If I wanted to take a little time,
If I wanted to share my inner mind,
If someone said it had to rhyme,
I got no time for that ****…

Paint for me, in your chosen words,
The lines are branches; the letters, birds.
Sing to me songs sublime; absurd,
Just don’t tell me it has to rhyme…

Settle the bitter, ancient scores,
Make the audience seek for more,
Make the shoes I stand in yours,
Do not make me repeat myself…

Write me a letter, I long to hear,
Your poet’s voice in my mental ear,
Till the world does shed a collective tear,

I think I’ve made myself perfectly-  uh…

Clear.

What is poetry
Is that even a question
Poetry!
Marvellous words design in lines
Transform into verses
It gave birth to sonnet
It comes in lyric
Of beautiful rhyme
Serving as rhythm in melody

Poetry, as old as man
Formed  from the Mediaeval times
Down Neoclassical
My dear, it's Romance
Coming from Elizabethan era
Formed a modern movement
Something so beautiful
Beautiful to a fault, it's called poetry

Ask my fathers what poetry means.
To Thomas Watts it's a way of love
Butter Yaests  paths way for activism
Grace gives strength to recommendation
Ojiade fights corruption
Pope graces  Cesar
Osadibe makes appeal
And it a way of life in lines

What is poetry, you ask?
It is a way of redemption
Scribbled down, it's description
A map of direction
Given as recommendation
To a vast way of calculation

Ask a chemist, and he says what on earth is not chemistry
A physician says life is based on assumption
Psychology say man is nature
ichthyologists sees the beautiful aquaculture
A teacher sees the best methodology
Historian gives tells great mythology
Which gives ride to sociology
Yet poetry is nature.  

Bellah

My love is the shape of canine teeth and claw marks
I leave around your neck,
the way I leave poems decaying in an unforgiving landfill —
the gods have turned away in disgust
as I sit and lick, like a rabid dog,
the maggots chipping away from the inside —
the entrails of my grief, all pulled out without mercy,
without a deathbed confession,
without a god to listen.
I long for something else to unfold;
something sacred and beautiful
when you turn my body inside out, but lo.
This is as deep and far as we go.
Tell me, I beseech, does my filth look better inside out,
uncovered, on display,
penetrating your very skin?
Take what you need, love, they are all yours —
my sins, my wounds, my impiety
in exchange for your darkened heart — I’ll spit it out
and swallow it back
down to my underbelly where no one can ever take it —
not you, not the gods, not their fallen, forsaken angels.

Forgive me — forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.
Forgive my unforgiving hands, forgive my unforgiving poems
if our sick, twisted, defilement is all they ever know.

Such a classic mortal blunder to lay
my spine as it erodes, graceless, inelegant
on Galatea’s cold, ivory arms;
such delicate carvings can never be human, look human,
feel human under my lonesome bones.

I long to see you flinch and break
into fine, liquid, rain of dust blinding me,
covering the walls of this room
in a blameless shade of white: a new asylum ward
for my kind of insanity,
you say.
It envelopes like light around my awe
and my forlorn limbs,
tangled with Galatea’s unmoving ones.
I look for comfort within brittle carcasses
scraped of everything they could ever give.

The quiet persists eerily.
But here, Pygmalion’s gifts remain untainted:
the apex of auger shells, the beak of a songbird
the blunted ceriths, the rusty chisels
all impaling my spinal bones.
Yet the sculptor’s kisses, long erased,
the careful carvings, long defaced,
long reduced into a Grecian ruin.
I bury my body on your arms yet they find no rest
against the ghostly pleas of mammalian tusks.

How many for your fingers?
How many for your hair?


Tell me, Galatea, were you carved to bear the weight of
all the sea salt I swallowed as I drowned?
Soften under my meandering thoughts; I long
to see you flinch and break — like all the dead elephants —
any reminder that you yield pliantly to the voice
of the love goddess, that you were once turned human.
Break now, your solid arms, under my own collapse
over the sea foam caught on fire.

I am no longer bending and weeping to pick myself up.
Here it all goes down and ends:
my bones,
and yours,
burning,
snapping.
Nothing —
nothing less glorious will last after us.

— Fray Narte

Find me tearing violets, my love,
in a manic daze; I am running out of softness and daylight,
like winter’s cruel hours


“but I will crown your hair with these torn violet tiaras
and your soft throat, twine with woven garlands”


and I will dig into my tongue for the remaining metaphors
beneath the bourbon, until odes drench my lips,
I will stitch my wounds shut and ready for your apricot kisses —
I ache to be kissed away,
to waste away before your sun-speckled eyes
like a tiny fae in your flower basket, I ache to settle
in your dainty hands,
in lithe fingers lost in my wind-blown hair.


My November, my gentlest love,
how I breathe you in like my grandmother’s letters —
how you consume me
in curious ways
and for the first time, I am not afraid of the softness
buried and warm inside my bone marrows.


Tell me, darling, will you stay?
Will we stay
this time
for more than a kiss?
Will we linger longer
than silhouettes in a dream?

Her eyes are sinkholes in a quiet, sleeping state
and I was a girl, lost and misplaced at twenty-one,
looking for love in infinitesimal spaces:

on her palm creases and chipped, ruby nails,
and in the blown-out ends of her lotus tattoo
I find myself tracing a secret,
at the spiked tips of her hair tamed by fairy lights
and on the slits of her skin — a rabbit hole of wonders,
I always fall like Alice in sworn careful tiptoes
and crash headfirst; a broken wishbone, a tainted wish
some habits you just can't quit.
like —
October and her obsidian eyes, and the sunless ways we kissed —
being lost and misplaced made sense for a while in the detached comfort
of her cold bed, colder hands,
warmth has become an oppression.

But this dalliance has always been a disaster waiting to happen
and I am a paramour, a memory, a face in the crowd
swallowed in a seismic fall —

and losing October has always been a disaster waiting to happen —
this bed, always a site of a losing battle
and I find myself in a soiled, torn dress,
lying helpless on the other side of her war.

Tonight, I light myself a candle;
maybe one day, I'll finally learn to run away from a girl made of disasters

and not towards her.

You still eat away at my chest
like a mole finding its way out of my body.


God, it’s been ten years now since you last wrote me a letter
sealed with a pressed, dead daisy
and a ghostly kiss mark,
yet they’re still dying under my thumb.


These days slip by and I can no longer write you poems,
my dearest, sweet September —
but still, I hope that you have in your chest
all my papercuts from unbridled letters,
all my quiet midnights,
and all of my unwritten words;
they are yours for missing.


Must you leave a girl then, darling,
whose only fault was being one?