by Visar
Flour-sacks waving like flags
on the windows in the afternoons.
The people in this town sit by their
windows, breathing on anything that
passes.
They sit on dead Volvos bearing
Bluetooth stereos on their shoulders,
where the words are streaming,
never ending. The caves in our skulls
have become like whistles, to
crack back sibilants at the world.
Our tongues have ghosts in them, our
minds are, irrevocably, like haunted
shacks. In the city you belong is a conflag-
ration of desire.
Nostrils are its forge. Intention, its
unrefined petroleum. In this crude
device, words paint us blacker inside
than silence does the vacuum of space.
Therefore, to communicate is to melt down
before the suns of a person’s eyeballs.
Let go of the body and river
through the aisle of the street lamps—
Crawl up the market’s winding spine
becoming temporarily miscible.
The instruments of our desires is
our hollow breath.
Subverted under flammable darkness
and light— and tearing up whatever
we breathe on as the prototype of heaven.
And when that dust settles, trundling cars shake
them up —
Visar writes from Lagos. Author of Daylight (2018) on Ghost City Press. His works have either appeared or are soon appearing on Arsonita, Mojave heart Press, Selcouth Station, Marias at Sampaguitas, Bone and Ink, Riggwelter journal, Nightingale & Sparrow, Agbowo, etc. Twitter: @rabiutemidayo.