‘Typical Nigerian Poem, or a Biopic in Which’ & Other Poems

they tell you nothing about my semi-orphaned heart

nor about my mother swearing to her god that the world is ending.

I come out slimy and weak, as though already pronounced guilty

of that innocence that doubles as ignorance.

I grow in reverse. In depth where my friends grow in length.

I long to pray but all gods are too busy to listen.

So I run to my father—a burning metaphor. He touches my head

and asks me to play a game where I pretend the world

is all I want it to be.

This is where it begins. All that laughter you see.

All the calmness

I have created in the image and likeness

of my pretence.

Everything good finds us without asking. We speak bluntness

to the killer’s knife and it listens. We go hungry because we suffer

of too much abundance

and crapulence is a sin now.

My brother tills the ground so hard he gets blisters. He marvels at it,

kisses it and calls it art.

Have you heard of happy endings? I mean, one where you are astonished

by all the fine things we turn out to be.

Well, even in this tiny world of blood and salty sweats, I introduce to you

the newest slave of happiness. The last foster-child of joy.

after James-Ibe Chinaza

And because I start always with the little things,

I do not pray to the fish-loving god

  lording over this watery expanse.

I begin with the tiny agents of my broad wreckage.

I come, a sinking ship that has jettisoned all it holds dear.

Father,

  permutating between ship, captain and jetsam.

Father,

  morning sun alchemized into the bright wires

rippling above this water—old ballerino tripping

  on the slippery floor of absence.

I come seeking evidence of your presence.

  To laugh at the memory of prying your eyes open

to fetch a cup of laughter.

I come seeking my two-year old shoes carried away by the flood.

  seeking the footprints of a stranger I dearly loved.

Father,

  for the ninth time you appear in a song.

You, man on the sidewalk, do not surrender yourself to the cold.

  You, with eyes drenched in silver films,

bless the forbidden tree planted on the border of sight.

  You, lumen mundi; I, foster child of darkness.

I, who have leaped off a page of another woman’s lament.

  a thread of countless splinters blessed with one fire of worry.

Here at this river with multiple deserts underneath it,

  I do not wish to plant a lake in my belly,

nor pour libations to the little gods of destruction

  nestled in the crevices of my village’s heart.

I come with a tattoo of a man bleeding through the right chest,

  asking this river even if once, to cure an issue of blood.

But now, you must pardon me for the dirt I dragged here

  on the soles of my feet.

For not seeing the miracle when the knife takes my countrymen by surprise.

  For not seeing that it was my own failing, trying to make sense of the wreckage.

I do not hope to cruise on your elastic patience, but I come with kola

  to lure you again into that dance. I come with a bag of stories

which you cannot hear because your ears are no longer ears.

  That your friends once mistook gunshot for thunder.

& that a hungry man got filled by eating the yam peels and thrashing the yam.

  There are many things you may never understand about the country

beyond this bush and water.

  I come because I know you are here, because I peered into your grave

and found it empty.

  Father,

  promise me not to be a ghostly fugitive; promise

to be at your grave when I come to meet you next.

Blessed be the little glossiness on our bodies. The sweat and the beauty. The sheets, comforters of the nude, hemmed witnesses of a pleasure so animal-like. Blessed be the god morphing under our hot breaths. Whatever croons on the tracks of your throat. Whatever unclenches at the confluence of my waist. Oh God, can you believe it? That we called your name, but not in prayer. That we saw you, only in the halted train of time, in the hazy limbo where you could be anything. Blessed be the alarm clock, vindicator of the fast man. Only you have known the salty taste of my aggressive hope; as I took my quivering hands to you. Three Minutes. Blessed, the blue of the light bulbs & the beige of the curtains & the bounce of music on my walls. Blessed be Milan Kundera on the window-side table. & the scimitar below my belt. & the small altar in the body where I have found a sanctuary. Beg the spiderwebs to shut their eyes just this once. Beg the fan to rock us gently down the ride. Bless the body waiting while I came. Bless all the thoughts lying stillborn between us. Blessed be the preacher-man’s voice splattered on the junction. Blessed, this room & the boy knocking now to ask for my shoe polish. Blessed be the orange moon on the face of dusk, clearing the road to take my love home.