Respectfully

Fuck the clouds
Galloping into our lungs
Fuck metaphors fuck beauty fuck rhythm
Fuck local wells arguing with canals
Arguing with graveyards
Chirping about the numbers
They wield 
Fuck bullets who forget masters
Who paid for their wings 
Fuck February fuck October
Fuck this land
Plundering red to shine its green 
Fuck it
Mistaking our ribs for floorboards
Fuck poets 
That turn bodies to flowers
As if a flower ever gets a tombstone
Fuck me
Fuck god
Forgive me father 
Fuck your silence
Fuck your busy
Fuck holding vigils
For a future to be patched
With our limbs fucked
Fuck fuck fuck
Trying to eat
Blue like a good child 

There should be Songs

For the gutters
Of milk, fields
Of cocoa,
Toned calves
From bikes,
Bodies
Clothed with life,
Forests of gold,
Broken clouds,
Jazz, and shadows
Of elders. Songs
For the famine
Of flood and fire,
Nappy grasses,
Feet’s fed
With palm wine,
Fertile mud,
Footprints of children
And rivers
Swimming
In oil fields. Songs
With loud drums
Accompanied by
Honeying cobalt,
Echoes of the savannah
And skulls
Of the strangers
You like to photograph
While they wear
A smile.

Dirge

For Olamide Alli

Nothing to say except you died exactly like we will
                                                    eyes plucked,
and that women burnt their eyes crying
and a few men ran out
offering tissues
                                                    not their eyes.

As If Never Knowing Hunger

They built a fire, cut a man
Worst than any dog
A tyre here, three there
Turned black bones grey as if by miracle
His flesh charred will turn pork
To fill their bellies. Imagine
Forgetting
The blood in your veins.
Fuel scarce as it is rained
And the sky didn’t break
Into a river.
When I walk the streets
I collapse in anger.
    I can’t
They, as if never knowing hunger
Tied a man
Marched him to a knife
Under God’s blue sky.
For a loaf
They dazed the street
With his blood,
Made the whole town pledge
Allegiance to their poverty.