Time cuts me down like a clipped coin
and I’m no longer sufficient unto myself.
— Osip Mandelstam

Cloud horses cross sun
Think great death
of fireflies

Sit on cracked stoop counting deaths
Tinnulus tinnitus
Know gods
aren’t meant to be
weightless
Alcuin of York found it easier
loving beautiful creatures
sweet
scents & lovely sounds

Here decades like days
Trudge fulvid
streets rustracked & full
Full of submerged laughter. Full
of plaintive emote & fever
struck
Trudge wasted
land trying
to domesticate terror. Past
tiled graves
Kaleidoscopic
peanut sachets drape shop door
Algae rash buildings
Stacked tires like altars
Vulcanizer sibilant
Graceful uplift of old
moniepoint woman’s bleached hands
Past grey
structures ringed with low electricity
Bulb filament afterimage
Brimming potholes
Keke drivers on shaky
benches downing bitters
waiting to start
dented soles digging loam
Fate loams
Light in things
trudge plumed streets
past girls with crowns
of umber blom blom
POP pilasters strow reaned roadside
Lolling kines reek
DON’T URINATE HERE & fading
Schengen visa flyers. Men
on brown horses flanks sunken
Pentecostal
P.R. in boot of Toyota
colour of orange seeds
promising
VENGEANCE & FIRE against spiritual enemies, even family
They drive past beggars
Jesu
June sun
beam wet sand & Ajase man
with puce opa eyin herbal in clear bag
locking gaze
looku looku
gaping movement    curl
of cut life
& street ripple
elegiacs of convex pattern
& placed
in flame
of love & sun
glazed mirth
fun tiwa n tiwa
Eweso o dede ule!
Pray hundred flowers sprig ruins of Aso-Rock

We Nature’s
witness & ache
to sing cellular as forest full
To know own form
as unknowing fauna, flora
See people like trees walking
To see gods hear Nature
gods older
than names
they lost
aliud, aliud valde
& echoing in hydathodes of tendrils
Victorines of 12th century reading creation like open field poem
Control society muffling immanent song
“If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die”
Haunt of song  fear
How to sing
with hate
heart
hearth void
Want singe numb
Postexpectant arrhythmic bodysound
Sounding
to root
to subsist
in land of sapa grimace
in land of man-damned
Sound

We arrive at certain sounds
symphonies, textures of gesture
& bloom
between
pain & veridical knots
& like Mahmoud Darwish & smell of coffee
against backdrop of 1982 siege of Beirut
all strapped
with cope
Emintemi — joy of masticating
pomo alata sue sue
inside fav buka
Sagging ceiling splotches like medieval maps
Rusting tables papered with gift wrap
Jekin da Trophy tutu sara jor
Superject eating supaghetti & tinko
Old Premiership highlights on telly
watching Thierry “Igwe” Henry glide compact Highbury
Buka unlike a Hopper, intensely populated
with the co(s)mically isolated
no matter gradation of naira
Photogenic phobogenic object
Take off glasses  chow steaming swallow
& figures smudge
in. Wetin dey
endure in wavering
singeing home from house

Mama mi
has been
shaking my hand
objecting to prostration
“Shey boshen gbowo nidile baba e niyen”
when I baffle
Eyebrows dance
when she chew
gorimapa
after shaving chalky head
full of muddy past & echoing
waning days
We hell together, |separately
on this mound of plastic
& we sit here laughing & crying & having
not
much in common
but everything unprethinkable
She grew in time
of Àjàlá The Traveller & now
sees me on her palm
Thou art thy mother’s glass
In old Athens table crumbs belonged to the dead
So our table talk
sentential libation
for him to never roil,
to never sing
baami owon
Omo imale afele ja
Our shadow

Riven sky, pewter
Wind from where
Trudge past
shadows
of death & fear
evil
Clad in flensing pleats
Pass beyond forms
Flaneur if not dead-on arrival besieged
Veins route head
Map of Ikorodu like Polynesian godhead
Efo odu lo ro debi o, they say of early settlers
who deaved neath shadows of deities
Cross narrow
streets availing pent
anger on encroaching marwas & cars —
fluvial ground beveled. Grass
pale green inside asphalt
Sheened roadkill           armoured millipedes
Frog jump elephant grass to eye shape puddle
Heavy leaved plantain shade snails
& dogs    lean, busy
yawning
fear
Son of Man, be
ephemeral as budding
moringa
over glass sharded fence, zinc roof
Even Christi in all glory was not like one of these

Look! how sun bleed
O!
to be
a chloroplast eating light
O
sun of mothers past
thou ‘stead to rever
For thou
perish
too
achronos
Like a leech