The weekends are a kind of purging for me. All the emotions pent up during the week, tucked beneath the surface, ignored, taken for granted. Week days bustle. There’s a lot of faces, a lot of excitement. Preoccupied with the next thing to do, I never really stop to feel. I put on a show…… Continue reading Weekends
Last night my emotions were raging so I wrote a long letter to calm them. It was decisive. I called it honest when really it was passionate. Desperate. Pathetic. I wouldn’t do it again, now I know. It’s what happens when Beloved stops being beloved and a single sentence hits you like loud music like…… Continue reading Last Night
Beloved, if on a windy evening you stand on your toes at the end of the road that leads to your heart and don’t see the top of my Afro bouncing home; if you crane your neck and call my name and stomp your feet and untie your wrapper and retie it, looser, without the…… Continue reading Beloved
Some memories you want to keep. Like last night when you felt so much love. It doesn’t happen everytime so the first thing you do when it’s over is write it out. In longhand because that’s always better. The pen scratches away. You do not cancel a thing. The light from the lamp casts your…… Continue reading Memory
Caveat: This is not a poem, just emotions in words. It will not rhyme, it will not flow. It will stagger, unsure. You do not fall in love with a man so much as he becomes you. You want him. You want him. All of him. There’s no word for it, no metaphors, no similes,…… Continue reading Kokommi
The knife is a straight path you bloom and your hands grow wings, you become a waste paper struggling with the richness of a sandstorm who said freedom does not come in colors? purple like memories and black because time is constant & you lock past and future in your chest like a story they…… Continue reading The Knife | Michael Larri
1. Let the sun set at 2 p.m. There’s no need for its light now, or its warmth. The flowers are dead, anyway. The last rose closed its petals and hung its head so low. There’s no need for its fragrance. Or beauty. Let the pianist take a break, or let her die. I’m rather…… Continue reading Two Poems about Nothing
1. Beloved, Why does your love make me so weak, so weak? Why does it make me shy? Nervous? Why am I scared? Why do I write a poem at 5 o’clock in the morning and pour my soul into it? 2. Last night I remembered the Dark Moon emojis you sent me on WhatsApp…… Continue reading Love, in Five Parts
Us, people like me, what shall we call ourselves? Today, I hung out with a group of friends, most of them female, taking photos. At some point, we decided that the singles amongst us should take a group photo. Four people stepped forward, three of them female, the last, me, not. I was excited and…… Continue reading A Name for Me – On Gender, Again
1. let her flatter you with her smile she has good teeth, white not like yours they open their arms and ask you to come in once let her hold your eyes and tell you things about her life before you her lovers before you the one who left her for another with big breasts…… Continue reading Three Poems for Beloved
Ìjàpá 