Post slumber
Nothing changes when I reopen my eyes
Your smile and gait
Same puzzle piece reverie coming together
Like coarse bark and smooth leaves of walnut trees
Or your articulation and my weak knees.
Even when the road ceases
Let my affection not be a sojourn of the mind
But an embraced destination, instead.


Ifeanyi N. Okoro II - © 2018

Instead of stones and hands,
We're throwing out hearts and hiding our emotions
Guilty in how we communicate
A message here
A chance visit there

Time lapping us on the track of our busy lives
Lapses when we don't act on our arrested desires
Or is that still such a sin only Satan so-call sells?

Cuffed,
read rights that announce what it should feel as wrong
Without passages, psalms, proverbs, and palm wine,
Both sacrilegious and unlawful to speak against our wants,
As if there's a separation of holy institution and national regions

In truth,
Lawless, this thing called love is!
It breaks and shatters everything
Steals your thoughts
Vandalizes your ears with the whispering words
Written and etched on its drums.
And here we are
Imprisoned as it taunts us outside the bars.

It wants to be caught.
And I, with you.
Or is it that
It temps us to attempt to flee with it?

Where?

If we break free and escape,
Adoration is how far?




Ifeanyichuku N. Okoro II © 2023

(For A.K.)

With her aesthetic psalms carved in this skin of mine
Readily healed with the balm she speaks
I gather courage to fight back my wanting desire
To see her again
When she leaves
I reopen the wounds
To revive pleasurable painful memories
Of her sharp beauty
Cutting deep.
Laughter, tearing through me like
Confetti on her personal new year
Her dancing is confection
Her smile, even sweeter
She doesn't age, she turn the page.
I can no longer conceal or restrict my praise
After all, it is her I worship on her holiday.
-
Ifeanyi N. Okoro II © 2018

How fertile your smile
How futile my defenses
It gave birth to peaceful, dead silence
In a universe of animated cacophony and stubbornness
As we track the movement of the stars
Gliding across terra firma, fervently
When flesh of the palms ascend to join
No lie survives
Once both hearts have submerged
Into
In two places
Between desire and the depth of the Caspian.

In between twin flame frames
Where our passionate, intimate orations' tempests
Stir our souls' embers to rising temperatures
Tempting a Titan high to fight the Gods.

I pray to the four corners of this domain
That if I can't hold on to forever
That you'd consider changing your name to "This Moment".
With permission, I'd gladly embrace your present presence.
-
Ifeanyi N. Okoro II © 2018

As the world turns carousel-style
This smile you've left me caused my dizzy spell
I've tried to smear it on my shirt
So it would become impossible to get out
Mess up my whites
Stain through to my soul
Make my half wants whole

What I loved about our movements together
Was the fact that our bodies knew the rhythm
Before the track played
As the lights splayed onto your shoulders
Cheeks aflame
Air
Thick like your locks 35 minutes past 5 o'clock
Tumbling, similar to my weakening defenses
At that moment, it wasn't even Capoeira
But how could one protect their face
From such striking beauty?

Persian pearls penetrating my mind
Your eyes fight fires and ignite desire
That night, I would've been just fine
Dying on sight
Trying to hold a dancing dream at midnight.


Ifeanyi N. Okoro II © 2.6.18

With this rain
I thee wed
Wet with aspirations
Downpour so thick upon the earth
It gives birth to creative hearts
Cutting and pasting promises broken in slips once notes passed in class
Now we prostrate
Gazing at glass dimensions
Daydreaming into moistened, nighttime-hued skies
Minutes from dusk
Consuming droplets like office coffee
Casually unfurling our tongues to catch a drip
Hoping to taste what it was like to be cooled down from old flames

This moonlight be the ring
Placed on the lace around your neck
Because your fingers don't need full metal jackets
With rocks like tax brackets
Besides, you're busy tracing our names encased in a heart in the stars
When the night crashes, and Venus visits Mars

But what does a wistful wanderer know?
Even as you depart
I'm trying to contain remnants of the zephyrs of your breath in mason jars like fireflies
As you call down for scattered heavy showers to follow your tempest trail left
Bathing in the heat of the night
Where there's trouble, wall-to-wall
Like Southern Mississippi or
Southeast Asia
Melodies of a river's croon or monsoon's boom, seasonally sweeping
Soaking my head
All of my worries are dead

I walk to your altar
In awe of your flora in the field of beauty
Amongst the springtime shadow of space
And swollen clouds
Receiving
Opening the heavens to sprinkle this bouquet

My poem, the precipitation
You request, I quench.
-
Ifeanyi N. Okoro II © 2018

There were stars in the gaseous garden
Not your everyday botanical brilliance boasting beauty
Just a set of eyes like fauna
Wandering and wondering
Growing fond of the fragrance of flora
Foreign ideas to think they wouldn't devour them

On Nimbus nights
I, a wayward raindrop from the clouds of descending souls, wish to be sweet to the tongue I plunge to
Like water for hot cocoa
One brings to a boiling roll
What can simmer this will in the hot seats like pots be
On burners

We all burn for attention
And, in another dimension,
We quench the thirst of both flora and fauna
Sacrificing for beauty and beasts
As rain would maintain peace on unearthed surfaces on fire

Maybe this outspoken raindrop is really a seed, planting and plotting to promote growth in spirits
The trickle down on panes when hearts don't quite hear it
Or eyes overlook
Or when roses won't rise
Maybe those stars will guide?

Maybe fauna don't really realize its worth is reciprocal
Why poems put pride in places so pitiful
That its readers are forced to intervene

Maybe raindrops trapped on door screens are living their dream

The garden twinkles and shimmers, moves and remains
This sky so black
Its fruit so trained
Even as it dips, tightens its belt, and occasionally falls
It's answering wishes from wistful droplets
Like myself.

And, like these gaseous gems...
Sometimes we fall for certain beings we feel are just as celestial.


Ifeanyi N. Okoro II © 2021