Oedipus revisited

I swallow the yellow and purple pills
and again, the child returns,
but this time
not to wail by the window.
The child rises from his watery crypt,
pulls his father from the bed
unto the concrete floor
and drags his papa by the hair, through the blue door.

He trawls his father along the dark corridor,
asking for a name, asking for his mother,
longing for breast milk, yearning for water;
seeking blood to fill his empty veins.
But his father has no answer,
his father holds no reply.
This is no place to weave another lie,
fear writes the truths in the white of his vacant eyes.

The child wants a body not a poor mix of blood and mud,
the boy wants a mommy, something more sacred than god.
But how will this child be made to understand
that a woman learnt
how to sit comfortably inside a burning bush,
so they accused her of defiling god,
shaved her hair with broken bottles
and banished her to a wilderness of dogmas.

What becomes of this child who has no ears?
When his mother cries in the grave cold night,
when she craves for a mouth to suckle her breasts
whose tongue will console her.

How to leave home

If you must leave,
then let it be on the most quiet night,
when the roads have been deserted
and there are no dogs barking in the distance.
Be certain the streets are naked
before you venture into the un-fabricated dark,
into the valley of discolored bones.
Be quick on your feet,
but do not let your ears hear your thuds.
A bevy of bats will flap through the reeling dark,
you must not bend your head,
you must not fret,
even as the darkness threatens
to swallow your resolve;
just mutter your mother's name beneath your breath.

If the crickets are silent and the frogs are quiet,
and there are no fireflies;
light a lamp in your heart,
let the wick be made from passion.
When you meet the cat, do not stop.
Do not entertain questions from strangers,
do not answer familiar calls.
At the crossroad,
you will be tempted to look back, but don’t;
not because you are afraid of mutation,
but because you do not want a loved one's kiss
to lure you into changing your mind.
For you must go to fight the bloodless war,
and then you must return with the golden sword,
to end, the shaman’s monopoly.

What is in your fridge?

In a bid to stop mothers from eating their toddlers
a taskforce was created, assigned to check every house
for limbs of dismembered children and the women
who will perfect spring from an inadequate
understanding of art.  

Every fortnight they would come knocking
they would come asking
their rather finkler-question;
“what is in your fridge?”

The first time they arrived at our door,
our fridge was filled with:
fake news,
wrong data,
fear,
despair,
soured memories, putrid dreams
and chapbooks of elusive poems
with no warnings to approach from a distance.
There were threats all over the fridge’s door,
there were curses my father could be sued for.

The last time they knocked on our door,
three bottles filled with muffled cries of concubines
were sitting at the right side of the fridge’s bottom shelf,
in the vegetable crisper were fresh sins god refused to forgive.
At the middle shelf, leftovers of estrogens and broken promises,
top shelf is for mother, for sympathies for spilt milk and scorn.
Stocks of dislocated futures sat at the top left side of the freezer,
at the right, a small box in which some bones were discovered,
mother swore it wasn’t that of her child, said it was of a baby chimp
whose carcass will be used to concoct potions for healing infirmities;
my father tried to back up her story with a very weak smile,
but more often than not, fiction bears a truth history cannot comprehend.

Beatitudes

To the reporters at the hanging who wanted the hood removed from the condemned’s head,

He said:

Blessed are those who never experienced the magic of dreams,
for they will never taste the emptiness of hope
when water yearns for fire in the eye of a storm.

Blessed are those who eat breakfast in the burned house,
for their flaws will never be seen in glass.

Blessed are those who go skinny-dipping with apparitions
at the house built to preserve private unhappiness,
for they shall sit at the morning table alone and happy.

Blessed are those who will hang themselves
with the intangible thread of sunlight,
for they shall find Eunice at the passageway.

Blessed are those who can see their full self-portrait in a convex mirror,
for they shall find behind the rendered veil, the nakedness of god.

May your voice never dissolve in soil.
May your casket continue to sail up the vertical river.
May you still find Anna listening at the knob of the panel oblong.

May the whimper you get as feedback from your lover at dusk
not be the leftover of the moans she offers the teenager
who mows your lawns at dawn.

Vanishing point

The night before he walked into the sea,
coffee spilled in my father’s shirt
and he begged me to help him
take off the regalia of his troubled mind.

Father confessed that he failed to embrace
stubborn dreams of perpetual energy;
feared he would leave the world
without delivering power
to the touch of teeming millions.

The old soldier listened keenly
while the Atlantic replayed
the philosophy of salt.
From our balcony
he could see the waves,
eye fixed like an old poet
waiting for his young lover
surfing upon the tides;
but she had strayed –  
                                          too far into the offing;
                                          there is no returning from that place
                                          where the sea kisses the sky. 

At dawn, the news filtered in through the windows,
the conservatives said father did not die
the way honest men should;
so he won’t be buried in his father’s compound.
They left his body in the forbidden forest,
and hung his head on the poles used to mark boundaries.

A few market days after,
I watched the bone people and midnight’s children
gather to share the inheritance of loss,
gather to savour the remains of the day.
I watched them harvest honey from the hull of father’s skull
where a swarm of bees had settled and made combs.
I tried to bark like they say men should, but it was no use;
for the hunger in the eyes of the disappointed
knows nothing of shame nor honor.

A woman’s body never forgets

It never forgets that it was once a home to a child kneeling,
back-arched like a half-ball set for trajectory.
Tonight, my mother’s prayer is fluid like a river,
She places her soul between the ligh
and lets her shadow be cast upon the canvas
of a memory cut too short to be held unto, yet so deep to let go.
She goes back to forbidden places seeking their sacred grounds,
she wants to unearth a child like a seed but the nursery bed is empty.

She sits at the brink of an amen awaiting the visit of sunlight,
awaiting a stranger whose mouth holds meaning,
but more often than not,
the penitent woman only gets divine deceptions.
A woman her kind adorable with almond eyes
is no stranger to the textures of pleasure,
but most times even when the beach is blue
we take its waters for granted.

Hers is the unheard cry of the concubine,
the unappreciated grasshopper sitting by the brook,
bringing joy to all the other bugs.
The setting sun did not bring her a lover,
so she has nothing to look for at dawn, except
a lecher with promises of graves glistening on his lips.
He says there is a stray dog dancing in the white of her eyes,
he comes to her with loads of destinies,
She knows what the soul will do for solace,
but there are voids we must never attempt to fill.
So this woman will not make a bed in her heart for the prophet,
she has run out of beatitudes, no oil, no dough, no miracles.

The man who dropped at night from a moving train
attempts to move into the dark spaces of her body,
carrying an ambition to leave her gravel
with nothingness and ghosts;
but love must never be shrouded in the language of limbo,
this woman’s body has learnt enough and won’t forget.
Yes her body won’t forget how only innocents pay for atonement.
She won’t forget the child stolen, the one deprived of giggles
laughter and songs from the heart of a yearning mother;
the breasts are still succulent and full, but dreams have no lips,
so her milk will eventually go sour in this room that still reeks
of lust, lies and emptiness that a woman’s body never forgets.

Soonest Nathaniel is a Poet and spoken word artist. He is the author of Teaching My Father How To Impregnate Women selected as winner of the 2017 RL Poetry Award. He was Poet Laureate for the 2014 Korea Nigeria Poetry Festival. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Rattle, Silver Blade, The Pedestal Magazine, FIYAH, Silver Blade Poetry, Northridge Review, Praxis Mag, Raven Chronicles, Wiki Column, Saraba, Loudthotz, Reverbnation, Elsewhere, Scintilla, Erbacce UK, Kalahari Review, Sentinel Nigeria, and many more.