FULL MOON

Homo Sapiens don’t revolve
The earth does
It’s modest enough to toe
The same un-tarred path
Forever.

Homo Sapiens move on up
And devolve
Incapable of simplicities
In the course of progress:

Hearts don’t find smiles
Promises lose truths
Weddings don’t marry trust
Music is out of sync with sound
Black and white are left out of the TV.

I read what i wrote
Yesterday today
I sigh because I may never write
As honestly as i once did.

Monochrome words have given way to hubris.

INSIGHT

Spain. France. London. Lagos
Say the billboards all over town
She’d obviously seen the world

I’d learnt
Or so i thought
All there was about her:

Her smooth green skin
Had moulted its DNA
Into the lines on my palm

Etched on my tongue
Was a keen almost uncanny
Knowledge of her dark insides

My brain had flirted
With every illusory streak of honey
In the bitterness she had to offer

What more was there?
So that night i drank with abandon
To the health of a friend who was 1 year older

Just before getting home that night
I saw by the roadside a rather queer-looking man
Wave to me like one needing help

He spoke naught
But mumbled meaninglessly
While shooing me to the nearby gutter

He had the tag
Of some secret service I can’t remember
Just above the right pocket of his white coat

I realized he was showing me
What looked like a time machine
He wanted me to be his first traveler

I obliged. He pressed some buttons
And in some sort of whirlwind
I appeared in Tibet

Where i met a greying bearded-man
Who told me there was more to learn
About that fluid dark temptress

I was still at his feet
When my wife and son yanked me out
Of that slimy gutter the next morn.

MY ECOLOGY

Is a home theater
Of trees
In varied forms:
A thousand leaves
Of The Odyssey planted in ten years
By blind Homer
Sprout from the first bough
Of a Mahogany tree that breathes life
Now as a shelf.
Walt’s Leaves of Grass
Hides on another bough
Smoked a few times by me
In-between Tolkien’s elves
And Potter’s wand.
There is Okigbo too, a shrub among the poplars.

GUT

There are no gutters. Viscid, green streams, always transporting something – empty packets of St. Moritz, pure water sachets, plastic Coca-Cola bottles, anything – slowly snake their path in front of every house, all year long, regardless of season, to the Canal, a gold mine of sorts that’s always surrounded by anonymous men digging up silver spoons, tin cans, rusted lanterns and aluminum buckets. The men even make a fire when it’s cold, after a rainfall and I’ll bet they even eat some roast meat in that Capital of squalor. The Canal would never have mattered to us any more than a naira note would have mattered to a slobbering chimpanzee but for Karl Marx . . .