The Poetry Marathon

Bless the day I would learn to love new beginnings.

The day the thing in your body broke,

Someone with a strange face discovered the crack.

The day you broke, the day you discovered you were

The thing that broke, my then strong arm wasn’t strong

Enough to hold this darkness against the thing

Around your neck; this long chain of slavery.

When the days break, we would all bless the dawn

By forgetting all the wrong people that died with petals

In their mouth; bless them; bless their names—flowers.

I bless god for the strong bone of surviving another

Night but who do I tell I do not seek dawn that much?

Who do I tell to teach my tongue to bless this twin

Daughter cell of exit wounds; this twin daughter of dawn,

Who do I tell to pray for me?, that may this new dawn,

Wash me clean like prayers wash my mother’s feet—

Like silence, slowly shifting this cracking dawn into exile.

1. Theory of parallel universes.

Dear gods [substitutes for  brain],

You gave us a thought where

We’re both here and there in

The same instances. Existence.

A theory found with the entire

Science. Milky Way to infinity.

I’m black means there’s as much

Possibilities of my existence as

A white lily as there are thorn

On the face of the earth—mother.

My father is dead means

The dead are a planted war song;

Hovering the night sky for the perfect

Pitch to fall unto. The universe

Says they’re all the same. My father

And I . coral hit on the surface of

the  mediterranean.

I believe in the existence of time

Traveling, I’m merely seeking a

Sign to call another existence

my own.

Give my father life for no other

Reason that he still breathes in

My bones.

That death is an exit wound into

A parallel universe where all my

People are my own, all their

Thick skin with smoke—stardust—

All the stones on a tomb reverse back

Into ashes.  If my world and the parallel

Are same, eject my existence from

The branch of wormholes that

Holds unto memory—give me a new

Name, give me somewhere else to call

Home. The parallel means I’m in a

Linear state to hold breath,

Body of languages and none to

Call my own .  The parallel means

I’m shot by a police for not being in

The right universe. The parallel

Means there’s a gathering of people

In a wedding that is yet to be my own.

The parallel means a woman is nursing me

In the belly of a woman that just conceived me.

The parallel means my father is not yet in front

Of the bullet that would wipe him clean.

The parallel means I’m waking in all the

Places I cannot yet call home .

The parallel means there’s a place

My father would be late to attend his death

And is still nursing his bullet wound,

The parallel means that is where I strike first.

The Englishmen  would always mistake Gurasa for pizza.

In a train station in Sarkin pawa

Darkness strikes and covers

The roads, all the vehicles on

The road parked beside the highway

To watch the apocalypse finish.

My sister, body of  English for accent

Finally opens her mouth to cravings.

In the meantime, Sarkin pawa had

Not seen power for over six months,

All the people with freezers have grown

To never need useless things, all the

Restaurants with ovens have closed to

Respect my country’s low standards.

My sister orders a pizza on her phone,

Minutes later she cannot connect to her

Internet to confirm purchase, we sit in

Despair, she sits in regrets, a sales boy

With gurasa passes our car, I purchase

Gurasa for all of us, the train station

Might never open again, my sister would

Only crave in silence, till her English

Is enough to call pizza with a new name—gurasa.

Ghazal with the night as climate change.

I open the remains of the night

And pour them into dark vastness, the night.

Everything I seem to love is growing into cracks,

My brother is the first to see, body of darkness —night

My brother is everything bent the wrong way—C

Every where the pain forgets to nest it ruin—night

My brother is a body of liquids —sea

Every where what drowns returns to life —night.

I sit beneath what used to be a tree,

An inferno of beautiful things in my mouth; call it night

I spit all the darkness, all the silence into all the wrong places,

The furrow on my accent is louder than my voice, I bury the night

Everything that covers a prayer and does it well,

Can be tagged beautiful in Arabic and called night

My mother would mistake my brother’s name

For sukko, in gbagyi it’s the only way to say night

My uncle nurtures an oak tree, my sister wants

A beach house so we take down the tree: night?

