Confession
There is an opening beneath my skin
with a layer of doors, closed and rigid
like a rock, & another outside it, with doors
on motion like a river, that layer the frivolities
I mould into a temple I visit every Eke day.
Each day, my addictions grow, & reasons
to expand my garden of lust multiply like
a cluster of weeds. How a mind manured
with words of God, tilled in the name of God,
finds a seed—stolen from the stall of Satan—
buried deep in it, handicaps my ingenuity.
It is just unexplainable like loss—the thing
that comes briefly but stays so long it becomes
an identity. Imagine Adam and Eve’s loss of
Heaven, in a day, & their offspring’s centuries
of hunting, for it. I’m gathering my loss—the mirror
of my identity—& I’m reminded of how distant I am
from Eden, how stuck I am here— driven by desires—
& how left alone, I’m most vulnerable like
Adam and Eve in the first test of temptation.
Cluttered Minds
With desperation, you are an inch away
from becoming dust. By which I mean
desperation makes a monster of you until
you prey on your own life. Again, a tanker
falls; the next second, a cluster springs, of people,
with cluttered minds, romanticising the thought
of bunkering. Tell me, what fortune is worthier
than the gift of life, the breath of safety?
The pretext can’t be poverty. I’m sure it will seek
redress at the face of the blatant accusation.
How about the greed to reap what you
didn’t sow? Hear this: Whatever will save you
will not come with a death warrant, will not
make an ash of you when you want to be a rose.
A Colony of Bleached Words
Everything here is a tragedy—scripted—
still in the air, like a rolling stone bulging
with gravity. The hero, at a corner
of his room, is still wearing a smile,
oblivious of the owl that perches on the roof.
A child asks his father why their home is
also their ruin, and the home bombards him
with a parcel of grief that robes the father
in a shroud. Here, to unleash mayhem is cheap:
at the gate of a sheep’s pen is a wolf to man it.
Some miracles, to speak them into existence,
the devil must be invoked, & the tongue made
a colony of bleached words. The story is,
it was a garden and now an ophidiarium. What if
it has always been an ophidiarium only in the cloak
of a garden? See, this is the problem with history:
the focus is so much on time that it becomes the villain
in a story it’s originally meant to be an audience.
Again, everything here is a tragedy—scripted—
still in the air, like a rolling stone bulging with gravity.
And the hero is still in his room wearing a smile,
oblivious of the owl that hovers on the roof, bearing
a parcel of the tragedy.
Rasheed Ayinla Shehu (RAS) hails from Ilorin, the capital of Kwara State. He is a graduate in English and Literary Studies, from the University of Ilorin. A fellow in SprinNg Writing Fellowship Cohort 8, his work has appeared on 20.35 Africa, PoetryColumn NND, Ake Review, Brittle Paper, TSTR, the Kalahari Review, Akpata Magazine, the Muse Journal, Fiery Scribe Review and elsewhere. He made the shortlist for the Eriata Oribhabor Poetry Prize 2024.