Déjà vu
Because the cyborg
still prints pictures
of hungry voids
I burn time,
mimicking the dead
thrills of freedom;
Tonguing dense cages
of love, umbrellaed
God-eye, heavily lidded.
Shredding damp masques
down the ditch
till I’m nothing, again.
Burn dreams like paper
cranes, riding the winds
at last, as ash.
To the Abounder of Tomorrow
Mahogany, It’s raining dead birds again.
The discoverer is always lost
at some points, walks
into a lake of mirrors
to rinse the ego, the miracle
of parvanimity, and the pride
hanging down the shoulder
blades of a forest god,
umber and orange in woes
flyspeck in brown-black skin
like half-burnt leaves
smoking between their jests
the humanity of autumns.
Didn’t you, like us, love deep
enough to hate the elasticity
of time, the elision of grey
assurance that Tomorrow lacks?
Flowerboy
I said flowerboy flowerboy, aren’t your bones oars,
swirling lithely between chaos of titanium grace? With his
face a marl of summer dawns, he threw back his crown
and laughed a refraction of joy into my rusty palms. I saw
right there on his lower lips a disco of angels dancing in
loose silver robes and rubber shoes. My adulation
became too caustic. I rumpled and he fell—all tattered
petals breezed an alleluia. I mourned my flowerboy,
fading and blending with the humdrum, remaining only a
crepuscule, whispering and whispering again like a dying
whirlwind—what else does it means to be a flower? And
because I know, I walked into a river, and night into me.
SIMBO, OLUMIDE MANUEL is a Nigerian poet, an environmentalist and a Biology teacher. He expresses his immediate and personal realities in poems and songs. This is his first publication.
Twyckenham Notes 