at the airport: the stripping of layers,
a life exposed to x-rays, picking up after.
But it is also walkable miles, days
of silence and three months before
we will be together again. And these metrics,
distance and time, cannot unravel the hours of
your voice’s life in my ears, the space the warm
earth essence of you takes up in my nostrils, why
my body in sleep makes space for you
even when my arms can’t cradle your flesh.
Travelling Solo
Coded in smiles and that buzz
we share in the grip of one-
of-a-kind books, paintings, songs...
is a key we both know – one
we build charged chords of joy from,
transpose, dragging 7th notes across days
twisting distortions into possibility.
We’re on a stage and distance is the noise
at the bar – we play harder to rise
above it. The need to make a living
switches tones between major&minor
but we solo our way back to origin ♩
it’s the way we write and don’t ♪ it’s how
we kiss instantly or hover in hunger – pine ♪
the way, with knowing smiles, we tangle
like some fantasy found in the spine
of a book, two cinnabar shades snug
in the heart of a painting, phrases that
overlap in a song that repeats like a love
supreme, a love supreme ♪ it’s that
way that you hold me ♪ the way we
hold we ♪ the way you hold hold me
like I’m leaving the melody, knowing
I’m coming back, but still... but still...
Blowing Smoke
for the curve of dismounts
o
She lifts her head to gift the stars white
smoke and my lips are drawn to the floral
arch of her neck, inching higher, the swirl
her fragrant exhalations make becoming night:
breath to air, dust to dust – we are mortals
drenched in a hummingbird sensation of time.
oo
I have known moments like this; my naked torso
brown as the bark of the mango tree I’ve mounted,
its leaves camouflage while I watch my playmates
seeking me, excitement choking me the same way
her moving fingers make my breath hover. She catches
me in the corner of her eye, my lips tremble on her
skin before the giggle becomes sound: lightning to thunder.
ooo
Sometimes I was found: some girl or boy throwing stones,
breaking the amnios of leaves that protected me – but most
times I just got tired of waiting and shimmied down. Love
is a little like that; the playmates plentiful as pollen grains
yet only a few bursting beyond the red bubble of lust
to the heart, the after-giggle, where the smoke rings go.
How I Know
“I smile a little more than I did before...
That’s how I know love.” – The RH Factor
Some memory of darkness; soft expanses
of ebony – and flesh that turned liquid
on my tongue, in the clasp of infant gums.
A body that moved to soothe me, a body
with shoulders angled to support leaning.
Notes hidden like silverfish in the creases
of my books, six-year-old fingers turning
care-perfect Ds, surprise declarations that drop
out on stages, reminding me that I’ve birthed
a girl with heart, a child who knows healing.
The smell of almond and Shea butter in the hair
of an embrace, the sound of trains passing, a glut
of air as tunnels fill with weight, slow breath
as I try to hold a moment that feels like one
that shouldn’t pass. We’re skin to skin at the cheek.
A boy’s smile that emerges as his mother’s
door closes, his hands reaching for the learned angle
of my shoulders, the circumference of my neck
soon in the clasp of his thighs, monkey bar antics
fading as a girl warms my cheek with her small hand.
This is how my dad felt, perhaps. All I remember is fleeting
but I recall the scratch of a pin on shellac, the wound
of Mahalia’s voice rising to fill a house, the weight
of his arm around my neck, the whisper of a smile
moving the wood of his skin, his voice saying, Listen.
In the poetry section of a bookshop, my hand in the crease
of an anthology of Brazilian poets, lost in the black joy
of word after apt word, I lift my eyes and see the woman
who said yes to dinner. She moves and my mouth is wide:
between us, a field of teeth straining to do more than just smile.
Of Sides
Love for you is
what you have
witnessed: doing
something you hate,
proof of sacrifice.
Love weighed in debts:
a chorus of chores.
Love for me is what
I know: loving
whatever i’m doing
because it is done
for love, done with
song, skip in the heart,
the task forgotten.
Every day you smile
less; my smile becomes
wider. To onlookers it seems
I am consuming you.
I am the one who is
wronged, but love is
a cushion of many sides.
