This generation is the selfie nation,
Taking pictures of the dying, digitization,
This generation is the generic nation,
Cancelling history and subjects, Salvation,
This generation is the death nation,
Being overweight is healthy, becoming purgation,
This generation is the stronger nation,
Deeming everything offensive, becoming manipulation,
This generation is the hateful nation,
Hating the own agnations,
This gerenation is the end nation,
Pushing and pushing, damnation,
This generation is the promoting nation,
Gender Swap, ***, paedophilia, pushing all these, Arbitration.
This genernation is the activism nation,
Save the Earth, making change that still damages the Earth, ruination.
This generation is the we won't do this nation,
Won't go to war to fight for others, pure negation,
This generation is the nation,
The eldery generation regrets fighting for their foundation,
This generation is the Anti-Homosexuality nation,
That still disowns there child for there sexuaility, Affirmation,
This generation who is fighting LGBTQ Rights Nation,
Hating those who refuse to date the same *** hating religion, so **** condamnation.
This generation scream Black Lives Matter Nation,
Reducing Police Brutality, improving lot more crimes, congratulation,
This generation fighting for women right nation,
Taking away male rights, instead of alterations and collaborations.
This generation is the older nation,
Bullying, lies and caring nation, Allocation,
This generation is the end nation,
Death filtration of the world's creation.
This generation buid this nation,
They have to learn to live with the cermation.

Corruption- please go away with your notion
Our mission is to make us a no bribe nation
So far, you made our life miserable and full of suffocation
-Corruption-
have you ever seen our determination?
Now, we are in full of action
And Throw you out with our inner-transformation
-Corruption- Don't dare to enter into our nation

With our good value system and education
We are sure, can stop corruption
Encouragement of Currency-free banking and cashless transaction
Can you dare to come to our imagination?

With vibrant leaders and Vigilance Commission
People have speedy justice and much satisfaction
Corruption, it is our war against your creation

With Community Participation
And having the "Right to Information"
There is fair chance of weeding out the corruption

Again, guard with digitization and automation
Make you dead before germination
With Honesty, truthfulness and against temptations
Certainly, together, make Nigeria a corruption free nation
     Sarcasm
*The fragrance pen

Corruption- please go away with your notion
Our mission is to make us a no bribe nation
So far, you made our life miserable and full of suffocation
-Corruption-
have you ever seen our determination?
Now, we are in full of action
And Throw you out with our inner-transformation
-Corruption- Don't dare to enter into our nation

With our good value system and education
We are sure, can stop corruption
Encouragement of Currency-free banking and cashless transaction
Can you dare to come to our imagination?

With vibrant leaders and Vigilance Commission
People have speedy justice and much satisfaction
Corruption, it is our war against your creation

With Community Participation
And having the "Right to Information"
There is fair chance of weeding out the corruption

Again, guard with digitization and automation
Make you dead before germination
With Honesty, truthfulness and against temptations
Certainly, together, make Nigeria a corruption free nation
Sarcasm
*The fragrance pen

Application of misinformation
Falsify a failed nation,
Eradication of all creation
Misinterpretation
Of representation
Deny the station
Granted by occupation
And the inhalation
Of justification
No prerequisite information
Just accumulation
No moderation,
Their determination
Through stimulation
Cultural *******
Communal degradation
Societal desecration,
Dehumanizing revocation,
Worldly humiliation,
Mortal sterilization
Never achieving mobilization
Lack of communication
Excelling in vile persuasion,
Proponents of procreation
Birthing digitization,
Destroy civilization,
Indications of adoration
Isolation in delineation,
Irrational indexation,
Fluctuating indignation,
No innovation,
Divination
Retaliation,
Immolation,
False ovation,
Lacking limitations,
Contextual intonation,
Divine fabrication,
Private publication,
Evolving fornication,
Give me extermination,
Notwithstanding annexation
Of dismaying oxidation,
Of valued perpetuation,
Global mass-castration,
Redundant rhetoric, dictation,
A donation, a dilation, a fixation,
An annotation of fibrillation,
We are personification
Of Contamination
Through globalization
Praising idolization
And finalization
Through *******,
No pragmatic exoneration,
In all frustration
We see not utilization
Nor stabilization,
Fearful implications
Of wayward stations,
Surplus mutilations,
Seeking militarization
Of worthless nations,
No conservation,
Just excavation
Of the population
******* on education,
Spitting on graduation,
No validation of aspiration,
Indoctrination of baptization
Mitigating litigation,
murdering habitation,
Quelling all vegetation
We will end in radiation
Through faulty navigation,
Abdication and abnegation,
All worldly agitation
Leads us to expiration,
Self-made annihilation.
There was never an end in sight,
We’re lost, and hope is a lie.

