Write ourselves alive

There is an unwavering silence 

Tucked between my heart and mind

Little by little, my blood rushes in

Trying to give an erection to my thirst

 

How about we lick each other’s wounds

So says my silence, and build pyramids while

We are at it, a ceremony to sanctify our union

Untangle our woes into ropes with grits

That would help us climb the new heights

 

New seasons will fall upon us

This might quiet the wars within us

At least for a while, until the master has dined

And his uniformed men have rested their rifles 

Yet we’ll lay in our beds with our eyes peeled

To catch ourselves tumbling with their rubbles

 

These people 

They want to see their feet 

Breathing deep into our noses

They want our fruits and our water, to 

Toss it around on their breakfast table 

 

Hands shrouded in ashes of the gone

The streams still hold the blood of our people 

We are weeping with our hands on our mouths 

Matching to look at the pistol straight in the eye

Joy! Hope wasn’t meant to look us in the face

We’ll remain pleated between fear and anger

Praying to rise when the dust settles

 

Maybe you or maybe I 

Should begin to write ourselves alive.

Everything adores being alive

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, too occupied with you

That I leave myself stranded at the bus stop 

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, shoved my finger

In your heart’s soup to taste where your love is

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the friends of today

And the ones before them who took all of me

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the wine bringers, and 

The empty hands sitting at my dinner table 

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the pre-breakfast rants

That’ll end up being one giant laugh tomorrow

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the bullies from the past

And how I nearly became them to the one I love 

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, all the kindness I offered 

And how it never returned, taken all for granted

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the ex’s remorse

And how his ugly past tainted my yesterday 

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, cleaning the elephant

Forgetting the peace of wild things

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the ones who beg for 

My money, only to use it to boost their status 

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the fights I walked out of 

And how I couldn’t sleep thinking about them 

 

I am feeling everything and everyone 

All at the same time, the truth of my lies

Forged to dictate my heart into loving pain

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, my father shrinking

When the cable man threw dirt on his kindness

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the words of the holy books

And how the assembly of today interprets them

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the ones who sit on my

Silences and crowd it with their judgments

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, how I raised myself

Without the hands of my parents to fall on

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the ones I feed, who

Extend their gratitude by letting me starve

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the old jokes that leave

Stains on the new fabrics I have woven today

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the ones whose sofas I slept on

While I figure out where my life is headed

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the death I escaped 

And how gutted it left me feeling, till date 

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the boy I used to be, and

How I killed him because I couldn’t love him

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the home I’ll return to

In a country and a language, I’m yet to meet

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the fish in my tank 

And all the beauty it repaired my heart with 

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the boy on the train

And how he rose to let the old man seat

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the music of Cleo Sol

And how it hugs my heart as if it were my shrine

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the visitors who came

And leave wet towels lying on my neat bed

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the fright in my heart

And how I couldn’t find the words to tell it 

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the clothes in my closet 

And how they hold the memories of you and I 

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the poets who chose silence

While the women and children die in the Congo and Gaza

May their breakfast taste like ash in their mouths 

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the fear in my throat

And how I spit it in the faces of others as they eat 

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the stranger at the park

And how his smiles renovated my loneliness

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the boy I could’ve been

If I wasn’t a consequence of all that went wrong

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, who God is

And how people bleed their hurt on others

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the reason I’m still alive

And all that I will become before the cross-line 

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, everything I shouldn’t 

Calling it a truce, a warm bed to sleep on

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, the crowd I’m surrounded by

And how lonely they make me feel

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, my father and his love

And how he crossed the bar so soon

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, all the things

That my therapist says I should let go of

 

I am feeling everything and everyone

All at the same time, and as the last leave falls

So shall my life. At least I can say, that I’ve lived

But is that enough, for me?

