25 notes on becoming - Boluwatife Afolabi.

‘I confess, like a true poet, that I am only broken by the sources of things’ – Peter Akinlabi
 
I
I write to tell you that the walls of my bones are made of contention and I am always situated between desires that threaten to break or mould me.
 
II
I write to tell you that I am not the cartographer of memory and that sometimes,
I forget my way home and stumble into women who offer to teach me the ways of water:
How to be soft, how healing comes in waves, how to open my body into the sea and drown all the things that hurt.
 
III
I write to tell you that my love is a nomad and while wandering here in Ibadan it fell into the hands of a woman wearing your face.
 
IV
I write to tell you that the second name for movement is uncertainty.
 
V
I write to tell you about hope.
How it is a dream where children grow into the belly of a barren woman,
how she wakes in the morning smelling of loss and longing.
 
VI
I write to tell you that scars are a lot like borders.
How my body is a map filled with dirt and death
and there is a sea in my eyes that takes and takes and on moonless nights
how I ache and ache beneath my hills and valleys
and call all the names of god painted on my tongue for the touch of mother and fullness,
how my prayers come back to me dressed in a void.
 
VII
I write to tell you that while writing this, language betrayed me and my mind assumed the form of a tabula rasa.
 
VIII
I write to tell you that silence is the name for protest and prison.
 
IX
I write to tell you that a river once came to life in the road between my palms
(some people say it is also a form of worship) so I closed my eyes, named all my fears and gifted them to the deep.
They came flowing back singing my name.
 
X
I write to tell you that I carry all your names in my mouth now
and my tongue don’t fit into this small space anymore
and mother said new songs don’t float out of mouths heavy with names
and children here don’t dance to night songs because all the birds have drowned in silence
and the night is longer here in Ojoo and I still melt into fear when your name escapes from the gap between my teeth and dissolves into the wind.
 
XI
I write to tell you that old words don’t have to die for new words to live.
 
XII
I write to tell you that all the children are going
or have gone and our dreams have now run out of colour.
 
XIII
I write to tell you about unknown languages.
How they fold themselves under tongues that have grown weary of seeking god,
how grown men trapped in a well of glossolalia,
are screaming
and dancing
and singing
and drowning under the weight of heavy tongues.
 
XIV
I write to tell you that I am a poem in exile,
hiding my grief in metaphors breaking the weight of my loss into syllables and rhymes,
because a man must not cry this is how I have learnt to hide my body from water,
cover my wounds with Cauliflower to stop my softness from spilling into mud,
because a man must not cry.
 
XV
I write to tell you that I wrote a song for all the boys we used to dance with that didn’t come back home, they say songs are voices that didn’t die.
I tried to sing lost boys back home, but I lost my voice singing.
 
XVI
I write to tell you that I wrote another love song for all my old lovers and poured it into the beak of a bird
but the bird died of grief.
 
XVII
I write to tell you that I have built many rooms in people that won’t stay
and called them home.
 
XVIII
I write to tell you about the way bodies open up to love
vulnerable
unguarded
like flower petals waiting for sunlight or water,
the way I left my body open for god waiting,
waiting
waiting.
 
XIX
I write to tell you about my sin how it is cheap.
How I sometimes wear it like a hat for everyone to see
or paint it black and call it guilt,
tuck it safely under my shiny clothes watch it stick to my black skin and dissolve into my bones
till,
till my body becomes too heavy for ablution.
 
XX
I write to tell you that in Ondo, a boy embraced the softness of another boy
and men, carrying the name of god on their lips rushed to kiss him with kisses of fire.
They said his body looked like sin, they said fire puries everything.
 
XXI
I write to tell you to battle forgetfulness this way:
Trap a shred of memory in a fist swallow it whole and call it a requiem
or a dirge
or an elegy
tell them it’s for the children we forgot to name in Baga and Damboa and Kummabza and Garkin Fulani because our tongues grew weary of naming names,
tell them how we bought dolls for the girls and asked them to paint where it hurt the most,
tell them our girls painted everywhere.
 
XXII
I write to tell you, lover
that my body is an endless sea of desire
and by god, when you laugh my body caves into itself
and my heart seems to melt into water.
 
XXIII
I write to tell you that I have wandered and wondered
and called salvation many names—
Eros
Ninkasi
Yeshua.
 
XXIV
I write to tell you about bodies that have forgotten the way home because
home is a bird in the mouth of a coffin
or a child in the face of a gun
or a boat in the embrace of a storm or an empty room smelling of stale prayers and dying songs
because home is another name for loss
and to remember is to betray a body
and gift it to grief again.
 
XXV
Finally,
I write to tell you about how I roused my body to life after it fell into Nadir. How I sat it under dripping honey and called it sweet names,
beautiful, bonny, beloved
gathered my reflection with affection everywhere I found it,
sang slow songs into the teeth
of all the tired boys inside my bones and told them:
you are enough
you are enough
you were always enough.
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Boluwatife Afolabi is the author of ‘The Cartographer of Memory’
an electronic poetry chapbook published by the Sankofa Initiative. His works have appeared in Saraba Magazine, Arts and Africa, Expound magazine, African Writers etc.
He is also the poetry editor at agbowo.org.
He lives and writes from Ibadan, Nigeria.
Twitter: @oluafolabi