The Poetry Marathon

For the worlds loneliest music

I’m reaching for the stars,

I’m aligning them to my favor.

If the world fails to understand the

Nature of beauty, why must my mother

Be punished by the wheels of existence?

I’m sorry the clock ticks backwards,

I’m sorry the music keeps fading

What’s yet to be revealed to

The angels, is yet to be revealed to

The devil, so if the world fails,

In pursuing communal harmony

Then let the drums sing & sing

To their stomachs content.

The air in the wind grinds your nostril into an

Ammonium confirmed compound of lost.

You do not choke and you do not falter.

A street with ghosts must only gather

A confederation of darkness, your skin

Kind is the first to assemble. Ghosts are whites

So even in this holy ground you’re discriminated.

You leave the one places that calls you son, two

Roads diverge in a yellow wood. You take none,

You take all, you cling to the illusion of righteousness,

You put your hand again, today, against all the odds

Yet, you cannot count yourself among your people

And you cannot clasp and not shake in silence —

So all the nights music, lay quietly before the soft

Lip of the broken town of ghosts and my kinsmen.

Silhouette.

I have refused to take the form of

All the chalked outline of my father’s broken accent.

Substitute (h) with (aw)—confuse me, aw do you do this

With so much ease?

I contour my weightlessness in pronouncing all the heavy

Things my colonizers have tagged stressful and I still do not

Believe in a profile where (Englishman) is the closest

We’d ever come to glory/ forgive my insecurities, God/

Forgive the form I have decided to duplicate/ most importantly,

Forgive my senselessness in reminding you my shape is to remain

In your likeness.

In the middle of the intersection of rain and beauty,

There is a curve between the skies and I want to dance all

My bones to its likeness.

I have refused light so I always have someone by my side/

So my shadow has someone to hold unto, not me: (I’m a piece of

Disappearance etched into existence by thoughts of being lonely)

So I dine with all the people that tag my configuration of lost as purpose —

I love them hard enough to become tender and more lonely —I must stay woke,

I must not forget the purpose.

It’s only my existence in the wrong man’s body that delineate’s the  purpose of lost:

To be lost is to be 100% certain that something or someone is searching for you.

Dear Body//light//brightness of a thousand firefly-petal// your amorphousness is

Enough testament that beauty comes in different forms —formlessness is one,

Your regards towards the shapeless accent you have grown to mole

On your skin is another & remember, form is introduced,

When the body has lost its original purpose.

Skin like milk.

 My body is a ligament.

protruding from the joy my mother has become.

All my sons are forming from my rib cage.

All my loss, forming a leakage—

A sacrilege of purity and sacrifices.

Tell me about bone marrow because

 I do not fear damnation &  because I’m like a

candlestand, pure with purpose, erect with light.

I’m derobing my spots to cleanse my skin, call it

Branding, call it the making of a beautiful inferno.

I’m a special breed of all the beautiful things I know.

begrudging the tenderness of flowers.

I’m skin like milk skin like butter icing:

vogue. starch and a covering of flesh.

Wrap me around my nostalgia and call me gifted.

Sometimes the night would refuse to unfurl,

Might look like it’s the “pause” phase of time.

I would throw my arms into the wind/

Like a prayer, searching for god’s embrace/

I would refuse to get caught

Because Isn’t this what  fallen angels do?

Bring light to ground zero and lose warmth.

Who would bury the remains of our loss if we’re

All lost in this strange planet:

If we’re  all men, chained to a long

Necklace of beasts who have held loss

 The same way elites hold morsel of prayers

Between their two front teeth.

There’s something about the night that

Refuses our wounds to cover,

Something opening our bodies to the absence of light.

Something that would open them angles up;

open their bodies to the bare

Of loneliness; make them the bare of loneliness.

I clasp a firefly between my teeth and charge

Towards the darkness,

Sometimes we’re not always present,

Because nobody wraps their arms around

Us to make us gifted.

for the gaping quiet

 I fear the silence of life more than of dead things.

 The sky opens, and pours blue serum into my loneliness

My mother; hope in a gown, curbs  her fear of the dark

Into her chest—the best place to hide a bad memory is where the darkness resides.

The best place to be light is where the darkness leaves you. My father is a home for angels that lost   their way through the storm, my father is the place the earth paused for resuscitation, my father is all the people the war ate and communally tagged heroes.

           I’m by the side of a river,   Carrying all the emptiness and pouring us dark-milky syrup into the palmar crease of the Nile

I swear this isn’t holiness.          I swear I do not seek validation that much.  I swear the day the flowers bloom my body would not succumb to the rhythm of the terror; the silicon silence; the gaping quiet slowly eating through the night, eating through my mothers biggest fear—death.

Viator for burning.

I let all the sadness burn

By the open glare of light

Let the song be felt,

Let the secular mind pause.

I would mistake the world for smoke,

Then my body would yearn to burn

My body would yearn for light

But times like these would fade away.

If the world ever needs warmth,

Anything a wrath cannot give the world

May my spirit be here,

May all the sadness burn.

       I forgive life on behalf of my uncle.

In a story yet to be told, a strange

Air sweeps into the desert-dry

Throat of the earth, my uncle

Would not yet love, too blind

To see the world in its ugliness.

My uncle would not yet love,

Too halo to be left alone, too

Heavy to birth a strong memory.

My uncle is in another world,

Pursuing the endlessness of

Time, before the wind started,

Something fell and didn’t roll

Back to us, something fell and broke,

In our pursuit for its new glory,

We left the earth flat, we let it

Rot, in the end, if you look down,

There’s nothing more to see than

The six-feet holiness of life.

In the end, the light would also want

To stick to its darkness.

    Floatation only works when both bodies cannot sync.

On the day my brother first learnt

To swim, someone died with

A strange song in their mouth.

The wind would then crack my

Mother’s healthy lungs and plant

An ache, the size of a cough.

Our house would then open

And swallow condolences.

Ours mouths would then sing

And squeeze hope-prayers.

Our songs would then break

And fill all the pores on our bodies.

Our God would then open me to reality,

On the day my brother first learnt to swim,

His body and the river were both made of

Light so they sync, the river would then

Flow and casts its burden by the shore,

Where my brothers water-filled body

Would later be found —sync.