It blooms like peonies

You are a boy with no feet

Yet you keep wandering away from us

Come back here, hear us say who you are

And then we’ll want to hear you say, amen 

 

It’s another night again

Shayo is cold and his silence is crowded

He’s been thinking about ending it all

The long days that pour themselves on us

Too broken to allow us to be who we exist 

 

How do I gather music to tell Muhammad too

That he is born to wear someone else’s life

Dress in their socks and shoes

Then spray their perfume, all over him

A disguise that the market women will notice

They’ll call him a woman with a man’s erection

 

And the boys he’d want to play with

They will throw sand in his sandwich 

Mimic how his hips sway on their way home

Tell him who he is before he knows it himself

 

His mother would raise her hands on her head

The next day she’ll pour the concoction the priest brewed

Shove its entirety in his dried mouth, then

Ask him if his inside textures have changed

This’ll be before his uncle whips his backside

With a reflection to retain him over the years

Then condition him to be man-like, like him

 

Shayo, Shayoo, Shayooo

How many times have I called you?

Listen, I’ll pray it out of you if I need to

You will not bring shame to this compound 

Our neighbors would never witness our bleeding

God forbid your ruination drag us by our lotioned legs

 

You know how to call shame by its first name

And invite her to sit with our good reputation

Those white men and the movies you watch

Don’t let them colonize you, do you hear me

Do I hear you say amen

 

It’s another night again

Shayo is cold and his silence is crowded

He’s been thinking about ending it all

The long days that pour themselves on us

Too broken to allow us to be who we exist 

 

I know pain very well

I blink and it comes running

Blooms in my blood like peonies

Slices a heart and leaves loose ends stranded

Retires its wounds and healings on all that I touch

And when I look in the mirror I see its vicious face

Drooling its endless aches all over my silky sheets

 

How can I save myself without leaving a trace?

A spill, a giggle, a last name, a poem, a blood stain

A target, and their sharp-edged tool on my back

 

How can I live a life and not leave

A reminder of ever having to exist, here. 

How to kill a thing that lives

Tell it you love it

Then neglect it to be alone and rot

With the stench of your absence 

Throw a blanket on its green 

 

Starve it from its air

Question its genuinity 

Curse it for being kind, shiny

Drain the moist out of its roots

Smack an axe into its stomach

And accuse it of not being enough

Enough for you and your stingy ego 

 

Hide your tissues

So when it cries it flows like a river

Until it’s high enough to drown itself

Sit by the window and keep an eye

On its deterioration as you laugh hard

 

Undo your deeds

Let your promises wither 

When it asks for water tell it to suck its pillows

Pick it by the leg and drag it into the darkness 

Flog it until it bleeds, until it turns black & blue

Turn around, tell it you are wrong for loving it

 

-(With tears in my eyes, I said)-

That is how you kill a thing that lives

That is how you kill a thing that lives 

That is how you kill a heart that loves.

The mourning wind

Dry the ocean

The blood and the children

Dry the throat and the soul

 

Dry the word on every tongue

Dry the pledges and the colours on the sky’s skin

 

Dry the soil and all that preys on it

Dry the hand that gives and the one that takes

-When the wind mourns

-Everything should mourn with it

 

Dry the ocean

The blood and the children 

Dry the throat and the soul

 

Dry it now

Dry it now, all of it

Today and tomorrow too.

For fear of what?

It’s all but shame now

The bottomless that feeds the other hand 

And the spider webs that cement marriages of

Some men and women who spite each other

But veil their anger with a pretentious smile 

 

But Nelleke 

You and only you have vanished, completely

The nights have put a face on your savings 

On all your denial of the wrong, to your mother

But! She who has birthed you knows you

Too well, too well enough to see the now 

 

It sickens me down into my stomach, that

In a field where every wrong repeats itself

More than just twice, more than just twice

That you could shelter a war so warmly

Budgeting your tomorrow into someone 

whose eyes are drunk, on another 

 

And Nelleke 

There are always new people to meet

Voices of new lovers needful of hearing, you

Must not starve on a lover’s leftover disease 

And make your heart one that improvises

For fear of what, a new beginning? 

