Black Boy

He was good with numbers and amused by politics. Figured it was worth a shot to major in economics in the next summer. Two days ago I heard him telling his older brother he wanted to have two kids with the nice girl down the street; the one with the pretty smile who talked like her mama done raised her well.
Last night he said he was going to use his first salary to buy a gift for his mama.
Today he’s just a hash tag.
A bunch of repetitive words leaping out at me like it would bring him back.
There is more hatred here than there are bodies to feel.
I want to make love to hope but despair stirs in my loins. I stifle it and think it dead, but it just sleeps.
We’ve been taught how to heal our wounds, but never how not to get hurt in the first place.
A little voice tells me to leave this place that has no destiny. But how do you shed off the only skin you were born with?

Torn

Everybody used to be something.
My mother used to be a wee little thing with perky tits and three suitors.
Your father used to be the village’s richest man once upon a long time.
The 17 year old girl using her mouth as a temporary container for men’s milk, in exchange for 3 five cedi notes used to be a rich man’s only daughter.
Nna used to be blind in only one eye. Tomas used to eat from his nose like it was a special delicacy.
Even I, used to be a naive little girl. And now I know the scars sharing rent space with your body better than anybody does.
You used to be a body racked with unknown demons, laughing at people’s pain and pretending to be happy. Now that you know your demons by name, I hope you learn how to sew your body bac

Drunk

I still find myself questioning why we never made it to cloud nine.
You would kiss the nape of my neck with such tenderness,
And trail your lips gently on my skin,
as if my body were a coded message
and you were deciphering a message my lips refused to speak.

Now I’m lying here alone
Wearing my pain like it’s a costume.
I’m tired of being so hopeless
Of having words so stuck far up my brain,
that I cannot disentangle them long enough to put my mind to sleep.

My heart is bleeding and I don’t know how to turn that into poetry
How is my writing supposed to save me
when reality has rendered my fingers numb?
I am stuck on your last seen statuses;
Any sign to know you’re there

This is not the best way to forget about you
But it’s better than drinking bitter wine
They say being a sober poet does not necessarily make you a better poet
That’s ok, I’m drunk anyway;
drunk on endless bottles of pain.

I’m a walking sad  poem,
And you’re an ancient language I can’t decipher.
We could never ever be.

Gavment

No water in mama’s barrel,
no water in Auntie Sisi’s bowl,
no water in the Tomsin’s tank.
No water anywhere.
Wan, tu, trii, four, five, sis, seben days of no water.
I don’t like bathing, but it has been seben days and I’m beginning to smell like shit.
Koku and Adjo eat only in the af’noon. Mama gives me food tu times a day.
I want to eat with Koku and Adjo but Mama said the food is not enough. It was not this bad weeks ago.
Dada said it is the economy.
He said that the economy is poor.
And gavment is not helping.
I don’t know who gavment is, but gavment is a bad bad person.

Growing woman

I love plain texturized walls;
How they bruise your knuckles when you forget to caress them
How they don’t judge you when your sobs sound like something between a bleating goat and a muffled choke.
How they pretend like they don’t notice that last night’s lover had softer skin than the one before
I love how ex’s enquire about you from the bottom of their guiltless souls.
“How are you?” “Are you okay?”
Fuck you and your questions.
Leave me and my twitter account alone.
I am fine and fabulous.
Breaking up is not a short distance trip from which you arrive from
Today I’m a growing woman; whose waist is sharing joint custody with the folds in her stomach, the newly sprouted hips, and the knots in her back.
I’m prouder of the way my name sounds like on the lower lip of a foreigner
I’m much older than the last man I kissed.
I woke up this morning and realized I’m god of this breathing land.
This is my love story.
This is my heartbreak

Suicide Sarah

There’s something about you that makes looking away impossible
You’re not what the world would label as pretty.
You’re not soft and sweet and tender
And all the butter words used to describe beautiful
Your face is finely chiseled
And your body stands out like a lone nipple on a cold rainy night.
You’re in love with a boy whose mother left him on the stairs of her mother’s house to go follow a man who never loved her.
You’re in love with a boy whose grandmother saved his good clothes only for a father who barely visited
And so he’s always waiting for a big day, a big moment, a big reason; before he gives you all his love.
When he should be kissing the spaces in between your toes
You smoke on rooftops to take away the heartache
You allow others cut you and get high off watching yourself bleed
Men have been looking for God inside of you and you have been looking for God in the faces of strangers who offer you their coat
Everybody wants you at their parties because they know you’re as good at them as you are at blowjobs
But nobody wants to know how many demons you had to pretend didn’t exist before stepping into the sunlight.
 
