough tenderness.
As if the theory of plant & water is disapproved.
It’s the same here, my lover says I’m too distant to love.
It’s true that I am made of stillness.
But isn’t it also true that stillness, too, is a kind of affection?
My friend says I lack affliction. I do not tell him that
my body looks at me the same way a wound
looks at the hand that tends to it. I do not tell him it’s all love.
That not everything about love is a miracle.
Sometimes, even death is enough affection.
It loves a body so much it kills it. I mean look at my brother,
his lifeless body. Isn’t that love, too? I mean,
for God so loved this world, he gave his begotten son.
I suspect the opposite might be true:
for God so loved his begotten son, he took him from this world.
Because great writing shouldn’t be hard to find. Subscribe to get the best reads in your inbox.
