8 Unconnected Double Triplets Facing The Same Wall
look, i am painting the perfect scenes:
1
an underage boy with a rum on his right hand
& brown big cigarette on his dominant left
like a godfather, sighing in his haven:
he laughed out loud his childhood with bloodshed.
a man said he is an underage boy & i am
saying it too: he’s still living in his rugged childhood.
2
a black man coughed and they ran wildly
as if he a is farmer: as if he breeds that which
can’t be seen or touched like a viral abstraction.
the night is the presenter of everything evil
that is human. & everything beautiful are the moon,
the stars & the two lovers, gazing them to delight.
3
a winter passed without snow & human scoffed
at God before the cold summer came like prophet:
life goes on in everyone’s mouth as a daily song.
in my mouth too, because what i heard is new
unusual & worth remembering so i moved close
to the philosophy of Heraclitus, seething for change.
4
life goes on until man pays well what living
demands as its price. i am seeing a glowing star
today from the atlas of my sight, the moon
from the continent of my beauty: only a few
of solitude knows how to recognize living &
the beauty flying around like the homeless leaves.
5
i did both because i am my own solitude & i know
how to live, & how to give people reasons, too
because i know i am, unlike them, beautiful.
i am alone because i love myself too much
too much i cry to experience the thrillingness
of consoling myself into funny moments.
6
this is the funniest part: she read the letter—
his love letter —to her mother’s hearing & she
laughed & began comparing his ‘a’ to her man’s.
she returned the letter with a poem, bleached with
an epigraph, saying: the time is not right now to write
the better lines, but wait, wait till you can wait no more.
7
on a saturday morning, some beautiful people
came to the mosque, plating their sadness & what not
through the loudness of their voice & genuflecting steps.
& after the sunday school, a boy pointed his finger
into a question: how fast is the answering of a prayer?
his pastor replied: how far you can say the name.
8
the boy called the name, & rain fell, after
the falling of the rain, a rainbow coloured the firmament,
after the colouring of the sky, the boy died
looking back at the mouths of his mother turning
back on God. the palms of his father, slapping
the alter: that what God did is not so divine.
A Silhouette Of An Almost Perfect Sister
for AM Mariam
black is beautiful, but we keep bleaching our skins
into the chocolate of being perfect
as if we would drink our melanin of grave insults.
we laugh together because black is blissful more
when love grows in the orchard a man of soft heart
gardens with his tender touch, when love grows
in the garden a beautiful girl of patience waters
into blossom and nourishment.
i never had my mind drenched in the rain
of sorrow alone: i look outside myself to see innocence,
waning away like the desert sands in the touch
of the paroxysmal wind. i see beautiful turning prosaic
like a political speech divested of anaphora.
but she knows: a coercion is not enough to break a man
into fragments of unending happiness.
you have to mirror the shape of his mouth
in his toughest time the way the sun mirrors itself
through the transparent face of the ocean.
you have to mirror his waking and sleeping time
you have to mirror what he mirrors with the shards
of his perambulating mind.because black is beautiful:
she beautified everything blocking her way against
the toughness of my darker room.
she knows: the only thing beautiful about darkness is
the darkness itself, that everything beautiful
about everyone is in the perimeter of their pained mind.
in the wake of everyday, she wakes up to see me
snoring the stress away, knowing zilch
about her prophethood, prophesied in the antiquity
of coming like a thief in the night.
AM Kamaal is a Nigerian poet, and writer. When he’s not writing, he reads Jericho Brown, Ezra Pound, and philosophy. He could also listen to the evergreen music of Àyìnlá Ọmọwúrà all day.