Everybody wants to drink with you
Everybody wants to dance with you
Everybody wants to fuck around with you
But nobody wants to walk blindly through the dark to help you find yourself
Well, damn everybody
Damn the calvary and damn the cross
Damn the saints and damn the whores
Damn the beggar down the street called you ugly because you wouldn’t spare a coin
Damn everybody!
Do they not know that the sun borrows light from your fingertips?
Do they not know that you give colour to the rose?
Do they not know that your breathe is studied by the highest of connoisseurs to make the best of perfumes?
 
There’s something about you that makes walking away impossible
Be patient with the world, whiles it tries to figure it out.

Almost perfect

It’s been 2 months since you learnt how to unfold yourself, to spread out the occasional creases and regular stains, and not be afraid to have someone look.
It felt like allowing your bowels to talk loose in your neighbour’s house; although it was unfamiliar and needed some getting used to, you were relieved.
You’re not used to the pain of holding it in but you haven’t known what else is safe anymore in months.
You wear your pain like a too tight shirt. Some days, you want to run away from your body and return on public holidays. Some days you have so much confidence you could be a bookshelf, eager to receive all of the world’s knowledge.
Most days, you’re so drained you’re not very different from an unpublished writer’s unfinished manuscript.
Your body is unlearning how to love and learning to fold itself back in, because it’s not sure anybody wants to see her stains. You’re building a thousand emotional forts inside your tiny body, but the world can only see an almost perfect smile.

Mother’s Rage

Touch him one more time and I swear by the lump in my left breast, I will slash your throat and decorate your dark soul on your skin for the world to see.
You sons of bitches won’t let black boys be.
Black boys can’t walk on tiptoes.
Black boys can’t like girls in stilettos.
Black boys can’t walk with pocketed hands in the name of swag.
Black boys can’t be white.
Black boys can’t be smart.
Black boys have no right to see the light
And black boys can’t be Superman.
Black boys can’t be scared.
Black boys can’t be right.
Black boys can’t shit brown.
Black boys can’t even breathe!

Touch him one more time, and by God, thou shall taste steel.

Soulmate

When I was 16, Nana slipped a note under my bed from the short boy with the pink lower lip, when Momma wouldn’t let me out. The next week she hit me 13 times on my backside with a wooden ladle, for allowing him to stick two fingers under my skirt. I sat like I was born with a body in disequilibrium for three days. That is how I remember my Nana; a deformed devil in an angel’s body. She doesn’t talk as much as she used to, and shoots peppery solution from a water gun at us because her arm’s too weak to be swinging wooden ladles. Some random days, I wish I could pick out the lines on her face and stretch them in my palm, just so I can live off her experience. But life would rather be a fake orgasm.
“Nana, will I ever find my soulmate?” I ask her softly.
“Child” she grips my hand in the palm of her weathered hands and smiles.
“There’s no such thing as a soulmate. You’re not a puzzle with a missing piece. If you want to have 10 lovers and call each of them your soulmate, so shall it be. If you want to have 1 lover, live with his 10 flaws and call him soulmate, so shall it be.”

I do not want to believe her, but I smile anyway.

Typo

You can neither eat nor sleep. You toss in your bed fighting known and unknown demons. There’s a virus eating into your brain, it does not take away from you; instead it multiplies thoughts of your fears by 13. It is the most harrowing thing you’ve ever felt. You wish you could turn your body inside out like the towel of a dead carcass, run your fingertips across the surface, taste the edges to be sure of the pH level, put your ear to your body to see if it is throbbing like it’s supposed to, rummage through your body as if it were a lost purse to make sure nothing is amiss; because you’re so drained from waking up and feeling like today, this minute, this week, this month, your body came out as a typo.
You’re so drained from not being able to be in control.
“Don’t hurt”
“Don’t gain flesh here”
“gain here”
“Heart, don’t beat like you belong to 95- year old grandma”
“Don’t pass out”
“Don’t be out of my control.”

Tell me body, what do I have to do for you to be spelt out right?