Locking Doors
(for Teacher & the Sundance Kid)
To free the L from its metal perch, slide
the torpedo of its head into place, locking
the front door – to check the fires of the gas
stove do not still burn... He remembers it’s night
and darkness brings duties. He holds your hand
guides you to the bathroom, turns on the light,
turns away before you turn on him, as you do
sometimes when the cache of your memories reset
making him a stranger. He can recall Grand National
winners’ names for the last twenty-five years: Don’t
Push It, Royal Athlete, Earth Summit, Comply or Die
… reels them off in his head, while you slip into Igbo,
speaking to the Canadian neighbours who share your South
Eastern patch of London with you. Falling back gently,
the way your Romanian gymnastics teacher taught you
in Lagos all those years ago. And this is the beauty
he holds on to; how you can recite his parents’ phone number
as though some magic has unlocked the forgotten idyll
of your unsettled Apapa youth. You still remember him
as the boy with a parting trimmed semi-permanently
into his hair by a father he saw when the ships came,
who brought you akara so hot he juggled it all the way
to your house, smiling as he told you he was the one
who got the first ones from the pan, first in the queue. He is
no longer the man who almost gambled your lives away, who
near lost his mind when your twin boys died
at fifteen: no,
he is again the boy
who kissed you and ran towards sunset,
looking back every fifteen metres to see if you were smiling too.
Year AD87: BM14
a poem in three sentences
Before the memory of spit wiped from your brow
in silence, before a boy in blue in Manchester
threatens to put you in the van simply for asking
what is our crime? before the grainy 1991 birth
of raised batons caught on camera raining on Rodney,
before Joy Gardner, Roger Sylvester, Erica Garner,
Sandra Bland, Sean Rigg, Cynthia Jarrett turned breathless
under a white haze of hatred, when you only blazed
in protest when you were tackled to the ground playing
football in a swirl of dirt, cheers and jeers raining
from the edges of a rectangle in Accra. / Blue-tinged
days when you were newly teen and only beginning
to edge towards the van of the hormone-driven youth
movement, before you know the damaging disorientation
of a kiss on the collarbone, a nip beneath the breastbone,
had you been taken to the side one fine Saturday
(after you’d wiped the chequered vinyl floors of your home
on hands and knees, laughed with your siblings
while coaxing the gleam from your parents’s cream Volvo
and had your cold water shower while whistling Whitney’s
new song, I Wanna Dance with Somebody), given lemonade
– pale green and fresh – and told that you would know love
many times over, that your heart would stretch, sing and shatter,
that you would learn the suck and spit of spent bodies,
that you would break and bloom, and break and bloom,
but through the mill of that mix of ache and injustice
in the world, you would find yourself a father of three
and friend of a clutch of formidable women you know
so intimately that you could take breaths for them,
you would have jumped up and screamed No way!
spilling the lemonade onto dirt like a libation,
your joy too much to contain at such possibility.//
This is how, come Saturday, when you pick your kids
up, you are always so stunned, because who would believe the tooli that
in a world that showers so much terror on skin so dark
you could still make, out of one lemonade-drinking boy so blue,
a full-muscled girl, a wise-cracking boy and a wide-grinning girl? ///
A Concise Geography of Heartbreak
HUMAN
...it starts from the skin, the same way
Europeans came from the shore, smiling,
setting up trading posts. When they whisper
in your ears, nibble on your lobes, sending
a shiver running through you, that’s Stanley
pretending to be an explorer, but under contract
to King Leopold. A finger runs down
your chest, raising goosebumps, your lips
lock and your oil reserves run free.
ENVIRONMENTAL
You are learning
a new language, every limb of your body
possessed by the fire of this love that smelts
gold, aluminium, copper, tin and iron ore. You run
when they ask,
doing do-for-love things, making their lives
easier. Meanwhile, they are with friends planning
how to deceive you, use you – it’s the Berlin Conference
in kisses. They are all up inside you,
you are in your feelings, sappy
as sliced rubber trees.
PHYSICAL
You want to drop seeds and shit,
hell, maybe you do – one or two –
until some night, the forest fires start.
It’s like the worst kind of heartburn –
all that BS you’ve swallowed.
You start an independence movement,
define limits, draw borders. They come pleading,
they offer enticements, Ambassadors
make compelling cases, seeding tears
in your eyes. But once you have seen
their true purpose, you can’t unsee it: you must
save your heart – even if it means you will hurt,
even if the new country your carve is
an assembly of broken things. It is yours.
You will compose an anthem
and sing it like an orgasm. You will
sew a flag from fragments of new insight,
fly it as high as you hold your head.
