The downtrodden brooks roared like seven thunders
The numerical murmur of the galloping snowy waterfalls
Enriched the harmonious heartbeat of the kettle drum
The wailing waves were tired troops of travailing timbers
Herded hysterically towards the monolingual sawmill...

The query of who’s mating dance I wish to attract
makes the peace of drabness comforting.
I am a bird of paradise made for one
garden, the flaming swords are for my protection.
Does it matter that my feathers droop and fall?

Water is a blessing to this baked earth
Insatiable from birth…
Armed for the feast of the Tabasky
Mark how even the Joshua tree observes
This double-bent figure...

I raise my hand against the storm
Thundering out your name
Wherever it is you have gone
Time is nothing but pelts of rain
On the umbrella of our camaraderie...

In this sweltering, settled country
of self-awareness and neuroses
of unsettling homesickness
as if stitched under the water
of a river, ocean and the sea
we shrink back from the mouths of fire starters...

Odinsoeruaka
Destroy me with love
Suck away the juice of my life
Drain me of every fluid of emotion
And discard me...

I will hang by this neck
Around this throat that sings
Of memories with cadencies
Of a clime where justice lived
Before pacifiers came calling...

it is on the lush slopes of this Mount of God
that new songs of affliction sear the nights.
the bull frogs of the malarial swamps croak
not to their reluctant mates but to the sky.
the swamps are now smelling of dead men...

I live here now
Memories are rooted in eating fufu when it's 5 degrees out
Or singing Nigerian gospel songs quietly instead of singing out loud
Mama says, "We usually sing these songs out loud till everyone sings..."

Itan allowed the growing crowd to suck him in. Each crease on his forehead, each dust-layered pore, each gray follicle of hair stored a memory of things seen that cannot be un-seen, lives lived that cannot be un-lived…He was a vast depository of memory, like the sea-held fish that eyes would never see; like the shore-harbored sand that could not be numbered…He was the rain touching leaves and skin in the most secret of places… He was the transporter, the physical wheels of intangible culture, the custodian of stories...

An angel wrestled with a man through the broken night, struck
his hip and finally surrendered blessing to the mortal racing back
to Yahweh's hold before Aurora opened her heavy gates, ushering
lazy Dawn from her halls. A piteous lot was Aurora's: The sea-queen
who was ensnared by the enchanting strength of man's mighty phallus...

I come birth-pang plain:
cards blinded by the full moon
hands clean of silt
tongue untied 
loins loose
fly undone…

I shove you hard
out without the blistered arms
that once sheltered your limbless night
from the invading eyes of open skies
Rusty nail in the frothy manufactory
of stainless pins...

The dreaded new African talking drum
Drums damaging every eardrum
Day, night, its message, a bush fire,
Consuming village to presidential villa...

Poetry in Nigeria brims with angst, the accent of its time:
angst, poisonous like oil spillages and gas flares;
angst, seismic and cathartic like gut-tremors;
angst, like the ash-cloud of the jaundiced & the myopic;
angst of the heretic, angst of the pharisaic...

Now that you have
So many dances for one son
Your night-table shall have
Only you to dine there
By candle-light
Amid a colony of moths...