Paperworks
By Simbo, Olumide Manuel
Let this recital begin with the folding of her mottled laughs
Into something that holds and firms like a toddler’s stride—
By which I mean every face of her laughter wears a faux bright,
A somatesthesia, and it’s hard to know if it’s a scalar
Or a vector, or a door painted into a wall.
X
There’s no art to wreckage,
she says, no geometry
to griefs. Everybody
is a work of chaos. And I,
unhumbly a masterpiece.
All my scars are half-burnt umber,
tattooed like fingers of thorns fraying
the nightwears of the moon,
begging the tides to maw
the quicksands of memories.
X
A marigot of dead fish oxbowed the twenty
and one mares stitched to my pillow, unthreading my sleep.
Silence fights temptations, to tango with the tangles
of raven hair & sleepy murmurs.
This is why I never understand everytime she calls me
an inn
and herself a wanderer —her own bed
banished her into retracting embraces.
X
But she’s the most obvious mask I wear. This love is.
X
In the shallows, lust pearling all the miracles
inside and between Us, blue palimpsests.
I do not want to share my grief with you
I do not want to share you with grief.
X
A foot in; the waves uneager, two feet in; the waves
uneager —whether the body sinks or floats
the ocean is as dead as the fishes, and
if the body is only a ghost, departure lingers
as the folded wings of paper firebird
—it will not fly, it will not sing,
it will burn and never rise again.
Simbo, Olumide Manuel is a Nigerian poet whose works have appeared/are forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Club Plum, Grand Little Things and Twyckenham Notes. A lover of fictional books, movies and music, he’s up for the escapism they provide, and the realities embedded in them. He tweets and retweets @Olu_midemanuel.