Push It, Royal Athlete, Earth Summit, Comply or Die
… reels them off in his head, while you slip into Igbo,
speaking to the Canadian neighbours who share your South
Eastern patch of London with you. Falling back gently,
the way your Romanian gymnastics teacher taught you
in Lagos all those years ago. And this is the beauty
he holds on to; how you can recite his parents’ phone number
as though some magic has unlocked the forgotten idyll
of your unsettled Apapa youth. You still remember him
as the boy with a parting trimmed semi-permanently
into his hair by a father he saw when the ships came,
who brought you akara so hot he juggled it all the way
to your house, smiling as he told you he was the one
who got the first ones from the pan, first in the queue. He is
no longer the man who almost gambled your lives away, who
near lost his mind when your twin boys died
at fifteen: no,
he is again the boy
who kissed you and ran towards sunset,
looking back every fifteen metres to see if you were smiling too.
Year AD87: BM14
a poem in three sentences
Before the memory of spit wiped from your brow
in silence, before a boy in blue in Manchester
threatens to put you in the van simply for asking
what is our crime? before the grainy 1991 birth
of raised batons caught on camera raining on Rodney,
before Joy Gardner, Roger Sylvester, Erica Garner,
Sandra Bland, Sean Rigg, Cynthia Jarrett turned breathless
under a white haze of hatred, when you only blazed
in protest when you were tackled to the ground playing
football in a swirl of dirt, cheers and jeers raining
from the edges of a rectangle in Accra. / Blue-tinged
days when you were newly teen and only beginning
to edge towards the van of the hormone-driven youth
movement, before you know the damaging disorientation
of a kiss on the collarbone, a nip beneath the breastbone,
had you been taken to the side one fine Saturday
(after you’d wiped the chequered vinyl floors of your home
on hands and knees, laughed with your siblings
while coaxing the gleam from your parents’s cream Volvo
and had your cold water shower while whistling Whitney’s
new song, I Wanna Dance with Somebody), given lemonade
– pale green and fresh – and told that you would know love
many times over, that your heart would stretch, sing and shatter,
that you would learn the suck and spit of spent bodies,
that you would break and bloom, and break and bloom,
but through the mill of that mix of ache and injustice
in the world, you would find yourself a father of three
and friend of a clutch of formidable women you know
so intimately that you could take breaths for them,
you would have jumped up and screamed No way!
spilling the lemonade onto dirt like a libation,
your joy too much to contain at such possibility.//
This is how, come Saturday, when you pick your kids
up, you are always so stunned, because who would believe the tooli that
in a world that showers so much terror on skin so dark
you could still make, out of one lemonade-drinking boy so blue,
a full-muscled girl, a wise-cracking boy and a wide-grinning girl? ///
A Concise Geography of Heartbreak
HUMAN
...it starts from the skin, the same way
Europeans came from the shore, smiling,
setting up trading posts. When they whisper
in your ears, nibble on your lobes, sending
a shiver running through you, that’s Stanley
pretending to be an explorer, but under contract
to King Leopold. A finger runs down
your chest, raising goosebumps, your lips
lock and your oil reserves run free.
ENVIRONMENTAL
You are learning
a new language, every limb of your body
possessed by the fire of this love that smelts
gold, aluminium, copper, tin and iron ore. You run
when they ask,
doing do-for-love things, making their lives
easier. Meanwhile, they are with friends planning
how to deceive you, use you – it’s the Berlin Conference
in kisses. They are all up inside you,
you are in your feelings, sappy
as sliced rubber trees.
PHYSICAL
You want to drop seeds and shit,
hell, maybe you do – one or two –
until some night, the forest fires start.
It’s like the worst kind of heartburn –
all that BS you’ve swallowed.
You start an independence movement,
define limits, draw borders. They come pleading,
they offer enticements, Ambassadors
make compelling cases, seeding tears
in your eyes. But once you have seen
their true purpose, you can’t unsee it: you must
save your heart – even if it means you will hurt,
even if the new country your carve is
an assembly of broken things. It is yours.
You will compose an anthem
and sing it like an orgasm. You will
sew a flag from fragments of new insight,
fly it as high as you hold your head.
Underbelly
You are seven, her eyes are molten,
her chin weighs what your thinking
weighs on the heels of your palms,
your fingers are feathers along the lines
of her cheekbones. She is about to kiss
you, but a gaggle of friends come in
and she spits in your face instead.
You will remember that moment when
you are twenty-eight and you trace
the point when a lover you meant to marry
turned sour on you, to an evening out
with her girlfriends discussing the lure
of unpredictable men. Suddenly she’s asking
about circumcision – a new interest in dicks.
The twenty-one year gap in betrayals
hasn’t changed you. Your boys don’t understand,
neither can the ex’s friend who sleeps with you
now: how can you be so calm – happy even?
But your thoughts are feather-light with little
memories: the euphoric pull of dark eyes, loving
moments together, away from the baying crowds.
lenguaje
Whisper to me in the language I know
when I know no language, when my face
still bears the map of sleep, the clear trace
of fatigue passing, mute and steady as breath.
Call out at the hour when I am uncertain
whether the sky’s clustered darkness threatens
rainfall or signals night fading away.
Coax my protest muscle from my mouth’s shell,
coat my lips with a fine dew of argument
and place your morning plea beyond barriers
of translation. Let tongue touch tongue, test,
and by degrees reach fluency in the lingua
that calls forth the earth’s children, conjures flesh
from lust. I entreat you with love – in Ga.
Kɛ i’tsui aka shwɛ
“You see, I could conceive death,
but I could not conceive betrayal.” – Malcolm X
Ojotswalɔ, my heart