i love new cds
the crinkle of sliding
plastic wrap off
how it feels to remove
the security label
in two tries or less

to see my eyes on
the backs of songs
crystal clear and
iridescent

(too new to be vintage
too old to be cool)

how smooth a brand
new jewel case feels
and a booklet before
fingerprints

but then again i love
finding them secondhand
a little smeared and
pages crinkled

how a brand new
album is a blank
slate for me to write
my memories on
and when the plastic
cracks and the music
plays on it all just proves
that together we lived

(hoping and praying we didn't get
scratched to the point of no return)

i was born in
the fall of a fleeting
shimmering silver age
the hybrid time
between analogue
for the common man
and digitization
of the masses

my childhood
when these things
were still fragile
expensive
slipping into
adulthood and
falling into
feeling obsolete

*(i am the last remaining
child of the compact disc)

this summer, the first of its kind, has been a very difficult one. I’m not unique in my anxiety for having the comfortable, intricate, beautifulinspiringwonderful rug I’ve come to love so deeply over the course of this chapter of my life ripped out from under me, but I think I’ve felt the pull particularly strongly. I’ve also lost quite a few people that I loved and love, in varying degrees and to various uncontrollable forces—first distance, then ungenerous and unforgiving illness, then irreconcilable differences of bagel topping and dog breed preferences. my world has been even more transient and transitory than usual, weekends punctuated by drives from my old home to my old home, neither of which I feel like I particularly belong to anymore. my weeks taken up first by a job clouded with exhaustion and headstrong disinterest, then by nothing at all, now by a conflict of interest—a place I love inside a place where I never wanted to land.

on the nights when I’ve fallen asleep, dreams of crying parents and misfiring deadbolts have awakened me, and those nights have been difficult to come by. I’ve felt the ennui brought on by the inescapable digitization of the world and the awareness that I’m not smart enough to be above it. that I’m not smart enough to even properly love the poetry that I love, to speak the language that I thought I knew, or to use the temperamental dishwasher in my own house. I’ve buried my misgivings about myself in lamentations that my friends have been scattered to different cities, so they can’t prop me up anymore.

I’ve shared pieces of myself with people more nakedly than ever before and with much higher stakes, and though I regret precisely zero of those risks, I’m learning it’s true that the harder you fall, the harder you’ll fall, and the latter isn’t something I’m yet accustomed to allowing for myself.

I haven’t yet accepted the death of a presence in my life that has been so large and multifaceted throughout, constantly reminded when the GPS winds me through the churchyard where she officially is now and when I pass her picture on my kitchen counter and when I keep on loving her wonderful family. when I remember that she’s the reason I had these phenomenal four years in this phenomenal place, and the reason I’m for now sitting comfortably in a job that I love.

and I haven’t yet accepted this transition into having so little control, so little trajectory. it’s a big life. this summer, as I said, has been very difficult.

but august, in time, will fade into september, and when it does I can say “last summer was very difficult." and I can remember how to stand up straight and that there’s a reason I have those city-scattered friends in the first place. and I can figure out that the lesson I learned is that risking a fall makes for a strictly irreplaceable, exquisite six month repose—not just a bruise—and maybe a new city-scattered friend. and that the death doesn’t erase the radiance of the life. and that distance is sometimes bridgeable, and that figuring out where to be takes a little time, and that nightmares aren’t there during the day, and that everything is, little by little, sometimes, usually, always all right.

