Tag Archive for: Umar Sidi

Tuesday Poem by Umar Abubakar Sidi

Things Poets Do

Bad poets do not see poetry as light

or the illuminated incandescence of light

 

Bad poets see poetry as the giant fork

which rakes through the flesh of hearts

 

Bad poets perceive poetry as the blackness of black

the invisible tube, the darkened cave of enlightened ghosts

 

Bad poets define poetry as the aesthetic amalgamation of words to evoke a waterfall of bliss

 

Bad poets hear poetry in the cries of strangulated beasts, the whispers of djinns and the cries of cats possessed by the demon of war

 

Bad poets do not know time as the linear progression in space

or the cyclical rotation of orbs along tailored paths

 

Time to Bad poets is the complete summation of consciousness and the components of sight

 

Bad poets inscribe poems in golden ink and hang them as mua’allaqats on the Kaaba of Words

 

Bad poets investigate poems not with pen, paper, ink and a critical mind but with scalpels, lyrical rakes, telescopes and a magnifying glass from the Madhouse of Life

 

Bad poets sing songs in synchrony to the invisible voices in the sky and the transparent spirits of night

 

Bad poets do not swallow prescribed pills, they take down Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism and shred all to powdered bits

 

Bad poets sail across the ocean of sands to capture the most glorious sunset which occurs only on the seventh day of Yun

 

Bad poets are navigators of soul; they climb minuscule centaurs and canter gently through veins, arteries and the capillaries of consciousness

 

Bad poets pluck out their eyes at night and inscribe blind lyrics ‘about the absolute necessity of dark angles of thought’ on the invisible tablets swinging in the sky

 

Bad poets do not aspire to poetry or to the architectural arrangement of words and sounds

 

Bad poets aspire to the 7th region of bliss, the original source of language, the inscrutable tablet where the sacred words: kun fa ya kun manifest

 

Bad poets are the accursed emperors of the Empire of Words, they include; the Poet of the Waters of the Sky, the Poet of Light and Blood and down here in our climes, the Poet of the Epiphanies, the Mad Poet of Kilifi and the Poet of the Clinical Blues

 

Bad poets do not write poems, they suspend their gigantic hearts on pins, soak them in the kerosene of love and set them ablaze, then they hold the ultimate mirror of life ­& on its plains, they sketch the holy image of love, glowing in flames

 

Bad poets say ‘poems do not end; every poem is a floating orb in the invisible elliptical orbit of poetic continuum’, and with this I say: Thank you dear reader, for reading the unreadable things poets do.