From Blossoms to Doom

For desire

Wild strawberries hunger for my mouth’s spit

Praying to God on the seventh day of ripeness

Single mothers secreting their breast milking

From the agreement of their wild creatures

 

On the lips of my grandma trees grow on wind

And their fruits never landed on the soil

My reason, life has been mutilated too 

And my father is withering yonder 

 

What’s it like to squeeze once a boy

Between mystery, adulthood, and splendor 

Breathing within rich hours a borrowed life 

Splashed between the black and white 

 

Some questions you might ask, and 

God says yes to the fallen who pray

Decent in his flames, going over it all again

Sleeping amongst the fear of somebody’s soul 

Baking guilt out of forgiveness for breakfast 

 

Twenty-three, alone with no porch 

Knowing nothing of the broken moon

This room hoists more kindness than grief

The ocean questions the purpose of my feet 

Must I pause and plant a seed of doom, after 

These fishes caught in nests swim backward 

 

First, they came from the pity of bastards

To the sugarcanes, our quiet has pledged

Killing time dressing the holes in their minds

Fools, who think of themselves as prophets 

Now teeth their claws in the belly of the sky

A life fell asleep, the young turned grey

 

Refugee nostalgia 

Going without saying 

Supervising the common herd

On what the living does after a funeral

 

In our own eyes

They see us too too little

Sometimes our everything equates to nothing 

To them, with their smelly egos and “sympathy”

 

But this land, huh!

This land has witnessed God’s own confession

This land has vowed for the end of the owls

This land has drowned in its very own tears 

Oh! Today I beg to be my own God, please.

Pale Fires

It’s as if my emotions have blurred

Into the lines, you’ve touched

By your untitled waters

 

Every stain on my tongue

Now consumes freckles of nothingness

Spends the nights awake, talking to the void

About the deadly wounds, I crown in my mouth

 

A grey red color overlays the shaft of time

Wrongfully gifting it to the chosen insets

Where I belong and you do not belong to

A crusade for a loss too heavy it drowns itself

 

I am such a branch, that sometimes

I let myself down

 

And, I might be growing wrong

Into these green grasses that hold teeth

Windows of yellow that open then now buttoned

These backs and fronts have unloaded me

Oh! Precious one, aren’t you blue enough?

Every night I watch myself die

Every night I watch myself die

And some nights

I want to stop myself from dying

But the privilege in death teases me

 

And every time I put a finger on the trigger

I think I hear the sound of my home,

Calling me to come home.

Melting Sugar Walls

The sun will swoon in

Here, after all these days have wept rain

You will pick yourself from the barren you sit

You will spill a smile on yourself, rub it all over

 

You will assemble to meet yourself arriving

You will greet yourself at your entrance

With your own keys

 

You will dance in the open veranda 

You will come in, to your own house

You will quench your own thirst

You will sit on your own lounge

You will eat cake, red velvet 

The one you’ve made

With your own hands

 

You will love yourself

Before a stranger, you will become

You will be unavailable to the world

Because you are very occupied

Meeting yourself

Giving your heart back to yourself 

 

All these wounds

All these wounds you’ve kept

To spend on another, you will bury them here

Where your sunflowers could never bloom

 

You will forgive them

For what they couldn’t be 

You’ll throw new seeds 

Into the womb of the earth 

 

You will praise your eyes

You will massage your tired feet

You will wipe your mouth for all it’s dropped

You will scrub your skin and lotion it good

With the light that shines through your walls

 

You will dress in your own clothes

Walk to the bookshelf in your living room

You will pick every letter that now lays 

Blanketed in dust, you will toss them away

 

You will look into the mirror

Where yourself you will greet

You will peel this boy from his shadow

You will wear him immediately 

Before a stranger, he will be

 

You will sit down, with yourself 

You will break bread, with yourself 

You will pour yourself a glass of fine wine

You’ll say cheers, you’ll feast on your own life.

Sisters that hunger

You are him

Your father’s daughter

You stretch your tongue and you say thank you

You stretch your tongue and you say I love you, Baba.

 

xx

Lamin & Abdoulie

I cleaned before you

I sit in myself

I sit within myself

I sit to witness myself

 

You come with your hiatus

You sit within it, stretch it out

You heighten it, I mean your “ego”

 

I’ve cleaned my house before you

I will clean my house after you

Only because I am clean.

