Ayoola Goodyness Olanrewaju writes

nightmares I

i

i did not sleep here
something stole me into my eyes...

the fathers here sip blood from straws
tucked into bottled babies
over the platters of skinned skulls of mothers...

ii

i am tossed here into the origin of time
where life is a mouth without the teeth of tenses...

the stones are pregnant with serpents of thunder fangs
from the semen in the testicles of earthworms...

i run and i am not running...


nightmares II

i

i was the is when they kill the keyhole
her blood was a clot of darkness that it is...

i am an open room selling silence
where life is told on the thoraxes of cockroaches
with antennas of thorns thrust into the thighs of heaven...

ii

i am back here where words are not whores of linguistics
when there is no shell of heaven and a yolk of earth...

i am swimming what i had and not swum
a watery darkness...slimy and no hope ashore...

i am here in my mouth swimming my saliva...