two bodies sitting on sand in a map that doesn’t die .        -Romeo Oriogun

(i)

This is probably how the story begins for other people:

a glance, two stares, one date, a half-kiss where someone

mistakenly tongues the other’s nostril.

They could have been running late on the same bus

& found the conductor’s sloth irritating.

They could have been sitting across each other in a nightclub

shrouded in the silence of owls and none of their wisdom,

sipping vodka & drawing stick figures on misted beer glasses,

whorls of smoke dancing in and out

of them like the aftermath of gunfire.

But ours did not begin in any of those ways;

we lacked the wisdom of owls alright

I had some of their silence, you hadn’t

& neither of us smoked cigarettes in praise of war.

I don’t quite remember how it began but

our eyes calligraphed lyrics of rain the first time:

drench me.

(ii)

To be in love is to be a body on fire

stumbling around in its search for a river’s path;

a path to God’s undying eye to drink some of his tears.

To be in love is to be a radio with broken knobs;

wailing without control, without fear,

without throttlehold, with all the memories of lost piety.

So when we face each other like clapping hands

& pop pomegranates into each other’s mouths,

I think about things like this:

bodies on fire

//b  r  o  k  e  n//

radios blaring a medley of Hip-hop & Afrobeat.

It could have been RnB, trap or reggae

breaking a body into water//into waves coiled like music notes;

perpetual inquisitions of love reside in the love singer’s throat

like condom packets in a cheating husband’s pocket,

Jimmy Ruffin asks a generation what becomes of the broken-hearted,

Bob Marley tosses his locked head & haunts a world with his words:

Is this love    Is this love    Is this love   

My skull takes the flow of lyrics like amphora taking new wine:

say wince, say grimace, say loss, say equilibrium

say owl before an explosion of headlights

(iii.)

Somewhere in the middle of the story;

a middle so long the remaining pages are the first & the last,

we are bumping along a road riddled with potholes

one hand on the wheel & another in softer places.

This one has several versions but it is still different facets of the same diamond:

Independence Layout, Allen Avenue

& some street without a name on Victoria Island.

I think we celebrate love the way we behold the sea:

watch it for an eternity//watch it come//watch it ebb,

watch it dissolve all the sandcastles into shame,

then we lose our awe of it, dig our feet into sand

& look for shells.

Which will be the first day of The Apocalypse,

because the end of something

always means the beginning of everything else;

the mother will be at the kitchen counter chopping onions

and rubbing her watery eyes with the back of her hand.

The father will be in the front yard revving the car

and listening for sounds.

The daughter will be in her room reading letters

from a boy who loves her too much

to tell her without saying it through dead trees.

It is the end of the world, the dead are all astir and love is still alive.

The son. The son will falter home, gibbering : father, mother.

The dog will see and bound towards him.

He will come up to the front porch.

The flowers from his grave now in his hands.

They will all board up themselves inside the house.

He will beat at the door with bloodied hands.

They will shiver at his every growl.

It is the end of the world, the dead are all astir and love is still alive.

I’m not scared

I’m not scared of the dark/ of the dark

.     -Lil Wayne

say it thrice for reassurance

to let it know it belongs to your hands

and not the store window of desire

that is how my mother taught me

to speak nothingness into being

no, this is not numerology; fuck

the ancient Babylonians really,

or was it the Persians? the Phoenicians?

fuck. fuck. fuck. say it three times

speak the wind into a woman wrapped

in kente, cornrows running

from forehead to the nape of her neck

goad a pool of something not water

into giving you something not your

face, or your father’s father’s father’s face

speak your lover into a beast that

swallows your heart and spits it

into your hands if you ask nicely

yes I told you of a man I used to know. he received news of his mother’s

death, he did a little dance and said: the earth never dies, it can only lose

what makes waxmallows bloom; so my mother is not dead. two hundred

hoes and two hundred cutlasses conspired against the hill, yet the hill

stands; so my mother still lives. when an angler finds iyemoja upon his hook,

he lets her squamous body into the water slowly, he lets the maiden of the

sea gently into the sea’s open mouth; let death ease my mother into life’s

calloused hands. when I last saw that man, he had written the last dirge.

now, the words break into cloudlets of grief and float from his reach.

in shielding my tongue

I tuck it deep into the recesses of my mouth

into the history masquerading with my body

into my grandmother’s story of yesterday,

before she looked away as vultures

gorged themselves on the eyes of the dead,

before she clamped a palm on my uncle’s wailing, infant mouth

as the enemy crunched dried leaves underboot,

before she said child, forget

these things, no one talks about them anymore

before I saw her tuck the flag of a lost country

between her breasts

in shielding my tongue, I do not speak

of anything left on the altar of grief

leave the priest be to do his work. hang

around long enough and see yourself caught

in a thicket on the mountain ledge

hang around long enough and see heaven

fissure into a mouth that pulls the knife

away from the trachea of the son to your horned head.

you want to be something for which a killing is made/awaiting the strain

of fire’s rhapsody to leap on a bound body/something for whom heaven breaks/

open to reveal a storm-filled orifice/but sorry, you cannot be the son/you want to open your body into melody/no you are not the fire/did you gather all the dense

stony parts/of your desire into a pile/did you heap/upon it/everything in you whose brittleness dreams of breaking/no, you are not allowed to be the altar either/

you are that on whose head/the priest places his hands as a/prelude to exorcism/

to expelling/your knees taste dust and he sprinkles holy water on your head/

some of it falls on your tongue/and like night/kowtowing/at the feet of daybreak/

you come into the knowledge of why Christ/clasped his hands in prayer thrice/

upon seeing/visions of blood in his chalice/before a kiss led him into the innards of night/amidst

flaming torches/and glinting spear points