Therefore
I allow the darkness recede into me
I – a city of crumbling moons
Of frozen stars.
Every mutilation is a sign
That something is dead
That something is dying

*

Uncertain of my fraying breath
I move to hide in the armpit of a half-blasted poem
Where I am welcomed by the stench of putrefying bodies
Broken into stanzas
Sprawled across every line
Every letter.

*

Somewhere in a song
A boy asks me to look into his dreams and I do
But shocked by a hollow wearing the colour of green and white.
Bearing the name of an unanswered prayer
Shapeshifting into a wolf-nose bullet sniffing the scent of his sleep.

*

To cleanse such sore-sight
I wash my eye with stream water
The way my grandfather used to
Half-way into the ritual
I see him standing at the mouth of a storm
With shrapnels falling from heaven like rain
Dicing his body like onion.

*

Such graphic scene pushes me to problem the miracle of God
It begins where fire ends
Like unsandalled Moses
Like Sodom purified in flames
Truly some things must first burn: peter tasting storm before faith
John the baptist severed into trophy.

*

Adeyemi said heaven is a metaphor
I want to believe that is why I search for rainbows in distant skies
Why in my sleep I feel my body drifting chainless like dry wood atop the same
Ocean that escorted my ancestors to the depth of her belly where
Brutal by brutal burial
They were gnawed by piranhas until they became gods who lived too long in water
Or why when I wake up
I taste the dunes of the desert sand from Dirkou
From Libya
In my mouth.

*

Honestly I do not care if I burn
I do not care if this city burns
I am trying to find my way back into Twitter
Through the desert route of a VPN.

 

Photo by Gideon Hezekiah from Pexels