Fundamentals
it’s fundamental we think
of water properties,
fundamentally, every pebble
has a fluid story —
fundamentally, I’m wrong &
every rock can dissolve
if left
submerged,
every water body is a baptismal ritual
expecting a body,
even your thigh,
especially your thigh,
especially your rough waves i
find myself calcifying into
fundamentally, we all drown,
and this poem leaves
no manuals
for drowning
in case of a raging thigh, let a
palm be a surfboard,
and let a second palm be
knowledgeable especially
in flamethrowing.
=====
Goodnight Gotham
By the borough, I nestle my palms
around your neck — not a funeral
yet your eyes glaze from inside
your boxed head / We should
leave / We could leave yet
your shoulders chitter in
disagreement / The rot
the headlines the slug of
the gutters that fettered and
fettered with nameless
names
We live in monochrome so
you never see the color elsewhere
the possibility of rainbow overhead
This is how I need you
This is where I leave you
=====
Gaslighting My Depression So I Stay Alive
before the miracle ripens
for my mouth
it turns to ash & pirouettes
away from my palms
i think too much of violence
except my hands choose
complacence over action
in my head, everything is nothing
& nothing sometimes is
the newtonian wonder that presses
me into the bed until the
sheets turn into quicksand
if depression is a city, i still live
there — with familiar ghosts
for neighbors
every time i think of death, it’s a plea
to shamble the matrix
i sit & watch the fishbowl &
think if the fish too thinks
of breaking.
=====
The Body As A Leased Property
(An Erasure Of Jesus’s Last Supper According to Matthew’s Gospel)
=====
Ars Poetica (The Game)
For Ifeoluwa
=====
Poems © Anthony Ikeh
Image: Pawel Czerwinski Unsplash