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.