"squalled" poems
And I solemnly swear
on the chill of secrecy
that I know you not, this room never,
the swollen dress I wear,
nor the anonymous spoons that free me,
nor this calendar nor the pulse we pare and cover.
For all these present,
before that wandering ghost,
that yellow moth of my summer bed,
I say: this small event
is not. So I prepare, am dosed
in ether and will not cry what stays unsaid.
I was brown with August,
the clapping waves at my thighs
and a storm riding into the cove. We swam
while the others beached and burst
for their boarded huts, their hale cries
shouting back to us and the hollow slam
of the dory against the float.
Black arms of thunder strapped
upon us, squalled out, we breathed in rain
and stroked past the boat.
We thrashed for shore as if we were trapped
in green and that suddenly inadequate stain
of lightning belling around
our skin. Bodies in air
we raced for the empty lobsterman-shack.
It was yellow inside, the sound
of the underwing of the sun. I swear,
I most solemnly swear, on all the bric-a-brac
of summer loves, I know
you not.
1.9k
Water of remembrance sprinkled
On the mountain crest of recollection.
Indulgent mussy memory catapulted
Stones of retentiveness into the
Courtyard of events like bricole
Of battles.
Pendulum of reminiscences swinging
On oscillating milage of roads like
Trotting horse with drippage of sweat
And itching foots.
Ghost of reminiscences restlessly
Roaming with carriage of yesteryear.
Final year educatees required
Boardinghouse,
But list of items engorged dear
Mother's treasury
"where do l raise money
to buy oyinbo mattress, Ilori?"
Mind pullulated with weariness.
Intonation of worries.
Cantillation of wants.
Deficiency of measured means.
Oyinbo mattress beyond ladder
Of reach.
Gluttonously waiting to devour
Lesser items,
But rays of compulsion unslammed
The gate of respite.
Lordly arrival warmly welcomed by
The dorm room's porter,
Walking majestically to the bed-space
With the acquired cotton wool and raffia leaves mattress.
Gamut of items passed through the eagle's eyes of the housemaster.
Silver painted pail donated by a neighbour passed through the sentry of inspection,
And got its admission.
Mother's used cloak turned bedsheets
Passed through the rigorous scrutiny.
Newly built portmanteau unlocked and neatly dissected, item by item.
Agazed eyes focused on the cotton wool and raffia leaves hand-made mattress.
Expectations rattled mumbling astonishment.
Legs stuck in the mud of mystification.
Telepathic dews covered ocean of thought.
Tranquil silence engulfed vicinity,
Deflating the balloon of hope like a litigant awaiting verdict from the jurist's chambers.
Porter's gesticulating gesture connoted nothingness of demeaning disapproval, perambulating on the hilly terrain of approval.
Akimbo stood l.
Now the verdict!
Molten volcanic magisterial command erupted in a gestapo gesture,
Spudding out from the barytone's baritone voice from the selfsame housemaster,
From the bastion of authority,
And the house generalissimo like a wild brant squalled, matter-of-factly,
"we do not accept bed bugs cotton wool and raffia leaves hand-made mattress here".
Entreaties collapsed.
Jan 11, 2019
Jan 11, 2019 at 1:30 AM UTC
Air left to
rust when we speak
it now is the time
to postpone
gladly over a shining,
retaliatory absence
in search of a space
to shape a volatile figure
that was
a bridge
how, humming our steps
a valedictory
making staccato.
hurry before it catches
us mid-flow, profuse
with sustained harbors
but they cannot
see us here when they slit
us from our canvas, how?
all that radiates
expels us out of this
when no more; absorbed their
breaths boldly stuck inside
a body: a cage: a meeting: an encounter
a path dollies in perfect capture
frame by frame almost an ellipsis
the world tonight blackened
a gutter squalled by an unseen figure
darting across, eviscerating
the bargain: that in-between produced vastness.
Jun 1, 2016
Jun 1, 2016 at 4:12 AM UTC
We have now become this bleached wall exposed
to graffiti; you and I, lost in a vector dwindling somewhere
between flight and ground-woven footing.
Like only such delicate secret opens to tongued up
and thighed upon space – only nightscapes the air dares elope with,
but isn’t that what absence hands over, a roughed up winding
moonlight suspended in crunched ether, or something else
that bade sibilance of speech rammed in preterit?
A blossoming descends in Maytime, besmirched with dreams
collapsing on obelisks. The moment in which I thought you
to be devouring space, nurturing a whelm of heat squalled and
intent, fanning a spleen of intimation, riveting a conflagration.
Else it was before, sulking in the finagling quiet: truths hauled
out and carved to foists,
much room it was to differ a voice and fragment message,
staring at this world the first time and the last – all at once
in that rampaging instance, the rest of the world pinned down
before me.
Feb 3, 2016
Feb 3, 2016 at 12:25 PM UTC
Before there was a field,
filled with fragrant, though strange,
flowers, stretching on forever.
It was in this place, this bastion
at the end or the beginning of
eternity that I found you the first time.
Splayed, as you often are, against the
grasses, eyes watching the clouds as they
find their way across a lazy sky.
You with your impossible answers to
serious questions. You and your
******* riddles.
There is only this room now.
It is squat, squalled, musty in now
familiar ways. It is piece of mercy,
in an ocean of hell.
Beyond these flimsy four walls
lays entropy, the end of all things.
A nothingness of another kind, like
I'd never known before, and hopefully
will never know again.
There are no windows in my room,
for that is how I have come to think of it,
as my room. Yet even windowless I can
still stare into the vast emptiness it is wrapped
up in. I can see the frightful void.
I know what lurks just behind the horrible
safety of my walls.
I scream into the void, if only to
keep my sanity.
You put me here. You wanted me here.
It was through your machinations,
devious and brilliant as they are,
that I find myself facing this nothing.
This was all just one more of your
self-serving, stupid ******* riddles.
And I, ever the pragmatist, ever the
logical counterpoint,
I played into it.
I thought we were so clever, to put
these symbols on our faces.
To shout to the world that this, not
the weak beings we used to be, but
these powerful, noble creatures.
This is who we are.
But I didn't pick the symbols.
They were always there.
You expected them to be.
You counted on my arrogance.
Oh, but you know me so well.
Aug 12, 2010
Aug 12, 2010 at 8:48 PM UTC