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