THREE POEMS

By Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi

                          Photo Credit: Saatchi Art

  

AT THE RIVERSIDE, THE PLAY WENT WRONG

After Chiwenite Onyekwelu

see, raise your eyes from their brows

displace them from the houses of insanity,

can you see that everything hovering

over here returns to darkness? ask me

of my land and watch me take you to 

one of its nameless streets, to pierced

windows, to houses unroofed with bullets.  

while filling a form, I was asked what my

nationality is, my heart dangled at my

side like bulbs at the end of thin stalks. 

I fear. I quacker. my heart developed 

pores to write the name of a nation

with grief as a surname. since the day 

I learnt of my genealogy, I have been 

bleeding my whole life. for every drop,

my home feed me with grief as a drug.

I, too, know we are frizzled dust dashing

into light, witnesses to their wilting tides.

At Owo, a boy is walking

with another man's body. in my poems, I've been

hiding this grief that pierces me like rosebuds

opening for the wind. apart from the metaphors,

 every other thing cuts me open.

sometimes, I mistake roses for tulips, graves

for beds. at the riverbank, I asked my mother to

replace me with the last thing she bought, a

joke I learnt in one of the books I read. she

broke into a thawing ice & handed me a Lily.

how could I have known that she too, like me,

carries a hearthstone in her chest?. maybe I am

too delicate to be a man—I keep folding like 

a disturbed millipede each time I open

my notepad to write. I break. I write. I break.

each line calls for my head. & all these while,

my mother's voice has been whirling like a 

saint leaf in the background. I know I hold no beauty

& that my mother's tongue burns of distorted

hymns. look well, there is a bullet sniffing halfway

into me & to run here is to sink into the soil. in

this poem, a boy is halved like the moon & it

is not me.

        

                                                              

CATALOGUE OF MEMORIES

Since 19, I have been living a mirage as a life. & since then I have mastered the art of coagulation—photocoagulation. I will spray my body in the nakedness of the sun to gather memories that never stayed, lived or remained. every image I ever captured with my eyes faints like a monochrome dashed by a rippen sun. I hold grief like a chocolate box. faint. I once killed a man I never knew. faint. in my eyes, the world folds into half. faint. I once sucked light like a year old baby. faint. & light looks good on me. faint. my whole life could be defined as a nitrogen cycle— I nitrify grief, feed it & ammonify it with my bones & with a rotten quince of a bacteria. then everything I ever loved begins to denitrate along, leaving me stretched like a rubber devoured by a 1pm sun. like how I told a lady I loved her & the next day she appeared in my poems with her head hung betwixt the metaphors of pity. her eyes still carrying the love. I bit my tongue to tell her I love her, at least, I tried moulding speeches out of my tongue bearing the alchemy of grief. i regurgitated love. & every sound that comes out was inverted. my tongue never betrays. how could an entity forsake what holds it so long? I mean to say, my tongue is a mosaic of deadened things. my genealogy says I am born as a unicorn. with a spiral horn— a talisman of my permeability. & just maybe, that attest to the impurities gnawing the lights I behold. that also attest to the sieve I have as a mind—where everything I ever loved permeates through their pores. 

                                                               

ELEGY TO ADAMU MUBARAQ

After Abdulkareem Abdulkareem, for Adamu Mubaraq

I still have the last phone conversation I had with you stored somewhere in my memory—your voice soft like the breeze, gentler than a kiss from two stars on a date. but this page of my gallery, where your presence lingers i can not flip, I can not flip what makes my mouth a hymn book for serenades. your face— an assergai piercing through my succulence into bagful of threnodies. last night, I visited my collections and I saw this poem,the first draft of my very first poem where you autographed " fly, freely, you, a bird in the sky". I don't know when my cheeks drown me into a stream of their tears. just like last night, there are days when I will sit under the starry sky rewriting the poem we wrote together. this time with eerie images & grief stricken metaphors. I don't know how many tavern must oozed off before a light is gleamed. dear lord, tell me how to lose possession of this thoughts raging my heart into wildfire. I, too, know you are the air emitting from the gaps of two teeth when they pronounce the ' th' sound. since the day you died, I've been gathering my shambles, trying to be man enough to say you eloped with the night stars—that you ain't dead, or that you are somewhere dangling on the barricade of our roof. but, every second journeys me into the origami of truth— that you've grown to be one of the subjects on the headlines of the news on our TV. I became an artist drawing your mirage on the sky. a musician that sings distorted hymns. a poet blackening his art with elipsis. in this poem, I hold you— a requiem and it wilts. in this poem I am a picture of a boy chewing chrysanthemum. at the borehole, a boy mistook my brother's name for mine & goosebumps paled over my skin. though, nobody wants to be a deflated tire. deflated? or rather an elipsis devoid of euphoria? but, again and again, I imagined myself living a life I didn't grow enough to know.  here, salvation is another road to heaven—to thorns of cactuses. & that is how I started this poem when you appeared in my dreams, asking me to sing songs with fallen parables for you— I still have the last phone conversation I had with you stored somewhere in my memory. 

                                                          

Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi is a budding poet from Kwara State, Nigeria. He is a lover of books and the people who write them. When he is not reading, he is writing & when he is not writing he is stuck in the day dreams of kemanji—his hometown, transforming into one of the renowned cities of the world.

His works have appeared or are forthcoming in national & international journals like: Synchronized chaos, Angel rust, Kalahari review, Ngiga review, Arkorewrites, Konyashamsrumi, Arts Lounge, Teenlit journal, pine cone review, mixed magazine, Borgu book club and elsewhere.