ICE

“And paving stones like Jocko Graves, the slave of General Washington, who froze to death, enfolded in snow on the banks of the Delaware River. His lantern out in front of him, awaiting his master’s return.”

— Roger Reeves

A whiff of leaves causes a treacherous sound to relax its storm neatly into the wind chime.
the white noise, hovering above our heads like a field cry.
a wobbly work song, balancing the country’s weight on a migrant.
& the shotgun approach to a hospitality that erases a body by noon.
this too, a shotgun: how, in my dying, a nurse once bent down like an open fire order
to gather up the fallen mess of me, crippled by fatigue.
my bloated stomach of ovoid shape, shiny from beneath the sweatshirt—
& I am touched without consent.
consent, as a verb this world refuses to participate in, despite all the actions it absorbs:
a thrown-out lawsuit. snow, hurled at the throat of a new day.
the charmed smoke coming from a nomad’s hot breath lured into a waiting boat
as the sea hot chases him, from wilderness to White House.
violence, the raging kinetics, wheeling this dream out of God’s watery hands.
something about fury demarkets all that restless kindness:
the Barbarian tide, massive waves tumbling like a hedgehog yawning in wild stretches,
rolled inward like a storm, unalive & arriving the shores at the pace of ghost—
this too,a language for everyone that walks the caffeinated morning,dead drunk with tea leaves.
the many plants we swallow in herbivorous demand
to cater for life like a flourishing copse at sunrise,
only to retire to bed slackened by ruin. the body, a fallen stalk,
matted round the couch in the shape of a tumpline. Oliver with the twist,
wanting & wanting more room to knit its dying into a kind of yarn:
a burden for easy carriage, frozen to death in this cold beast of a journey.
Jocko Grave’s reincarnate modelled in new pants, as body lanterns towards survival
the way a figure is misnamed as a “lawn jockey”, like the joke alone blurs his-story.
it breaks my cavalier spirit, to see natives make a sport of a negro.
each day, someone picks up a black monument, renovates it till it loses form,
becomes an object incapable of holding light to a wound
that permits the world to freeze in shock of what dries a body of its water.
I speak of slow breath, below 35°C. lungs, wintered into ice flute.
a sound we’ve come to blow all our pouted lives: descendants of a hacked-to-death orchestra.
the flask of our voices contained by the wind.
here, pneumonia for you brother, enough to infect this world,
to have a say in the country’s weather numbing us to frost.
we walk out on this boat alive, gut in both hands like dirty washing.
son, bearing the torch of his father’s lineage.
the sea eating us up to waist level. our legs, stuck in the mouth of carnivorous waters.
the upper echelon of our bodies decapitated by sharp ripples, cutlassing above shorelines.
I start off as cutlass, knifing the air into a scene of blood.
arms unfurled like a scabbard, brightening the massacre.
the crusade of brothers astonished to a spot, & everyone who has laid their lives to freezing.
show me one black body today, who wouldn’t need thawing to perform autopsy.


A Whimper is the first Language of a Migrant

The night a seizure stole my brother’s body to the back of the yard,
poisoned with a rhythm that rots his loin into an unceremonious dance
destined for ruin in our one room flat, roof heaved into its own discotheque.
his mouth, froth with white balls of anti-venoms.

the spittle wrapped across the reptile of his tongue like a cross-belt.
& how he saves the self from himself; manifesting both poison & cure housed in one jawbone
begs the day & its bag of skin dragged across everywhere like a battle.

my brother—a more ferocious battle, with his skin dragged across our home
like a begging that begins from the kitchen & ends nowhere.

& while he was taking place, I was elsewhere in the gutters of my own imagination,
stitching the bite-marks of mice & slowly becoming the rodding eye of a drainage
whose iron-bagged skin is dragged across the road like a construction work-in-progress.

somewhere in between language & leash, I repeat my head in the low hanging stream of water
that nooses itself like a mother tongue, second guessing ways to will my body to a strangle.
imagine I succeed at it; will I have operated from the right side—where logic is a brute?

when I tell myself I would have worn that decision like a lifetime, I mean:
to live up to its horror as anything else other than a troubled apparition,
designed to ghost between countries, sting my relatives
& everyone who lent a hand in deboning my gum before it teethes.

every poem with venom begins with me questioning what the left & right sides of
my brain are responsible for, to ascertain where I fault on logic & compromise as brute.
the pink of my tongue noosed down, slowly, like a reptile, lassoing the neck of a mouse.

my head in a stream of water here, is called drowning.
my head ragged upon a mother tongue is a different animal,
a kind of dying that language itself into something more than a bubble.

there are days where the right side shields the left, the way the brute in me shields logic,
the way a river shields & crushes my skull into hot balloons of blood
no logic on earth can stitch into a clot, as I tear through water.

the mice, devouring their way out of the gutters of my imagination, & into this world.
they roam life, brown & naked as troubled ghosts.
the wide spread of their gums, jammed across a cracked walnut like ghastly accident.

to make the jaw count for something demands all thirty-two teeth.
so, in my carnivorous hunt for food I break a tooth from the shiny set,
careful not to blood them at an early stage.

I learnt this compromise from the bitemarks of a mouse.
my meat in the wet pit of its mouth, hoarded away from investigation.
like, when the skull of Hitler was brought in for questioning & it pleaded vegetarian.

so, the world offered an olive branch & made him chew on it—
the way both sides of my body were chewed vertically, to meet at the torso like a cross-belt.
the fallen teeth of the mice, now dragged everywhere across the table of a forensic scientist.

I gut the gutter of this animal, not from imagination this time, but with my bare hands.
ripped off its mother tongue, & watched it begin with noise & end in a whimper:
a learned silence, like the first language of a migrant.

the rabbit hole any mouse will go down in, to gnaw the vocal cord into a strangled instrument,
stopping both the flow of blood & music from the right side of the brain—
where the genius of our existence is wild & non-verbal.

*Photo by Precious Madubuike from Unsplash