Tuesday Poem by Remi Olutimayin

/in

Facing words:
Difficult to hear
Heavy with meaning
Lost interest

I don’t have time to think

Truth tastes odd
Lies taste familiar
Ambivalence is safe

I don’t have time to feel

Weighing moments
Stalling for time
Losing the mood

I don’t have time for time

What do I have?
Nothing I want
Everything I need

To think, to feel, to make time

So now what?
Yours Sincerely

Tuesday Poem by Babatunde-Olotu Oluwatosin

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A BALLAD FOR THE AUGUST LOVER

I

1:19am

Vancouver spills out of the speakers

in a song titled, “collapse”

I am holding my body like this,          without my hands:

my molars pressing into each other    like lovers       swollen with wanton desire

to let go

is to offer my body to the heaviness of memory

pleading to have me    the way the fire in a “sildenafiled” groin

pleads for succor

 

to let go

is to sink “in ocean blues” as the song portends

on arrival

to sink is to drown      to drown is to die

but I no longer seek to die

for already I have, with all of my body,                     died

the way things ought not to

II

Vancouver:   “on my own, I’ve been outgrown

                                    on my own, I’ve been outgrown”

I am left to sink in the scent of a lover that left

ask me how she did it…

I’ll say she put one foot before the other

and mastered the flight of childhood songs

fleeing the mouth of ageing children

 

Ask me how she did it…

I’ll say             I do not know what posture to assume

to stop the tears from overcoming my face

 

 

 

Tuesday Poem by Tobi Alàáká

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the morning already always is heavy with grey and eye on a prowl

i can live with ants and chatter
and rivulets skirting my brows

and with my bare feet on slime
and my mouth saline
and my body coiled with loathing in room thirty seven
where i am not one nor other

i can live on
devoid of my name
or my face
or of my memory
or a trace…
or only still
as a statistic dipping the wave

i can still try.
but who can survive, officer, mornings already always heavy with grey

TUESDAY POEM BY EFE OGUFERE

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THE IMAGINARIUM OF CHRISTOPHER OKIGBO

August 8th, 2148.
a decade after the purge

…static

navigating a jet black innoson
through the debris in rumola
moments before the broken bridge
drags the red sun beneath its bow.

parakeets converse with daffodil
sprouts from the sediments
collected on shotgun shells.

splayed on the walls with fingers
soaked in red rhubarb are the words
dearth of poetry is death of society

there are no bards
left to write these songs.
who will remember martyrs
dragging unspoken verses
through the streets of a dying city?

the purge came and ripped babies
from the sanctuary of wombs
because they kicked in rhythm
and chuckled in free verse.
heirlooms replaced by holograms.

here, we make our final stand,
witness us become forgotten gods
bodies subtly morph into immortality.
voices pitched against bullets.
miracles embedded in recalcitrant seeds
make flowerbeds in the tombs of dead poets.

Tuesday Poem by Toni Kan

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Who do you think you are? – The Mayor sings for himself by Toni Kan

I

I am the man who Kan
Father, son and lover
The one they call Mayor

II

They call me father
Awele
Chuka &
Ify
I see the big nose
I take in the pointed chin
I know without a doubt
That these are the fruits of my loins

III

I am Oyibo’s son
Brain pickled by Alzheimer’s
She forgets my name
The son who nursed at her teats
This son who misses her mother
With an ache that threatens
To splinter the heart
Rend it in two like the Temple veil

IV

I am the lover man
The one who comes first,
Everywhere, except in bed
Mister Lover-lover
Finger tips febrile with heat
I sire goose bumps with my touch
And my kisses are dripping honey combs
I love like a giddy teenager and
Manic with passion I rage all night
Like Ogun high on wine and semen

V

They call me Mayor
Jolly Papas and Barons of Broad street
This man who found Lagos in his 20s
And claimed it for his own
Home may not be hearth
But wherever Isu sets down his burden becomes home
This is home, this city where I lay down my burdens
Like the Iroko, I have set down roots deep into this city
And Las Gidi looked me in the eye and christened me Mayor.

