Grenade

a grenade lives in the mouth of the girl you're in love with
tonight you will kiss her
& it will explode
pieces of you in her mouth melting
from holy wafers
to ashes
& troubled water
as she lies naked as sweat running down the gutter of your back
a foetus in a bomb crater...
in your eyes she will face vagina to the wander of stars
piss in the mouths of your gods
who fuck boars & hunt whores
before her teeth–the black canines of night reaps you apart
bread at the last supper
because you’re without-a shadow split in two
you're the finding asking what light is
if not a scar emptied into too much night
you're alone
an adulterer at the dusty sole of christ
quotations of stone soon to be scribed upon your back...
there was a war fully formed
inside the deep-sleeping bone of a latter boy
who made of her cartographies leading to intimacies you'll never know
giving blind ears to calls of POWs fleeing her throat
when your tongue yet stroked below & her head fell back in song
still you do not flee with them
you've confused love for foot that knows from where it does not come
forgetting you are only boy
& regrettably so
an excuse to hate road when you're missing home
to love
& leave her fragments of yourself
even when she lets go long enough to throw you up...

Flock

flock above all sweet sorrow flock above this city of
nameless bodies like a symphony of stars mangazing
twinkling their last – a break of fast over my daunted heart

let me watch you fly the long way home spread your spiteful
wings to find repose in the elasticity of air watch you breathe your
final feuds of fire for the first time…

you visit my lowly chambers solely at night like a horny
husband loiter over everything over my
wandering dreams slit wrists & unrequited sins as though
my satanic soul is not nocturnal enough to serenade
sacraments to peaceful sleep in the tabernacles of hell

but by certain prognoses you’re not only sweet slothful
sorrow you’re orgasmic as the genitalic explosion
of a drone bee in its queen mother

because the grave is aesthetic almost as artful as a serpent’s
gait & we who languish on its fences in the name of country
love or other maladies soon will demand new names
in exchange of lunacy

we whose bodies are roaming cities soon will
lose ourselves in finding

so flock above all sweet sorrow flock the unscrupulous sun
like a lump of human dung squats on this puddle of blood
& the flies flock too like democrats in my country brooding
earnestly at the goodwill of guns guns without silencers
c h a n t i n g the will of god…

Morning is the rearview to newfound roads

This is what happens when your shadow
A bottle of cheap rum
& the stillness left over by strange women
Who once walked your periphery for money & warmth
Are the only things left to your hands to hold
I'll tell you
You pick up your sticks
& if they do not vomit fire
You pick up your stones
Leave the devil in you to his loneliness
& woes
Leave him to his grief
It is true you're often a rainy day
But it's okay to enjoy the slap of sunlight on your face
Wear your empty pockets - like your scars - inside out
Let them french the wind until money unseals its lips
Healing is but the cry of a newborn baby
So let the pain outweigh the pride
Do not follow Jesus
Be Jesus
Walk on water
Then turn it to wine
Laughter - however lonely - should be road marks
Leading you into dance
You're more than that wild thing stuck between god's teeth

Longing | JK Anowe

                                 (I)

                        it is beginning
                             and all
                      but your tongue
                          harnessed
                         to my tongue
                         like stallions
                           to chariots
                              of troy
                              is void

                              all but
                    rippling silhouettes
                        aloft the ankles
                             of God
                             in dark
                      formless waters
                      calling out to us

                          spreading
                          like poison
                    the budding nectar
                          shrouding
                         your tongue

                         ever sonant
                      as melting butter
                             lurking
                        in the petals
                    behind your thong

A voyager's song | JK Anowe

From a fast moving motorbus
A man standing in a field is a scarecrow
An albatross landing is a lost boy's kite
Or a vulture preying on his corpse
Women hunched over cassava stalks
Are adolescent palm trees drooping to the midmorning wind
& the children picking weeds almost as delicately as fingers do lilies
Are mud figurines shattered at their feet
An uncompleted house at the bottom of a green hill
Is as you haunted by stillness & longing
Its roof red as the earth of Issele-Uku is a rusted sky that allows no rain
A ripped billboard becomes the aftermath of your hands on my cloths & skin last night
& in truth your language was native to poems whose wordings
I've long forgotten
Of which I'd rather convince myself are best unwritten
Because I'm your passenger
Rickety body
A casualty waiting to unravel
& I cannot own you even if I wanted to
Nor walk this loneliness without you
If you loved yourself the same way you've often urged me
To leave home
Curse God
Forget you

Another Ode (a response) | by D.E. Benson | Poetry

.
"my heart explodes
with you"
                 - JK Anowe, Ode
.
i close my eyes
and see all the things i couldn't be
before i blew to pieces
.
before i became ash
drifting in dark places
in search of an end
.
an end to you
.
an end to this feeling
stuck in the back of my eyes grief
that refuse to be shed
.
i surrender to you
a bird hit midflight by fate
as i spread my wings and soul
.
to sink

i try to capture you
bini
in these testaments
of what we used to be

i try to capture
your faiths and furies
your diabolical beauty
and splendid anomalies

as i walk through these
valleys of reminisce
where shadows
of chronic longing
swerve like troubled trees

but my instincts
are distant as
they are distinct
bini

they come slow
with the speed of love

and the memories
like boil
ripens with pus
as i indeed realize
that like diamonds
time only cuts time...

JK Anowe, Allergies.