Malleability is the First Act of Vacillation

I sit in my room wondering what shape the world
will take up next. My body weary from alignments,
and compressions, and expansions, and pathless arcs.
Outside, there are dragon-flames, the age of Fire: every
tongue, a funnel of combustion, fuelled by time’s solubility.
The world itself, malleable in destruction—its very essence
sets it off on a path of deconstruction, the theory of ashes.
Not that my room is resistant but it is the only place I can
shed my skin without shame, burn on the altars of solitude.
And if this poem is the beginning, my room is Eden. An apple
walks into my mouth and I taste Eve’s skin: crunchy with guilt,
sugared with condemnation. Something about the tongue veers
us away from the palls of redemption. Although I am naked,
I am not Adam—I cannot begin this odyssey of perambulations
with a crisp curse; what do I say to the serpent when he knocks?
Spare me the goodwill, I have seen shapes and shapes and shapes
but I have never seen an hour move so strange ticking with shadows
and shadows and shadows as though light is a taboo. Spare me.
The world is a shapeless plot and before my room ingests
a sheet of flame like a story with an incendiary twist, I will
say a prayer for this garden where the seeds of death blossom.

Testaments of Highwaves

in this poem you are the restless body of a country
courting the apocalypse. your conscription, a willing

plunge, an endearment of desolation, hieroglyphs
of manifestation etched on your forehead. you say

it is no scandalous affair: bones forged as effigies
of self-denial. the proof sprouts, entombments seeping

out, serpentine strands of hair. how can your lips
crave honeyflowers yet revel in the crater, snuffing

gunpowder? what’s the taste of ashes gnawing
your tongue? your spine is a dystopian song.

how can you pine, ploughing day’s breath for miracle
ridges yet copulate night’s pronging palms on inferno-futons

of unbelief? what’s the taste of ashes gnawing
your tongue? your spine is a dystopian song.

a rhino-horn burgeons from your pericardium; ode to
an extinction that detests aubades. your thorax, a mapped

sortie of malaise, and your navel is the nascence spurring
the great flood. what’s the aftertaste of these songs

when your waist wiles every crevice for climax?
in this poem, your heritage is the romance of tragedy

where love is death, and dismantling bodies are borderless
memories of dust, the testaments of highwaves.

Mob

All the memories of the past revisit me as ghosts
and beckon me to a conversation at time’s table.

I yield like a shore to the carnivorous strides
of a drunk tide, unbolt my body for the incursion.

Memory, the foreskin of consciousness, unwithering,
undying, hangs with the panache of palatial garnitures.

I try to flee, far from this unheralded swinging
of shadows minted in lightspeed, but everywhere I set

my teeth of dust is an enclave of something that refuses
to disappear, or admit evanescence. Eyes of fireplaces

knitting snow-forests, the owls in cyclical obsession
where my body is the night of oblivion, a disciple that

should be ingested by the drunk tide. Something about
the past weaves the caskets of darkness with canes

of grief and ships them to heartposts. And the peril
of the hour is that there isn’t enough light lurking

in our marrows to turn these graveyards to regales
of pristine fireworks. So, we unbolt the lids and lower

our bodies into a congregation of fleshless beings
where every man’s bone is an artefact of nothingness
tirelessly marauding the earth as time’s loyal mob.

Osieka Osinimu Alao is a Nigerian writer and poet. His works have appeared in International Human Rights Art Festival, Lumiere Review, Of Poetic Yellow Trumpets, Arts Lounge Magazine, Nantygreens, and elsewhere. He is @OOAlao_ on Twitter & Instagram.