The serene people whose ease of manner
once made him yearn and confabulate
are laughable cartoonish and piteous now
could have been much worse he said
as his last breath left his scarred throat
feral hand closing his own eyes
St. Pudenda greeted him at the tall gates
under the lights at Checkpoint Charlie
Mariachi trumpets rolled out the mauve carpet
and a dog barked from behind the garbage bins
from all infinity we end up with this
a realm of syntax governed by ambiguity
she read from a large ledger atop a marble pedestal
why a ledger rather than a laptop is anyone's guess
apparently the vanguard party had been evicted
by Frankie Boxcars and the Hollywood mafia
many clouded eons ago in the great schism
over the digitization of paradise
no jury of his peers he noted with unease
nothing of telling import she imparted casually
eyes darting up and down the pages
as if something previously detected
had been airbrushed from history
arrested for self amplification she went on
and sorcery and coughing in quiet places
getting enough sleep she asked with a beaming smile
I don't know I was asleep he intoned
I suppose we can reveal the joke she mused
but I WAS dreaming he countered
backed into a tight corner by snarling lap dogs
tossed into a kidnap taxi with a sack over my head
marched with a gun in my back
through a forest of clichés
fed lines from a hideous new sitcom
about *** among the homeless
a weekly broadcast on the Piñata Vision Network
but what choice did I have knowing what I know
poor dear thing she continued
there is a better version of everything
a law of nature completely natural
and yes it is densely beautiful and
smoldering with awe like a corpse in the bathtub
try to avoid the truly grotesque
in favor of the marginally grotesque
we love having you in our science department
with the state secrets and ****** **** videos
masquerading as the way things actually are
where the misty cows moo in contentment
and the Vaseline runs hot behind sanctuary doors
horrors altering the course of suns
between the here and the there
every bit of it needless she giggled

From "Engine of Didactic Beauty" available on Amazon

The serene people whose ease of manner
once made him yearn and confabulate
are laughable cartoonish and piteous now
could have been much worse he said
as his last breath left his scarred throat
feral hand closing his own eyes
St. Pudenda greeted him at the tall gates
under the lights at Checkpoint Charlie
Mariachi trumpets rolled out the mauve carpet
and a dog barked from behind the garbage bins
from all infinity we end up with this
a realm of syntax governed by ambiguity
she read from a large ledger atop a marble pedestal
why a ledger rather than a laptop is anyone's guess
apparently the vanguard party had been evicted
by Frankie Boxcars and the Hollywood mafia
many clouded eons ago in the great schism
over the digitization of paradise
no jury of his peers he noted with unease
nothing of telling import she imparted casually
eyes darting up and down the pages
as if something previously detected
had been airbrushed from history
arrested for self amplification she went on
and sorcery and coughing in quiet places
getting enough sleep she asked with a beaming smile
I don't know I was asleep he intoned
I suppose we can reveal the joke she mused
but I WAS dreaming he countered
backed into a tight corner by snarling lap dogs
tossed into a kidnap taxi with a sack over my head
marched with a gun in my back
through a forest of clichés
fed lines from a hideous new sitcom
about *** among the homeless
a weekly broadcast on the Piñata Vision Network
but what choice did I have knowing what I know
poor dear thing she continued
there is a better version of everything
a law of nature completely natural
and yes it is densely beautiful and
smoldering with awe like a corpse in the bathtub
try to avoid the truly grotesque
in favor of the marginally grotesque
we love having you in our science department
with the state secrets and ****** **** videos
masquerading as the way things actually are
where the misty cows moo in contentment
and the Vaseline runs hot behind sanctuary doors
horrors altering the course of suns
between the here and the there
every bit of it needless she giggled

From "Engine of Didactic Beauty" available on Amazon