Underbelly
You are seven, her eyes are molten,
her chin weighs what your thinking
weighs on the heels of your palms,
your fingers are feathers along the lines
of her cheekbones. She is about to kiss
you, but a gaggle of friends come in
and she spits in your face instead.
You will remember that moment when
you are twenty-eight and you trace
the point when a lover you meant to marry
turned sour on you, to an evening out
with her girlfriends discussing the lure
of unpredictable men. Suddenly she’s asking
about circumcision – a new interest in dicks.
The twenty-one year gap in betrayals
hasn’t changed you. Your boys don’t understand,
neither can the ex’s friend who sleeps with you
now: how can you be so calm – happy even?
But your thoughts are feather-light with little
memories: the euphoric pull of dark eyes, loving
moments together, away from the baying crowds.
lenguaje
Whisper to me in the language I know
when I know no language, when my face
still bears the map of sleep, the clear trace
of fatigue passing, mute and steady as breath.
Call out at the hour when I am uncertain
whether the sky’s clustered darkness threatens
rainfall or signals night fading away.
Coax my protest muscle from my mouth’s shell,
coat my lips with a fine dew of argument
and place your morning plea beyond barriers
of translation. Let tongue touch tongue, test,
and by degrees reach fluency in the lingua
from lust. I entreat you with love – in Ga.
Kɛ i’tsui aka shwɛ
“You see, I could conceive death,
but I could not conceive betrayal.” – Malcolm X
Ojotswalɔ, my heart burns for you
like kpakpo shitɔ spreading jealous
green in the ripeness of my heart –
add not salt to my pain;
kɛ i’sui aka shwɛ. Do not
bury my passions in ŋmlitsa – hard,
formless and scorching in the sun
for I have loved you too much
to merit such disdain.
Kai’mɔ fɔfɔi ni n’kɛ ba o’shia,
smiles we shared over ngai’s spat crackle
the songs we sang together, voices
as warm as water in a gbudugbaŋ,
already past language,
violating taboos as we shared kɔmi
kɛ shitɔ with maŋ –
kai mɔ mi nakai’o
kai mɔ mi nakai.
Kɛ i’tsui aka shwɛ. Do not
linger in the wind of our union
like a basket
of didɛ shala;
kaa ha ni e’tɔmi
tamɔ wolɛɛnyo yɛ hunu mli.
Ofainɛ kɛ obaa shi mi’ɛ yaa.
Kɛ i’tsui aka shwɛ;
don’t keep leaving and coming back
like a gbogbalo, doing a dance I do not
understand, for I love you
too much to learn
to love you again.
Dark Spirits
Home half drunk but with some degree
of faculty left you find your exes nak
ed
in bed with the woman you're seeing now She's her
best journalist self soft lamplight lapping her
skin's contours as she turns from the lawyer to ask
the anthropologist about shame in cultures that cleave
tight to commensality The sculptor is studying the clay
of her own nipples her calves resting on the microbiologist's
thighs They pay you no mind not even the blues
singer who said she would die for you not even
when you strip and perform that ridiculous party trick
with your dick no hands as you make the little thing
dance left to right that the novelist adores You
sulk as the debate shifts to patriarchy voices
rising as they coax and challenge leer and laugh
resonant as they agree on your status as a sincere
but flawed feminist a sympathiser they say
The chemistry lecturer spots you eventually
points The Kahlo scholar ignites a fire right
in the middle of the bed and their fingers like
a hundred licking flames beckon you You feel
the heat of the equator as you lean back mattress
buckles the red of the fire pulling your locks
making you scream Before your fantasies can come
alive they turn to envelop you like caterpillars on
sweet fruit you disappear in the amber of their fusion
When morning comes your room is rich suffused
with the burn and treacly aftertaste of dark dark spirits
Eaux
Oscura y sus obras
i
Three primary colours mixed
in a shallow pot. A blackness
beyond the reach of a scorpion’s sting.
I am yet to meet the being
who can unmix paint, restore
the pure pigment the brush’s tongue flicked.
ii
For venom’s cure comes from venom,
from fangs jibbed like a fountain pen’s nib,
is collected in a hollow, injected by hydraulics.
I say I am a dreamer who fills spaces
with wild doodlings; I place diamonds
in the charcoal of sketches, laughter
in bursts of gloom, but God! Who knew
the power that children have
to expand air, to set a ship adrift?
iii
A brush might ask its bearer: which is