GONE TOO SOON

In my quest for another,
I saw and flung off the
Cracking of a girl
Whose hip is
An immoral doctrine at
Her rare lap,
I saw shinko dudu –
A weird Negro with the face
Of a black Mongoloid,

I mean the uncharitableness of thorny tufts
When children play ducks and
Drakes at unworthy times.
Or when you play second fiddle
With a newly
Knighted lunatic.

And then,
The footstep of a smile is
Missing her way to a lover’s house,
The inquietude of a heart
Fighting violently against herself
She drums her body at home –
The chest of an innocent man.

Ahead
I saw touches, tangles,
The back view of smiles,
A shadow’s transpose swiftly shifted by a new light,
A Sturm und Drang fattening her way to loathing,
An ancient idol is shouting
“My back is being over-chiseled!!!”
——————–

STOP SLAVE TRADE IN LIBYA

I don’t know when the malleable Mediterranean
Became a morgue of freedom,
With this same brine my sea is bodied with tears,

My heart is a brittle stone
Broken by time’s hostility
And its denudation of slavery

I don’t know how it tastes to
Carry Libya on my tongue,
Neither nor Syria nor Iraq,

Or Algeria too cruel and too
Stone-just to isle that arid vastness,
Because whenever I crib Libya on my tongue

I would see myself that night on
Aljazeera news burning bastardly:
Wholly cremated in seconds,
I would find myself in a

Migration that
Verges the chronicles of advanced exiles,
As they wade the woes of worries

Through this ocean of effluvium.
Through terrains erstwhile befogged
With senescent dust-bunnies,
Poisonous cobra lairs,

And cobalt colored desert-tortoise scorning migrants
By dint of totems, a landscape
Versifying migrant’s body into an unsung dirge,

You walk a little, after you’ve started gasping for a crescent moon,
You would get to 150km south of Jamahiriya museum,
Promenaded in Tripoli’s pancreas,

Where the kidneys of Nigerians mated the
Landscape with a mend of un-slender cruelty and slavery,
Where kidneys fall off migrants,
As they wake from a trance of Europe’s wealth

To discover a chain tying them to an orchard’s son,
To discover your language engraved on a crescent cobblestone,
Domiciling some fat epitaphs of an Arab’s ghost.

——————–
Poems © Awogbemila Temitope Ayodeji
Image: Pixabay.com remixed