We put pillars everywhere that could home a tree

The beach house stands erect in the absence of trees—night

I gather my silence every time gasses erupt

Like little prayers in the sanctuary of God: night.

And verily, it’s only in the remembrance of God do hearts find comfort.

الله أكبر

The days would only break by your name.

And peace be unto us and peace be upon

Our mothers, May our brothers find the serenity

In your name, May our sisters hearts never ache.

الحمد لله

My mouth carries ginger and garlic

But alhamdulilah sits most comfy in here.

God, let me not lose touch, let me not

Fail, let me not fall, and if I ever do,

Let me not crumble.

Allahu Akbar      Allahu Akbar

May the world retain its balance

May the evil fear us for being good

May our deeds never return from

Heaven empty handed—

Salam

   Last days at [insert location]

The only memory the almost broken

Sewing machine holds is of my fathers

Feet as they sync into it to weave my mothers

Yarn.so we let the machine stay, we take another

Look at the room, everything seemed to have

Given out its color of originality.

The dwarf guava tree withers strangely

So most times we do not sweep the

Exiled leaves, we let them rot to the ground,

We let them rot to silence —to sand.

My mother would then ask what I needed before

We left, I’d be left between choosing my fathers

Memories and my mothers peace

I would then steal the entire house

And its memories, hide them behind a

Brain pathway in my head       If anything is worth holding

Unto, it’s worth keeping forever.

Self portrait as a silhouette.

 

I forget my thumb in the fire

But I do not forget the thrill.

Every abstract’ biggest dream is

To own life, so we let the bowl be  filled

With sugar and cinnamon

A grey fizz, like a thunderstorm

Wraths a boys heart,  but boys

Don’t die, Boys don’t girl,

Boys are everything but tender,

But soft, but prayers axed into

The ground to never leave.

I forget my thumb in the fire,

But I do not forget the thrill,

I do not forget the sun

That rose from Bermuda

And slowly sways into my body

Like a pilgrim in his pursuit

For halo validation.

Kaleidoscope.

Memories melt into colors and

Pour into this wound hungry for life.

To heal is to sew the mouth of a

Wide country [wound] and come to

Terms with living with the scar.

I let the blood parasite eat from

My core of energy, what’s worth

Giving life, is worth killing.

I open my mouth and I’m my wound,

I let the gap between me and my people

Determine how spacious our

Tales of survival can be.

A love song runs from the heart

Of a lost lover, we mix colors

Without ever knowing sight.

 

All the people I love are the ghosts that hunt at night.

The drive to my people’s home, the silence of nights

Quiets down as the horror fades away. On the roads

You do not meet the drunk, nor do you mistake the

Roads paranormal bending into light—a symbol of

Purity. It’s a thousand hours of walk, your body is

Forced into a gun powder (and your insecurities

Creak into the back of your ear like broken omen:

Clay plates falling on Christmas Eve)—smoke

Becomes fire, your body is an explosion of wrath

On all the wrong planets, your mothers body is

The first place to hold unto the warmth on the atlas.

1. A conversation with Cyborg cashier working in Taco Bell .

I pull the night by  its fore limb into the driveway

And listen as the sound of my car slowly

Fades into oblivion.

I hesitate in all the steps I take into Taco Bell;

My body is an aching that must not die yet.

My body is an aching with insatiable cravings

For crunch           The cashier is a purple cyborg

Eye and codes intact          I feel a certain breeze of loneliness

So I ask                How many aches would it take the body to survive

                               To become indestructible ?

She, in her loyalty to her code, ignores my concerns and displays

A hologram of their menu       I’m too liquid to crave a Baja blast

So I ask again          How long would it take the world to bed rosés again?

Cyborg, in her loyalty towards her programs refresh the menu for something

Other than a crunchy meal.