ii
[12:00am]
A boy cannot ignore the tantrums in every repose.
Nothing remains calm that is calm forever. Even the
Dead:
- His father, ghost-rizzling into the dried leaves
Stuffed in a rizla clipped between his fingers.
- He sees him in every puff of smoke. A weed is
Too blunt to cut through the forest of loss; of
Insomnia —still, the ghoul in his eyes must be
Asphyxiated.
[4:00am] His alarm meets him awake like the previous
Day, and the day before the previous day.
- A scavenging bird strewns itself to an injured prayer
Finding its way back into his…
Mouth: now a shrine, every word he speaks walks
Backwards into his throat, such that live
Becomes evil — where he forages his veins
For the echoes of his father’s voice calling him
Home: a place where the dead can finally die.
iii
[6:00am] Tears trickle into the wall clock hanging beneath the murky
Ceiling of grief to turn time into an ocean swallowing all. A boy whispers
A name to the teething edge of a razor blade —after which he draws
A face on his wrist and calls it a road. The quarts of the clock
shapeshifts into a boat ferrying the boy anti-clockwise into the
same mouth that swallowed his father.
i
Father, a flower blooming into the morning of a country
Ensnarled in the uterus of a nightmare. A man in black is
The sun dangling too close to a flower.
Reversed-photosynthesis is how I say chlorophyll
Has grown teeth. An AK47 at a checkpoint is too old to crack
Jokes — call it a grizzled squirrel —then label father a palm kernel
In its mouth.
Michael Imossan
is a writer keen on expressing himself through all genres of literature. He loves being in class — whether as a teacher or a student. He is a joint winner of the Shuzia Redemption Poetry contest. He is a winner of the poetrycolumn-nnd Weekly poetry contest. He has been longlisted for the Nigeriannewsdirect poetry prize 2020, as well as for the Shuzia prose competition. He is a second place winner of the Letters To The Lion of JADA Spoken word poetry competition. He has been a judge of the FASA spoken word slam. His works have been/are forthcoming on Inertia Teens Magazine, Small Leaf Press, FieryScribe Review, poetrycolumn-nnd, Olney Magazines, Salamander Ink and elsewhere. Also, he has been interviewed and published by The Daily Trust Newspaper. Tweet him via @michael_imossan. Facebook: michael Imossan.