Tuesday Poem by Kayode Faniyi

/in

if today i die my heart

if today i die my heart
will burst
into a thousand
shimmering
songs
&
the substance
of their shimmer
will be that at least
all elephant of me
once fell

in love;
never mind that
love
was:
a majestic throne.
was.

this majestic throne
was borne
by royal raffia fronds
the fronds themselves borne
by stalwart bamboo beams
beams beneath which
yawned

& yawned

a cavernous pit
a pit at the bottom of which
pointed
spikes & spikes & spikes
spikes whose bloodlust
waited

& waited

with bated breath.

no cries were heard
none
perhaps drowned out
by
a
humpty
crash
of everything held
& a simultaneous goring
& deflation
gory
of everything once taut
a goring & deflation
of everything
once      thought.

if today i die
i die
a fool.

yes.

tell me did
you ever did
you look
skywards
did you ever
ever look
the sky
in its roiling eye
did you
discern the rare
spectacle
of the thunderbolt
besting a streak
of lightning. did
you ever tell me
did
you
ever?

Tuesday Poem by Hauwa Nuhu Shaffii

/in

and she glides and glides

in a club in sabon gari,
a woman sways her body to
the dark song playing from her bones.
i know because right now, we belong
to the same wind.
she swings offbeat at first,
but soon, the music without melds
with the music within.
and then she grinds her darkness into powder
with footwork i recognize as ours.
it shoots through her
and she glides and glides.
she twirls her faux hair and that is when i see the henna
on her hands. i ask her in a tongue i’m now certain we share
who spoilt your heart, who spoilt your heart
she cuts her eyes deep into mine until they hurt and i squint.
and she glides and glides

Tuesday Poem by Tope Ogundare

/in
Tale of Two Sisters
beauty is a lady of the night:
coquettish
made-up face
reflecting rays of light
the dark knows no beauty.
in the dark, we are all bodies
no boundaries:
predator & prey alike,
locked-in by basal instincts
the eye boasts of knowledge
till darkness counters
the pride of legs
the dignity of hands
& the stoutness of the heart
dissolves into nothingness
darkness is a blanket of warmth
for blemished bodies
seeking solace from cold stares
riddled with scars
filled with beautiful stories
told in the language of touch
beauty loses her voice in the dark
loses her appeal
Jacob sticks his eager member
in the wrong hole
in the tale of two sisters

Tuesday Poem by Nkiacha Atemnkeng

/in

In Fear of Bad News

The school where you studied has been burnt.
Sweet memories with classmates remain.
Fire travels through the wire,
Home boils in the military pot.
Your school has been torched by separatists
Who watch your home town burn slow.

Voice notes ferry strange metaphors
Water na water
Bullets are not pellets of water
Gunshots like rattling electric poles
But gunshots don’t shock; they maim or kill.

You dread your Whatsapp gallery,
Morbid pictures trickling into your phone.
A litter of corpses you delete from your phone,
But not from memory.

Calls from home startle;
Your heart beats hard, in fear of bad news.
You redial your loved ones.
Your breath cease when they fail to answer.

You can’t go home,
Famished roads devour travellers.
People disappear like spirit children,
Only to resurface after paid ransoms,
If they are lucky.

Tuesday Poem by Joy Mamudu

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For Bearded Men

There is a thin gossamer thread
of neglect that separates love
from fading memories.
The camel has passed
through the eye of the needle .
Your promises,
once fattened & turgid
lie deflated in the annals of time.
At once fertile and impotent
like a used prophylactic
swollen with cooling semen.
You have shaved your beard, which I loved,
& moved on
but you cannot put
fresh wine in old skins.
Your betrayal is folly
time will bring you back here
worshiping at my altar
only then, I will no longer be your goddess.