Rain

tonight the rain is a concert
stage for a performance by orange

streetlight. It is at times like this
that I like to think
of profound things,
like the difference between
time and eternity.

time, a bunker, windows lined with twigs
six feet long, securing nothing.
beneath the floorboards, is death, its false bottom.

outside, there is an armored argument
against the convoys that defend
the bunker. This must be eternity.

The Spill

undry dreams rise like rivers
some nights
from lust-skyed cities
within me.

you stain the air
spaces of my mind
the cobwebbed corners
of my dreams

you cause a spill on the coast
lines of my pajamas trousers,
a gentle map of lust, showing
only rivers slowly drying up.

the spill endangers the fishes
patterned on my bedsheet.
i rise those mornings
to gaze upon my bronze snakes.

And Fear
(Crater Lake, Kenya, March 2006)

is that thing, all-eyed, slithering
around time-locked mountains.

it is iron john & his green crayon
at the bottom of a kenyan lake

conversing in a dialect that fails
to move the waters.

it is cellphone waves watching
from a safe distance the tourists who stand

at a bar stammering for whisky.
and it is a blank page, ten days old

riding on the bus that forgot
its swimming trunks.

© tolu ogunlesi 08