THREE POEMS

By Oladosu Michael Emerald

                     Photo Credit: Edith Brown

A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF MY SILENCE

I walk in the night

where my demons love to hide.

Did my mother create loneliness,

or was I fathered by silence?

I worship silence like a god.

I am fluent in silence.

I mutter my prayers without uttering a word.

They say "God is in our hearts,"

So I guess He hears the language of silence too.

Presently, I've been to hell & back & it's barely noon.

I'm scared to go outside.

My deepest, darkest fears feel like they are filling up the sea.

I float like sand in a stampede–despair mixes with little nylons.

I've been down on myself, I forgot how to believe in myself.

I never asked for help, now I just struggle with it secretly.

A ghost is a shell of cessation,

A capsule of silence,

The beginning of the end, of a new, even greater stretch of darkness.

I'm emotionally slashed.

I don't listen to what the world says,

I avoid them filling my ears with salt.

I just want to enjoy life & break the rules,

give names to the stars

& wish they are not the shooting ones.

I will keep searching for the energy to find my smile.

& pretend nothing ever ends

 

 

                                                               

INTERVIEW

"When did you first know of grief?"

I first knew grief 

When I saw a street kid 

with a swollen eye like an owl,

& a thin neck like my granny's broom.

I first knew grief in his potbelly,

where I saw the signature of the gods 

scribbled on his feeble intestine.

I first knew grief 

When I called myself a poet.

I find synonyms for my pains.

My traumas.

& my grief.

                                                               

EVERY WINE IS A CATALYST TO POROUS MIND

a wine micra taxi

dropped a fat man

at the curbside.

he wore a blue agbada 

he entered a bar covered with a roof

of brown & black colour.

he sat with anxiety at the round table 

of an empty bottle of wines–

pouring beer in the faces of the waiters.

he forgot the taste of beans & bread,

the way he forgets how his legs walk in the darkness.

beer is an independent variable to a drunkard;

no matter how you stumble on your way,

you'd still find your road to the tavern.

the fat drunkard found his way out of the bar,

with a body of compass,

that points gutter as home when it rains.

he spent the night, lying in a gutter, like a dead man in a casket. 

  

                                                                     

Oladosu Michael Emerald (he/him) is a Nigerian poet, digital/musical/visual artist, and a photographer. He believes in reality, and duality. He tweets @GemmyEmerald