Boomerang

Author’s Note: My friends have stopped gracing my blog with their poems. I guess I am a tad too finicky and, yes, I haven’t been paying them in beers and chocolate as promised. So at the risk of failing as a blogger yet again, I have decided to publish some of the poems I am working on. This is from a sequence  of poems scheduled to appear in my forthcoming collection. Enjoy.

V

I thought that memories decayed
that fantasies built in bubbles
burst during office hours

that the past has no stranglehold on the future
that what is past is past,
& the present fends for itself

I thought you were history
caricatured with lipstick stains
I thought you were his story

mine has been told before
of how we met at the door
of the Niger; how we found
ourselves in a place where
time became elastic & we found
joy in soothing each other with
smiles & knowing glances

how many nights did we know
together? how many starry skies
under a hideous tree, where someone’s ancestor
rests in his unmarked graves?
how many kisses were stolen?
how many giggles were found?

how did love fall like the broken lobes
of kolanut? I don’t remember
all things. Some memories decay
till they are rejuvenated again.

VII

Six years later, T-Pain’s words hit me
like a Rocky blow, but not across my face

I’m sprung. I’m sprung
I have been since you left

And it took only for you to walk by
for me to see all the old feelings squeezing

I wish I numbered days appropriately
I wish I called them after memories of nights

Infested by casual liaisons, cannabis smoke,
nights buried under foreign flags, night that

slackened into morning, hungover & amnestic.
I wish to count women who outlived the night

those who kept my morning warm
rid of separation-anxiety.

But I return to the memories of crisp chicken &
dense dialogue. To fleeting gestures that linger

in the mind. To my knees hitting the ground in Umunya
because I said I got you.

because I said I got you.