Tired of writing poems of defiance Those that reek of blasphemy and fire Read aloud in a voice refusing to crack Here I shall not rebel in my literature so cheap Imbalanced: with neither rhyme nor prosody Let my colonial tongue speak words soft To write an ode to my lover, Exhibit A.
Exhibit A’s pair of dark eyes Nothing like oceans, nothing like stars Yet I dedicate couplets from a classic Slave to Google with three unidentified words I talk about forever in love Despite pandemics, wars and death Just then my words stop as if barricaded.
Someone’s forever ends with a knee jerking their neck Beleaguering them so that they can’t breathe, they can’t breathe.
Moving on, transfixed on my token to Exhibit A I start to compose an ode to the valley Where drops of Paradise were poured And wonder if rivers ever flow Beneath the gardens there?
But what about the rivers of blood A child on a body casing a dead heart The Pulitzer likes the rubble better than Paradise.
Exhibit A likes not my poems anymore Hence I quote a poet who loved better Exhibit A, worry not if you find us separated Again and again and again For “I will come again , my Luve, Tho’ it were ten thousand miles.”
Ten thousand miles What about the ten thousand miles A fullstop to sixteen men Their hungry ghosts haunt the rich palaces Regret not eating those chapattis.
A semi-colon to the life of an infant Who can’t suck a dead mother’s milk.
