there are doors i will never unbolt again,
+++++i mean, puberty has heralded my wrist with

bean like calluses & every day my soul falters like
+++++a wretched hand on a walking rod.

discipline has become a soothing mantra,
+++++a boy sauntering through thorny shrubbery,

teaching himself to assuage his thirst with
+++++drought, with numbing dry bones of

self-control. my lust, cowed into a chamber
+++++fettered with a paradigm of locks

& i, an island sifting from the
+++++geography of freedom, simmering

into a Calvary dispersed with broken appendages.
+++++my lips, a corn stalk husked with silent dirges.

———–

Supplicating

every time I think to start my fajr
+++++with a canticle of Psalms rather than

peel the ears of my god
+++++with the scalpel of my serrating supplications,

i fall like an aphthong out of a phoneme.

say, it is impossible to vowel
+++++the ululation of a hymn
on a blistering tongue?

+++++i beseech, how do we wear wounds
& call them beautiful sunspots of the

Lord’s presence with us?

+++++there are nights my body becomes a candle whisked by the wind
& constantly, the mind is tormented

with thoughts of oblivion. thoughts of
+++++fluttering like a white fly into dust. into nothingness.
into echoes of silence receding down

a gorge. into a being incapable of supplication
+++++or yammering. into a being that is not
+++++a being.
———–

Grayscale

On this night, you are a window & the tiny fissures of the sky
+++++peep through your translucent skin onto a kaleidoscope

of broken mirages. A beam of dark matter lightens within you
+++++traversing through silky strings of networked veins, & black

halos eject grayscale spectra onto the color of your blood. You feign
+++++masculinity & remain poised like a moulting arthropod relishing

the acculturation of a tawny ecdysis. Flighting rays of dark hue lap
+++++your eye sockets with candlewax, surreptitiously desquamating your sight

with a native blindness, till you are plunged into an abyss, shutting you behind
+++++venetian blinds forever.

———–
Poems © Adesiyan Oluwapelumi
Image: Rudy/Peter Skitterians Pixabay remixed