REVISITING OLD WOUNDS
I am on a winged journey from home /
Sometimes, I regurgitate how I escaped
the hard scolding, in-between the storm
How I serpentined amidst life's whirlwind,
The crisp breeze rustle of trials.
I mirrored myself on a broken glass
My body is titrated into figures
Into shapes running from one another
My wound is troubled like a hagged boy
Who sees life as a burnt cake
Sometimes, I stream my hands on my skin
The clustered friction like a cracked wall
The turbulent memory destabilizing my mind
The way children deflower a silent stream
disturbed the figure a lonely leaf
Beyond the shadow of any doubt
I have walked on a piercing thorn
And bled a fusion of liquid blood
Like the smear of salt, in-between
the two nations of my hands
How grief enveloped my mind
With unbearable epileptic grief
the way a thorny grass
Holds down a silky garment
And drags it amidst different faces.
2020, Ondo state
I WISH I WRITE A POEM TONIGHT
A visiting darkness encroached my heart
Solicited a home in my eyes
I killed the alien with a rough face
by setting a dog after it
until he got hit by a car
I lighted a candle
Against a wolf
Shouting in my head
How it died
The candle can tell
I searched
For a white paper
Free of ghosts
The ink was full of inspiration
I opened the door for the holy spirit
It talked like shimmering star
And outweighed the alien chasing me away
A house full of fluorescent light, so bright
I placed my thought in a glass of wind
The message travels; a ray of sunlight, to the universe
2019, Ondo state
Ariyo Ahmad is a Nigerian poet who blends his thought into paper with his ever flowing pen, whose inspiration is tapped from his beloved mother and his late father who has sojourned to the land of the immortal. His poems have been graciously published or are forthcoming in African Writers, Violent and Birds Journals, Kalonopia Collective Magazine, UpNigeria, Mixed Magazine, Madness Muse, and many other publications. He lives and works in Ondo State, Nigeria.