 

I will sit where your eyes wouldn’t reach

I’ll embrace my toes and swallow my tongue

I’ll nibble on your death, the one you gave me

I’ll empty my body just so I can breathe you in

 

Ah! it’s always quiet in this deep

Until a voice comes to break it

But this voice, it comes from neither of us

 

The sins we try to drown with your hands

The toys we tore out of guilt

They stare at us now 

As we lick our wounds

 

We must not point out we’ve been bypassed

By the time, by the endless immoderation

I still wear your name on my tongue

I still write letters to our old address

Where the hills have eyes

And the stagnant waters run deep

Hoping you’ll be found there, breathing

 

And I tell myself

The moon is only but a cocktail tonight

I will drink it, with you, with our mouths

But none of us will shout cheers I know

 

I am not afraid of the fallen

At least not here, not tonight

Not with this sea of silence between our lips

Not even, with your backbone facing mine

You’ll throw me a rope before I hit earth

You’ll look into my eyes like I’m painted,

By the hands of your heart

 

But for you tonight, what must I wear

A smile on my nakedness?

You like it when I smile

So, I’ll wear my best smile tonight 

For all that we could have had

For all that we could have been

For all that wasn’t written, to be our fate.

Don’t call me that

Sometimes,

I plop an entire bulb of garlic,

Into my tomato soup, I know that well

 

But don’t you call me your lover,

I am only your friend,

Your friend that kisses you in the mouth,

Sometimes.

Classical Madness

 Punch me with your words

Punch me with your sword

Punch me with your brick in my mouth

With your two-piece ego and drowning claws

Bang me with your fistful of lies

With your dirty flags shoved in my throat

Cut me with your sharpened two-edged blade

With your love that runs smooth like honey

And your skin that gropes as elegant as silk

Remember we are green

So must our love be rough and rebellious

The city burns in our headlines tonight, so

Let’s use rage to paint the beauty of our lust

Raw like the oceans that drown their tongues

Do you think we know love? And if yes

What is it that you think we know about love,

Except for her name and how our bodies burn?

Beat me with your shaft, in my face

Till I bleed like a fountain, high and dry 

Write a song, a poem in the beauty of my gunk

Shake that disease of youthfulness in my bed

I love you and Valentine ain’t got shit on us!

V for vengeance, for all the nights, spent apart!

Mortar my heart and hit it with a shovel now

Hard, rough, shaggy, uneven, rhythmless

Until every prison, I keep swoons 

I promise not to tell our mothers

The pedestrians

They will stare at our burns

Let them call it for what it is

A tea kettle on a stove 

A classical madness 

Rock and roll

Crazy shit!

Again, fight me with your love

Your jealous honesty and your sweet smile

Confuse me with your lust, your shredded skin

Build a bridge with my downside, walk on it

Ask me to stoop low as you conquer my being

Let’s cheers to this youthful madness we call love!

Then punch me again, like 

How love punches a heart

In all the right places, Oh!

Say it, how enjoyably it hurts

Keep a poem between your teeth

Drink it the next time someone honors you less

Remember I love you first?

And that you smudged at me for saying it first?

That all in all, this was yours to be told first?

In Amsterdam, before any other place first?

Punch me

For all that seems to be for love

Punch me

For all that seems to be for lust

Punch me

For all that seems to be our juvenescence

Punch me

For all that seems to be of certainty right now 

It’s your name on the skin of my skies

It’s my kiss on the fields of your lips

So say it now, say it loud for every ear to hear

As we dawdle in these white sheets tonight

As we burn our bodies together, for love.

A twist on the wrist

You ask for a poem

I handed you a piece of my tongue

You look at me as if I am not enough

Pushed me towards a farther shore, nude 

As if all that I give are impenetrable scars 

 

You ask for my name

I told you how old I am

You smeared my sweet smile on your face

Entreated me to go back to the drawing table

And comprehend how it is to pick the crayons

 

Darling, face me with your truth

Do you think I am not abundant

That my vigor has no meat around them

Do you sink me in a bowl with other fishes

And found out that I am capable of drowning,

Easy, soft, silent to your dismay?

 

You ask for my melody

I offered you a blade of my grass

Each time I give you a sliver of me

You make it feel as if I am difficult with giving?

