By Dami Ajayi
Falling in Love
Between reality and angst: existential and muddled
a second outlasts eternity:
vice versa.
The flutter of heart valves is mechanical
Like falling in love:
Instant chemistry, tick checklist
Belly butterflies, tick checklist
Flawless dialogue, tick checklist
Diagnosis: Magical realism.
I have seen white light dispersed by
Prism into composite hues; Pot shavings
Are truth blebs, handle with care.
The flutter of brain waves is mechanical
Like falling in love:
Similar interests, tick checklist
Great First Kiss, tick checklist
Greatest orgasms, tick checklist
Diagnosis: Psychosis.
Love accentuates physical phenomena.
Breathing is poetry; silence forbode meaning,
Ambience, birth illusions. I know this feeling.
Haven’t I been here before?
Between reality and angst: existential and muddled
Is an abyss:
Falling in love.
Adigboroja
(After Rex Lawson)
Music soothes backaches into trance,
Ripples down spines that arch and recoil and fan out,
Hands held in grandiose gestures
Eyes wide shut
Mouths leaking smiles
Arguably, highlife is visceral music
Organic accordions in rhythmic repose,
The joy of listening begins from the innards and spreads
From the scalp to shuffling dance floor toes
As song boku for river
Na so woman boku for town
Money boku for town
So so trouble boku for town
Rex and his Rivers men
Spew rhythms trailing river banks,
Invoking a watery presence
With unrelenting percussion,
A burst of trumpet riffs
Ribbons of tunes cut in mother tongues,
Highlife is visceral. Truly.
I Know What Lagos Does to Dreams
I know what Lagos does to dreams
Undress them slowly like a nubile
Without blemish.
Lagos clambers by like a clam
Stuttering footsteps don’t totter.
Lagos wriggles past
Entropy in motion
This city is audacious without remorse
It will leave you spent, moans hoarse
From frightening memories that repudiate.
Lagos of lurid things.
Lagos of finery.
A Palimpsest hurriedly rewritten.
I know of memories that decay
Before their half-lives
Owambes punctuated by one chances,
A shake down hustle drums like
Syncopated Pentecostal rhythms—
This vigil won’t part red seas or the lagoon.
This chorus of hallelujahs won’t saunter
Beyond eaves.
This offering of pittances, this basket
Of blood and sweat and tears,
Threadbare like hidden dross is tax-free.
And heaven is an uptown Lagos residence;
Lekki, disyllabic, sitting on the ocean’s mouth,
Daring suicidal.
__________
Dami Ajayi, a medical doctor, writes from Lagos.