A Camera for Our Future
Now, this world has turned to my past,
a field of dry grass, snow inside my house,
like cups of peppermint tea, overflowing,
and my future arrived without a gloss,
I have thrown the gauntlet to go away
to places where my past has no bearing on me.
I hate Saturdays; they remind me of today.
My life evaporated before me like a balloon,
or bubbles of milk exposed to the rays of the sun,
I wish I were the River Thames or the Niger,
flowing to my future without my past debris.
I came across a camera on my way to the future,
after my heart broke into a million pieces,
and I died a thousand times without resurrection.
Armed with a camera with a trillion lenses,
I stepped out on the river ridges of my town,
forlorn. My shadow is skirting the bushes.
I swallowed a needle, but I’m still alive.
My mouth tasted of ammonia, a dead snail.
The past is like grass, unbending to the storm.
My camera takes pictures of my future,
a thousand rivers of peppermint tea,
stars building mountains inside me, dumping
within me, hills of failures, like dunes of sand,
and this desert within me is like a river,
where I sit on the margin of a palm leaf,
rolling my eyes side to side, north to south.
The moon rises with rays like rain in the west,
and the sun sets like the moon in the east,
when it’s not their destiny to keep to seasons,
because there’s no winter, summer, autumn, or spring.
Snow falls when the heat is on the horizon in the sky,
and melts when the cold returns like a humble cat,
meowing into its secret lair to spend the night,
and wraps in silence at the threshold of an hour.
Time oozes timelessness and standstill; landscapes
of angst holding up a mirror to one another,
there is normalcy in every repetition,
a knife stabs the chest of surprise in cold murder,
like the lips of the future miming my rejected past.
The seconds are stumped, the minutes are deaf
and the hours are like the tide paralysed by a wave,
none of them makes a way where there’s no movement.
It’s in my future that I become the storm,
arriving so cool at the scene of a stabbing with knives
following my shadow through the gleaming fields,
driving rains crazy and darkness under the ground,
to places where light is the next thing to the night.
Grief will lose its name and sharp edges in the future,
where sorrow and despair will have flowered followers,
since the bitterness of the moon is the sweetness of stars,
and there’s nothing but what is common to time.
For all my troubles, I shall inherit the scenic camera,
that makes my ordinary life a firefly of nightmares,
like rivers of peppermint tea, in stormy teacups.
She Died Smiling at Me
I stood on the dark side of her face,
it must be the sun that kissed the rose
so hard it wrinkled and shrivelled,
folded into its veins and bloodlines,
and the wind arrived with a paper
where it wrapped the dead flower
like a dinner bundle.
All through the years, the sickness
raged like an angry wave, a cobra,
a wasp creeping into her tissues,
into her skin, her blood and nerves,
snarling without forgiveness, with ire,
biting her body like jealous insects,
leaving her weaker than a dead leaf.
Her body was burning like dry leaves
set ablaze by a grinning arsonist.
Her mother had assured her of eternity,
after the disease had eaten her up
and there was nothing left to bury
except a bag of bones to throw at the sky,
and since her mother was right after all,
she had no reason for her tears to swell the river,
like high tide, the earth rising to meet the sky,
for mountains joining hands to fight the moon.
Before her body closed like a red book,
or a door slammed shut by the whirlwind,
she was a leaf closing to the evening star,
with the last dim ray of sun burning at me
like a dry straw fluttering with fire at night.
Speaking Ill of the Dead
A Halloween Poem
I heard voices echo like gunshots;
trees and darkness formed the wall,
and all around us were shadows whispering.
Perhaps I was the only one who heard them,
others behaved as if nothing had happened,
the way they carried on dancing, running around,
skirting the market, muttering some jargon.
What were they saying?
Why was I still using my senses, not losing them?
That’s what my eldest sister told me earlier.
During the service, you will lose your senses.
I wanted to know, then she said,
You will be glamorously hysterical, overwhelmed,
glamorously foolish before the tree.
I was like those who dreamt of dancing with spirits,
when the service began, and voices rose from the tree,
I saw my mother close her eyes.
I turned to stare at her, Don’t speak ill of the dead.
Her voice was dark. I shuddered;
she, too, was possessed of the service.
I wondered if she was glamorously foolish.
Night birds fluttered, wings zoomed in and out,
the squeaking and shrieking increased,
my mother said they were owls.
I urinated in my blue pants. Owls were ghosts.
My sister said that the dead joined the party,
when the spirit possessed the dancers.
They appeared as owls or bats.
I saw them, the one-armed, one-eyed,
and one-legged in gymnastic tension.
I turned to stare at my mother again,
Don’t speak ill of the dead.
When did I speak ill of the dead?
When did silence become speech in my mother’s world?
I turned to the sky, black, ashen like rain,
the thickness of pregnancy, a huge pot on a tripod,
as though the clouds were a gathering of ghosts.
The iroko and uha trees gaped from the sides,
and the market was a bustle of revelry and wonder,
I dare not speak ill of the dead.
After/Thought Literary 