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Strobe of Time
For Ope & Gbenga
We pick pebbles
from the past
bricks after bricks,
what time makes
of things.
We build dreams of it,
press through doors
we become memories of
and time keeps nibbling
at itself in regeneration
until each room is experience,
but the door is a waking light
so we take the stairs, each at a time,
the blurring line of life
along the climb, each
step a note on a piano,
each stone a block
in this dream, till
it ends in silence
and we begin in breaths
waking from depths
like one new word
in that house built of songs
we still dance here.
Seabird
the seabird circles the sea
drawing the map of shadow,
the boat on the rhythm
of the crest and trough
the crest and trough
of the circle
going on and on along
the rings of ripples you can’t
break us from
the circle drawn by the constant
force of life, the shadow
gliding with the rise and fall
like taking life’s turns
in known concentric circles
we all lost our ways,
trapped in the rings of ripples
breaking off at the end, and
the boat keeps moving on,
floating along the circles
with increasing radius,
the length of time we
hanged on, aware of what it
would mean to be done
not knowing how to be the bird
owning the sky of our sea.
The Animal in the Room
The animal in the room stayed
afar like in the close range of promise.
You stayed like the imposition
of the light that informs my shadow
and how much of me is defined by love,
longings; all that made us the expression
to which our tongue is made; the animal
becoming the conversation of space,
a bidding possibility or what is left
in-between the links of days and days
and I’m begging these seconds to stop saying,
longing, longing, as if I’d own it too,
the slow arm of the clock, how it comes alive,
laughter, you. And when I forget
how close you are, when this patience is lost
and the logic of the beauty concealed
and the beauty revealed is totally forgotten,
your fingers lit upon my bodies, a cup of pollen,
the animal becoming the slug, intricate
as love, breathing in the carapace,
my body knowing another body in me.
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