For Mama’s Boys
There are no guidelines./Mama’s Boys write their own survival.
We were boys/ before the world tore our innocence apart.—Adesiyan Oluwapelumi
Before the cracked feet and heavy shoulders and little sleep
There was the miracle of soft feet. Sleep dissipates from the eyes
& there’s food sitting on the table, beckoning our pink mouth.
The rains, too, were just sweet songs. The earth, wet with
melodies, breaks our tender feet into unrehearsed dance.
We could go on all day except our Iye promises a banquet
of canes or the cold forces shivers than our little frames.
What do I know now of tenderness? Let an aunt go.
Forgot a cousin’s body in the past and clung to memories. Watched
My father suffer & rot in the cage of a greedy illness before exhaling.
Sixteen, & I’ve grown into what the years before the storms and heat
of teenage years deny. Wield a shovel and watch my feet disappear
into the cement. Nineteen, and I’ve made a home off construction sites.
The world won’t let me play with my friends no more. Tired bones,
Wobbly feet, burning dreams, shrinking life, & white skin. I make bed
off concrete floors and open buildings.
& when the days promise rest, there won’t be enough time
To seek the faces of old friends & Bros. I lay in bed
With a head plagued with nostalgia. Play Girl in red’s
If I Could Make It Go Quiet on repeat. & when Iye calls for me
To cut a branch of a mango or cashew or guava stretching
Towards the roof, the birds are returning to roost.
Before light pierces the purple blankets of dawn, mama’s boys
Lift their bags onto their shoulders again.
Tongue
In one moment, a snake slithers onto a rock to collect warmth
from the sun and then leaves in a heartbeat. I do not know
Where to say it emerged from or returned.
In a YouTube video, someone in the UK says something in English
but I could tell what milk fed that mouth. What water runs through
him. The accent in his mouth, enough music to sing his way
home. You could point to him and say he is no bastard. Away
from home yet his throat carries a whole continent alive.
His tongue does not fail him neither will his clan cast him as a rabid dog.
I, lost in my struggle, wrestle with a failing tongue.
My mouth, another Judas. Burning with the flames of questions
I do not know where to point to without dragging you into the fire.
My raiment’s shade is not enough map to point to you where
my people claim me as theirs. I, lost in the woods of this
world, walk under the heaviness of what I want and yet
does not recognise me. What I know will not save me
and that which will give me clothes in the cold
does not call me its own.
Duplex (Wishes)
I begin with sorrow, wishing to end
It with joy— day to succeed my nights.
All my lost love returned to me last night
But it was all a silly short dream.
I tell my friends about the silly short dream
When I awoke and we all grew silent.
We all want some things not to grow silent
Like an abandoned house left falling alone.
My siblings tease me, they don’t leave me alone,
I ripen with anger, but, I still want their grins.
I wish my funny, dead aunt to drip with grins,
Like Lazarus, to ease back to life.
Ma still mourns the aunt who slipped out of life
I do, too. I wish all the fall to end.
Ayiyi Joel, TPC XVI, is a young emerging poet from Edo State in Nigeria. A Best Of The Net Nominee. Winner of the Shuzia Epiphany poetry competition. He can be reached on Instagram @Ayiyi Joel and on X @Joe-Xi Mao
Cover photo credit: Alexey Demidov