For Michael Olajumoke

Joys come in measured orders,

and when you arrived from the desert,

I saw the geysers of a stream

in your eye,

carrying a desolation.

Your body is the utopia for a measure of desolation,

because you, a woman

is the lush of a countryside

built from the war.

Your body, an epigram

points in the direction of love

like the torn legs of a war-struck thing

still picking an abode in disarmament.

And in your songs,

if joy were a small thing,

it would be stuck between your sadness.

Source: From the Isolation Issue (September 2020)

a coloured thing,

black coloured as a friday wake-keep,

arch heir of death,

skin lurking as a memory site for the revolt of a republican,

dulling a memory refilled with what he could have been,

becoming a clam to escape its own silence,

where it is exactly hidden

between the stop of mother

before she picks up the next prayer for the government.

but silence is innuendo alright

and she still gives consent[

with her mouth twiddling into a rosary bead,

a relic of grief

searching for the creator’s numen

and then the panther sleeps on an ocean again

in desolation.

Source: From the Isolation Issue (September 2020)

there is familiarity,

a twinkle in our eyes for unknown places

that beg a birdsong to settle

for one of milky eyes or murderous ears.

a chalice or wine.

I don’t think I know the crevices of insanity well,

but it sure looks like a jagged muscle

from a mouth tilted in the position of a rig-saw.

you leave the ninety-nine

and come after my body,

measuring slabs of it with your eyes,

resectioning its tissues with your teeth,

cooking it with spices from the internet.

& then you see

that you have cooked up a ghost.

it’s a white coat carrying rashes,

something you call letters

or a relic of it

that soon becomes songs.

you bathe them in your spittle

and give them a home in photographs

or tie them to a group of wintering bluebirds

and in electronic papers that are all apparitions.

calories wasting & eyes singeing.

you go to the kitchen to search for lost energy,

sleep and dream that I became your neighbour

and woke up to ninety-nine retweets.

Source: From the Isolation Issue (September 2020)