 

You face me with your backbone

As if my tongue couldn’t tailor images

As if my hands haven’t gathered enough,

Sticks to light your unwilling, kerosene-less fire

Funny, I thought we were twin planets

Is this fire I can offer not enough? 

 

Now, I whimper

Without urge in my name

A bird with a broken wing I might be

But, let’s come back to the drawing board

You say I must stretch skyward from now on

So I mirror you above and beneath, must I?

 

But thank you

For the warm socks, you promise to give

I am not angry, I am not hurt, it’s just that

Moments like these make me miss home

And to wonder why I chase the things I chase

 

I’ve been here, at this same juncture

Wound me with your blade of forfeiture

This boy, he’s been dreary many a time, yes

He will slumber, roam like a penny, far, wider 

He would gather every ruin and every courage

And climb your borders again.

Let this stay between us

This bleeding poem that holds feet

May her fears fetch starlights in the gloom

Awake every shadow under the breast of God

Before his scorching sun awakes us tomorrow

 

These hungry silences

Breathing in my chest

May their nights’ pillow all the weights we ferry

Sing them into their new homes as we repent

For loving yet another man’s misery

 

These hungry hands

That touch the raven

May they keep space for the sunlight too, for

Remembering to keep their word and exonerate the frost

For loving another man’s man again, and

Their children who will clutch our torches

 

This poem that is happening

Shhh! let her stay between us

For the fear of their’ headaches

For goodness, you must know

Is a commodity our modernity dearth

 

These flowers standing in my wounds

May their fears fetch seeds of courage

After every eye has achieved weeping tonight

 

I know better

Than to reduce a man

For what he brings to the table

But if it is not enough, I will stare him in the eyes

 

My heart is too little, too abundant it fountains

I have squeezed my all  in the luggage of my poems

Some still fatherless

Some are still naked without a mattress to rest on

They will grow to know my feet is not rooted anywhere

And all my bones that remain

May they have a flesh to claim.

 

 

The ocean in my Veins

I’ve learned to stretch it all

My bones, my kindness, my beliefs and all

The memories of the father on my tongue

 

I’ve learned to calm its chaos

Every ocean in my veins

 

Gift it a skin, a truce

Sat him in a room full of ears and lovers

With a little bit of sunlight piercing the windows

 

I’ve learned to stretch it all

My back, my roots, my name

Everything, except for the truth.

 

Gold in the shape of Honey?

The tiny cracks

That set up this avalanche

Whose feet will they unleash on,

And the quiet that remains before our eyes,

Whose lips will survive to tell their anecdotes?

Erwin’s Eyes

I’ve heard

That sometimes

Love sneaks in like a thief 

And consume you within its thirst 

 

And sweet Erwin

He oozes with love as if he were a perfume

I can scent it on him, I can see it in his eyes.

Everyone’s got to pray sometimes

Bless the hands that give

Bless the mouth that speaks truth

Bless the water for being the water she is

 

Bless the moon that shines

Bless the boy who watered the roots

Bless the eyes that remember yesterday

 

Bless the tortured who forgives

Bless the mother who prays

Bless the feet that follow the sun

 

Bless the ears that listen

Bless the music that heals the wounded

Bless the mind of time as she approaches

 

Bless the seeds of the farmers

Bless the quest of the refugee

Bless the friend those doors are unlocked

 

Bless the heart that’s capable of loving 

Bless the goodness that welds us together

Bless the neighbors that love their neighbors

 

Bless the food on every table

Bless the trees for honoring the rain

Bless the worshipper with what he wishes 

 

Bless the flower that blooms

Bless the fist that succumbs to peace

Bless the child who is willing to learn

 

Bless the tongue of the liar

Bless the children in the water

Bless the kindness of the seasons

 

Bless the pure intentioned 

Bless the hater and the hatred

Bless the blind man that sees

 

Bless the envious with his own plate

Bless the hands of the thief and his victim

Bless the boy who is pregnant with a dream

 

Bless the patience of the maker

Bless the seer that is unseeingly blind

Bless the one who cleans after the chaos

 

Bless the sperm of the father 

Bless the womb of every woman

Bless the child that arrives, new

 

Bless you for being

Bless you for worshipping heaven

Bless you, for mentioning the departed.