Each time the thoughts of you

overtake me, like a sudden cloud

enclosing the day in a bleak shroud

When I see an old couple, hand in hand

walking, in the evening and I remember

the solidity of your hands in mine,

finger to finger intertwined

a sudden miracle, the weight of your hand

Every moment I live without you carries our echo

I am not whole, without you, anymore

a nonhealing ulcer, incurable at my core

that swallows the bone and eats the marrow, asks for more

Long nights I miss you,

your warm body in the safety of our bed

how I loved when you sighed

and I held you when you cried

Suddenly I became a maker and mender of all things

At supper, the empty table torments me

wine, a meal of paper too dull to taste

trying to forget those days, we ate

elbow to elbow from the same plate

I remember your voice, and the way my heart

would skip beats like a broken record

when you looked at me

with all the light I no longer see

Your heart was my candle, love

I remember your smile, and your glance like the sun

burning me after a few moments

I'd have to look away, Perihelion

You used to sand down the broken edges of me

You used to put me together

Tell me that I was loved.

Tell me that I was enough.

Devastation at the airport

the immensity of the loss

worse than gravity,

impossible how

could I ever walk away?

Even the rainbow refuses to shine

without you, who has made my heart long

I remembered only the time

once I held you in my arms and you were mine

Every day i think of you, perhaps a hundred times

how could I tell you how often

in the kiss I see between two old couples

I remember how I felt when you kissed me

At night, in the blistering seat of summer

I remember how once your arms held me

outside I smile but Inside I am screaming

I cannot stop screaming

How am I expected to have joy or happiness

to dream, to hope, to be

without you

Why am I cursed with this

when all the others are with their lovers

I rage against my fate

-my heart, which inexhaustible refuses to stop

-my body, inexorable, which continues to move

-time which clocks from day to day, my restless limbs

-which must unfortunately wake and drag me from the soft embrace of slothful sleep

-bony fingers squeezing into the too bright dawn of a new day

-my lungs which moment to moment bring in breath, not air

-my work which doesn't wait for me

-every day I am expected

-to be in a certain place

-I must, I guess, walk through the motions, say and do the things expected

-I am the flesh only with the spirit is gone

-I walk like one alive, but truly dead

-perhaps I died and I do not know it yet

-My family, whom, would be inconvenienced

-death is messy, perhaps too much to bear

-if only something quiet and quick could take me away

-an unexplainable accident, unladen with stigma

I live not because it pleases me

even though from time to time, a ray

will pierce the gloom and I'll be briefly at peace

but because the machinery of my body goes from breath to breath

from now, till death

I don't know if I want to try again

if it's not you my love

you with the lovely smooth skin, the eyes that make my heart catch when you look

at me out of the corner of them, long eyelashes fluttering

a staccato rhythm I'm not used to

I don't know if I want to.

I don't know if I can try again

I think only of the absence of you

long nights 5 time zones away calling, and calling

on the hopeless phone

raging and raging as the internet beeped and the line disconnected

mornings, with the lack of you

craving

only the sweet Lagos dawns when we woke up together and you

thinking, I was asleep would

run your fingers through my hair

I don't know if I can

I don't know if I should try again

You, my love, when you finally arrived

are every mirror I have ever gazed at

and every rainbow seemed to foretell your presence

like a wind you, a storm that catches me

that carries me away from the shore

until I lay deep in the ocean and can see no more

is there ever anyone else I could love

as deep, so deeply!

could this, my stubborn heart betray me,

by loving anyone the way I love you?

What I know is this.

When I left you, the other half of myself

at that airport

that hot February harmattan evening

all the night was silent and yet

everything within me was

screaming

I don't want to love again. or try half hearted that some other man might be better

I want you.

Ah a picture perfect day. Beautiful summer skies, glorious sunshine, a day no one has to die. Middle eastern peace? A million dollar scratch ticket suddenly found?

I don't want any of these. I'm selfish. To me the perfect day would be a moment, I could find joy again. A day I woke up and didn't have to drag myself out of bed. A day the smile in my face was not fake or painted on. A day where that strange bird, that odd creature that lives in the land beyond Emily Dickinson's hope, the solitary joy appears.

A day I woke up and truly enjoyed living, what a perfect day.

Driving down a dark road

in the utter darkness of November

where the nights begin to eat the days

and swallow them whole

like the Monsters of my youth; in a book I once read

we'll eat you up; we love you so!

The sky's an eternal slate gray and the air smells of burning

leaves, heat, furnaces, houses as bears lumber to their caves for the winter

As the mist creeps, sheathes the hill in fog

a few brilliant colors peak

from the blanketing abyss

a touch of vermilion, catches, the eye almost seems like the sun's departing shade

it's last hurrah

before everything collapses into the dark

and the Night eats the days

It's late at night and that's when I can be honest

about how pathetic and useless and sad and small I am

2 am, laid bare as a babe

weak and pathetic, animal soft flesh and I long for something

but I can't have it

ever my shadow stretches in front of me,just like the dark hours when I watch my clock as it ticks

I know I can't have it

at 5am, I'll wake up to another dark dawn

and another grey day

shamble my feet into shoes

and pretend to be a human

not the creature wearing a human flesh suit

that I think I am

or perhaps 3 years

I made this account.

I told myself I'll write stories, poems, enter contests

I thought

I thought about a lot of things then

in my early twenties when the shape of the universe was this ever unfolding beautiful green thing

that stretched before me like an unending river

instead of the dark,one lane road it is now

heading into the forest with no hope and no direction

10 years later and 10 dreams dead

I sit here with my account now opened

nursing alcohol on my lap

the taste of bitter on my breath, sweet sharpness of the liquor

I guess today is different from yesterday