A Leaf Said

If you really have all the time

in the world,

then why do you check your watch?

Only trees have that,

and they don’t care.

But, then again,

they don’t do any harm, do they?

If you were born green behind the ear

and you’ve more bark than bite

than a clockface make you might.

Unheard Poem

Insensitivity

is the biggest evil in the world.

Forget about arms trading,

globalisation, homogenisation,

conflict escalation,

political hesitation,

moral degeneration,

climatic destabilisation

and growing unease.

What about your fellow human?

Are your eyes open?

Did you have to jack your ear wide

to receive the token

of a spoken kiss?

(Leaning like trees.)

And was it bliss?

Did you think about this?

Were your feelings amiss?

Are their shoes uncomfortable?

Are they wet, rain cloying

through holes born of walking

and bullet talking,

more balking than the voice

of a human.

When you see through their eyes,

do the colours run?

Is there a bruised sun,

blotched moon, ugliness in bloom?

Or is the ugliness in you,

projected all askew,

as you canter like a star

throwing another off course?

Equinox and Solstice

The procession of the world

is a wonderful thing –

the natural order

changing ever so slowly;

the days wax into each other

unnoticed, except for the stars,

the falling leaves,

the coming drifts of snow

and lull of birds.

But equinox and solstice are elsewhere,

for I am in a train carriage

peopled by drunk idiots

repeating the game, the trick,

and hoping for a different result,

and the dream of season seems

as alien to me

as trying to find signs

in the puddle of last night’s

exuberant excess.

You Can Have Your Love and Eat It

Dress yourself in your own creation.

The new day ushers in a new style.

Dress and have dressed the cessation

of the truth undergirding all the while.

The steel frame, flimsy made,

the cardboard sticks, scotch tape meld,

support you, heavy, burdened maid,

and, struggling, load goes upheld.

Frailty, poor frailty of youth,

exchange not, nor questions asked.

No thoughts to be laid out as rail –

pretend to fit all under mask.

Love incomplete – care

arm half-cocked;

confidence shall sure impair

the trade,

your cellar bare, half-stocked.

Collar bones are hollow stones

and backs of knees are naked trees

and napes of necks are old birds’ nests,

and love’s cradle was never rocked.

One Amongst Many

You look smart in your low heels

but I wonder what you believe:

do you believe you are

a crucial member of society?

A pillar that self must not erode?

Do you believe in impropriety?

Piety?

Do you see small fry

as a load?

Are molehills mountains

Are wellsprings fountains?

Are shadows little men,

little foreign travelling men,

that fill you up with shouting?

Are opinions really carat

when put on scales with shit?

Are your hands held open

because you expect the prize to fit?

Are you waiting, solemn soldier,

somewhere in the line

far behind the grating

quiet voice within your mind?

You Can Extrapolate

Women's feet

hold the promise of dream

but only when a plain foot

slippered in an open-toed sandal

appears

will you know the truth.

Painted toes

and high heels

and naked feet,

and all just

a dressing

for the mind.

Virgin

Are you a virgin? You ask.
What do you mean by this?
Do you mean, 
have you penetrated a vagina?
If that's what you mean, then yes,
I am.

Do you mean,
have you penetrated a man's anus, or
have you in turn been penetrated?
Neither. No.

And do you mean,
have you penetrated
the heart and mind,
and all that lies behind
the frosted glass of the flesh?

Then yes! yes! yes!
I have. But have you?
I doubt it, with a gaze so brittle
and a mind pierced with thistle,
like a dark tower 
stretching down
into the earth.

Man and Woman.

'Female' - the feeble male,
extending from Creation tale;
but 'mankind' once meant both sexes -
vexation not, nor gender hexes.

Taken from a man's rib -
ever such a blundering fib;
subject to her patriarch,
a little flightless thing in dark.

Both have their lineage in furry things,
evolved from lizard parts, the slings
of Time nurse us through the change
of body, mind, and social games.

200,000 years, and more to come.

History works through cause and effect -
nothing happens out of step.
When you think about it, we're all
small players in a grand scheme -
simple cogs in an elegant machine.
This is humanity;
this is the human dream:
we are the light playing
on time's e'erflowing stream.

We dazzle the water,
we increase the load;
the future will eat us
and history will show.
And history will show
everything about us -
even the unacknowledged realities
that surround us.

Nonsense.

I went into my garden on
the last blue Moon
and found gnomes eating
waffles in the petunias;
they held clenched between
their toes several spoons
and shuvelled like gravellers
their tuck all peculiar.

Wiffleball bats
danced like flowers
and cursed at me
for lacking mental vigour;
my imagination, they held,
should be red devourer
with a dripping violence
and a hallucinating snigger.

These gnomes were perverse
as they ground all vile
against the wiffle-bat flowers
like imps drunk on lust:
their teeth were all spangley,
like piano teeth of crocodile,
and they guffawed aloud
like drunken gnomes must.

And in this confusion
I heard the kettle steam:
after the click,
the release of a cry.
If only this madness
were the kernel of a dream,
but I fear, dear reader,
this nonsense is mine.

Things fall apart.

for Chinua Achebe.

I sit in my obi
grinding my teeth,
handling my chin
sternly, firmly
as my wives people their huts.

They finally arrived:
the white devils,
the mad men.
They chant about a god
and his son -
he must have a wife, too.

They tell us our gods are false -
the Oracle, our chis,
Agbala, the earth goddess,
Amadiora, Ugwugwu, Evil Forest.

Slowly, they have destroyed us,
undermined us,
stolen from us
the minds of our children.

Our ancestors weep nightly
and the elders pray for them
to seek vengeance.

Inadvertently, things have fallen apart:
they have guns and iron horses.
They have disproved every tenet of our religion
and have replaced it
with their own,
which we cannot fathom.

The nine villages are fragments now.
The world, our world,
once so knowable
is alien to us.

They have cut through it,
through us,
through our lives.
Things fall apart.

There's always something new to say.

With each day,
write a poem:
there's always something new to say.

The old man in his
rubbery skin
and the child
blooming,

the aye-aye
with his fingers thin
and the proboscis monkey's
nose;

the black man
with his story thin
because his richness
he does not know.

The white man
with his heart of gold,
the Oriental
with his smile;
the gentleman
with his walking stick
and flâneur sins beguiled.

The sunflower with its
droopy head:
the yellow of its mouth;
it catches sunbeams,
communes with light;
faces the south.

The kittens in their basket.
The laundry in the corner.
The old folks sitting, twitching.
The order of disorder:

repeats itself like an old joke
that always somehow rings true.
There's always something new to say, see?
Paint it red, yellow, blue.