Orison

I definitely haven’t been in the mood for a story today, collecting my thoughts was a problem.

I haven’t written a poem in a month or so, I miss poetry. It’s the easiest form of writing for me and it gives me the most joy, even when I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…

 

Orison

Pray for me even if you don’t believe 

There’s a god to answer.

For this cup fills me

With anguish & bone crushing dread

And I am yet to take a sip

 

Pray for me, hold my hand if you can.

For this darkness swallows me whole

I can’t breathe

I can’t breathe

I cannot fucking breathe.

 

Pray for me, day and night

Perhaps God would look to you

Maybe your sins are fewer, 

Maybe he knows you still.

Me? He’s forgotten me. 

 

Pray for me for my tongue is gone,

Stolen by the thief of peace.

My words jumble in my head

Desperate for air, 

Dying by the minute. 

 

Pray for me even if you don’t believe

In prayers, or charms forgotten by ancestors. 

Pray for my soul

For the earth wearies me

And I want to die now. 

 

Cracked Wings.

I could have told you little one, that…

Wait my darling, you still are little.

Stop frowning, lest grooves grow on your face.

And while wrinkles show a life well lived.

You don’t want to be the most lived person in the room.

Enough For Today.

In the middle of this kiss, I think for the thousandth time that I love you. the knowledge pops in strange places, it wedges its way in the middle of familiar paths. I don’t know what to do with this love, it twists itself around my belly, it grips my neck and holds my lungs so I breathe only in shallow gasps.

Spent.

They did not tell you, did they? That your staff would wobble and melt at noon and refuse greet the morning sun with an iron core.

I Like…

Odogwu,

I like the wiggle of you under my skin, carving your space in the swirl of cells and blood and bone and white, cold hunks of fat. I like to think I too have a space just inside the dermis, atop the blood pump in the third to sixth intercostal spaces, above the thrusts and rhythms of the life you’ve made for me.

Never.

I bury another Never
Watching it slink into the soil
As I cover it with the sand under the shadow of your face.
I look at the ruins of my fences and defences,
Strong and defiant a week ago,
Crumbled in the earth after you strode in,
Arms akimbo, pockets brimming with keys to secrets,
The secrets I didn’t even know I held.

What Is This?

 

I want to tell you everything, the awesome and the mundane,

To tell you about the ant crawling through the hair on my arm

To whisper about the ache of missing you,

Is this what love is?

Home?

I had always thought of home as a series of addresses.
Houses with keys, my loved ones lugged in their pockets.
Rooms with corners lined with memories.
Favourite books in shelves older than me,
With the scent of camphor and old paper,
Dancing in my nostrils, sparking orgasms in my brain.

Found And Lost.

I miss your name between my lips,
The lilt of it when I am happy,
The rumble when I am angry
The thin whisper when the world sits on me.

Finding the Dream

 

Laying dreams on the table,
Spreading them out to shine or sparkle.
Drawing patterns with bare feet on the sands of paradise
With my mother’s voice in my head,
To tie me to shore despite the calls of the sea.
Carrying the weight of joy and freedom,
Singing as I shed the coil of twos
Dancing as I wear the sheen of threes
Wallet folds its arms
And laughs with twisted mouth
I shut my eyes and tend fragile hopes
And continue to believe
There’s something missing in these pictures.
Me.

Saint John one of the Virgin Islands inconstituent district of the United States Virgin Islands (USVI), an unincorporated territory of the United States. The smallest of the main US islands besides Water Island, Saint John is located about four miles east of Saint Thomas, the location of the territorys capital, Charlotte Amalie.