A SELECTION OF POEMS
Fallen Angel
You tore a star apart with your bare hands
Ripping it in two like an over-ripened fruit
Every dimension felt the consequence of your destruction
Your investigation ricocheted like thunder
Your incision cutting deeper than any blade
In your tinkering, the shape of being was cut and chopped and bruised
The winds that filled the gaps you made
fought /(found) their way to a better plane
Only passing through your faithless way
Base Line
Through the nonsense of language
And the heat of revolution
And the depravity of our condition
the baseline endures
Through our displacement and destruction
Despite suns absence
And freedoms captivity
We hold tightly onto the promise of our foundation
Mud redder than dusk fixes our feet to what was before
Spirit lighter than air tangles us to the intangible
All that can ever be, traced on the map of our palm
Transcribed in and between each crack of our skin
Whispered into the fruit of our veins
the baseline endures
I have been granted permission to understand. But only for a moment. Only for as long as it takes for the power of truth to run through all of me. To set my nerves aflame. For peace and contentment to feel at home in my soul and then it leaves as swiftly as it entered. I try to trace my fingers around the shape of its departure but I can only comprehend its absence, not its presence.
Hobe
I spit out the window from the sixth floor
And in the dark I cannot see
As my saliva laced with beer and tobacco touches the ground
I wonder if love can last but 24 hours
If a connection can be destroyed with the swiftness of skins touch
I have forgotten how to nurture a flame
How to blow into a fire just to see the kindling rise
All I really want is to kiss the softness of your earlobe
For you to gently stroke the bare and tender flesh of my neck
But through the worlds deception
Through memory and habit
You ask and I accept your proposition of more
I am reminded of my earthliness
And the angels leave me for a moment
As I indulge in the movement of us
And as your body leaves mine
And your spirit leaves yours
And you walk out of the door
With an embrace
And a ‘ca va’ aimed at the floor
I feel alone
Left more alone than I was before
Before I knew
Remembered
What love was
I felt it
And then you left
As lovers often do
You promised you would dream about me last night, but as I walked the plane of fantasy, the land of green sand and polka dot sky. I saw, I felt, that the memory of me had escaped you.
the us we were
I feel as it slips away
Fading like the fog of a dream
Encompassing
The material
The physical
The tangible
Leaving me with a whisper
A hoarse and forceful shadow
Drying up the well of my being
Until all that is left is a pruned and wrinkled thing
Gently held between the finger and thumb
Of someone who used to know my real name
The Market with Grandma
I remember Longsight market
the suits and sofas
As I walked down Dickenson Road
The narrow paths
The wide hips
The smell of new shoes
And old people
Families
Friends
Returning to somewhere familiar
He acts as though
he remembers my face
With my newly gappy-teeth
I beam up at the man
selling
Birthday cards
Christmas cards
graduation cards
anniversary cards
Cards with words
Cards with pictures
Cards with numbers
She grown big hasn’t she?
My grandma states proudly
I didn’t hear his reply
I was distracted
By a dress
Deep red
Gold finishing
A scarf
embracing a neck
The ends
handing down a back
I look around and see the dress
In different colours and shapes
On women and girls
My grandma takes my hand
Leading me near the carpark
I hate this part
I scrunch my face
And hold my nose
first the toilets
Then the fish stalls
I knew she was going to stop
Before she did
It was always the same routine
The same adventure
The same exchanges
A wave of brown faces
(I went to Morocco as a Moroccan I left reminded I was not)
If the ants ceased to scurry
You would never know there was a hole present
one by one, like an army
they marched
from the crack in the wall
across the cold floor
to the fridge
I watched the ants
As my Senegalese twists were tugged
and pulled, by the handful
as words and phrases
were said by the mouthful
so sped
I forgot to understand
It didn’t hurt
but before it had been issued
I knew
The style wouldn’t suit me
It was made for straight hair soft hair silky hair
not my hair
instead of thinking too deeply about the oxymoron of my competing hairstyles as a physical amalgamation of my internalised cultural dispute
I looked closely at the uniform ants
all aware of their place
along the cracked white tiles
I looked closer still
One wasn’t quite in line
(poem originally published in Rife Magazine 2020)
Looking Back
The memory of us hangs low
Like an autumn moon
Shrouded by the shape of the season
Smudged like ink under my thumb
Our legacy glows the faintest orange
The warmth below the silver
…
It ripples silently
Wordlessly
Honestly
orange dusk rests on everything my eyes once touched
Sometime Now
When the mist is lifted
And I am submerged completely in now
In its peace and its unraveling
The tide of truth collecting at my feet
The shape of being
Slowed down to a stillness
To the whole of a greatness
It is then that I will say
goodbye