Puppetry with Schizophrenia
I begin my day like a broken winged bird, my heart
a shattered porcelain. I cry into the wind and it returns
a casualty of despairing sighs. I am a breaking lifeform
to say call me boy and I’ll scurry to you like an echo
recoiling after the clinking sound of a shattered glassware.
My white face bloodied with scars still bears testaments
of every scalpel that seeked to makeup me into a ghost.
Say I, foreshadow of [ ] wearing absence pretty well.
Say I, absentia. Say I, cirrus horoscoping into a phantasm.
At the edge of a cliff, I plummet into a featherless flight,
my soft body crashing into shrapnel. Say I tongue chaos
like a foreign dialect, my teeth a syntax of disorder language.
Say life and my tongue becomes a knife. On an holy ground,
a figurine of hope sermonizes my listless spirit. My body,
the pillar of Golgotha. My mind, a city of graves. My lips,
a choir of elegies singing of Sodom and the sad nocturnes
of Gomorrah. In despair, I blasphemy the vain glory of joy,
my bed still stinking of formaldehyde, opium and liquor.
Say I, tail with broken head. Say I, tumor without brain.
Say I, caliphate of loneliness. At nights, the animal in me races
palpating like a fawn chased by a carnivore. Say I, the breaking point
of every elastic strain pulling towards death. Slowly, a hungry silence
feeds on me like a parasite, eating me from the inside out.
Say every night is a sabre taking a bite of me.
Blood is not a cosmetic to the human body.
I am drinking from a chalice of my own pump in a nightmare
I scripted. Say I, Lazarus walking death down an aisle again.
Swooning with Butterflies
The mouth becomes a feathered friend,
panchromatic wings flocking like stardust into the skies.
I stack beauty betwixt my lips
and it waterfalls into a field of chrysalis.
Here, there are more words to describe the soot of a burnt palace.
Say phoenix rising from its ash into elegance.
Say life even in the teeth of death.
Say, I butterfly. I, camouflage.
I, rainbow melted into a chalice.
Drink and the body orchestrates an art of defilry.
Can’t you see? Our beauty makes us prey
to the caprices of pigments. Red burning
our realities, blues drifting us into
paradoxical paradises. Green fingers
naive to playing the mourner’s sonata.
Bright orange curls morphing into
viper’s cords. Purple eyes dyeing
deaths. Somewhere in a garden,
Mozart plays the fur elise and my father
swoons dancing with a gardenia of
butterflies in his mouth. Say a sad song
is a happy song. Say, we waltz through
evenings like he is here, hands clasped
in arms, gazes held in nets. When the music
ends, it starts again. A litany of sad nocturnes
in reversal. We are dancing into the past again.
Ichor
Of you, I remember a spittle of memories
held by time in a perforated sac,
a lingering beneath my skin,
my chest tattooed with bright bruises,
my heart a burning city,
an inferno, smoke smothering the sky
with sooted-grief, my eyes blanketed
with veils of anguish, my mind trapped
in the maze of moments & pauses,
green fingers, holy fire burning away
chaff winnowed from wildflowers,
brown earth engraved with shadows
of bodies that once lay here, anthills
made from moulds, carrion gathered
into graves, crows satelliting the gore
of cities set ablaze, dead men congregated
for a sermon in a church of cadavers,
a choir of dead children singing litanies
of sonatas with song-scripts held
to a plane mirror, mouths making prayers
to a deaf god, ichor flowing in our veins
as we persist on this lane of shadows.
Fractals
The mind diffracts into ruptured wavelengths,
cranium fragments into ellipsis of memories,
and a city built in enamel gnashes iron—
every edifice plunged into the throat of ruin,
I am becoming a limb of reality—amputated
& left to rot in the cocoon of dream-ingesting maggots.
In the dark, a cricket chirps, singeing its wings,
as it harmonizes the broken cadence of a lullaby
swooning me into eternal rest. Somewhere, between
whole and (w)holeness, I lay, the gap sinking into me
like an inhalation, my body a door with no door
leading to a discotheque. Everything before me
is a grave. I, a walking corpse. In the sky, a dark moon
hovers with crows clustered into a murder of feathers,
I am horoscoping into an offing with miracles
rendered into past tense & a quiver of memories
sculptured in keepsakes. Tinctures of hope
besmirches my face, unearthing sadism
from my body buried in ache, my lungs turning
godless—defiled by an ennui wanderlusting
across the rooms of my body. I press on a clavicle
and a ripcord ricochets my neck off my head.
Doors
In father’s eyes, there is a door, I walk through and I am lost. I carry the darkness and I am night. Say there’s an exit in every reality and an entrance in every dream. On my palms are feathered memories of my past, I clench and the dust vanishes. Father, like a man falling through the jaws of a whale, I fall through the gut of misery and like stone in the crop of a bird, I am breaking away into fragments of memories unable to be pieced together. At home, I am walking through walls, through universes unseen in search of you. Open to me father: here’s my body—an entrance to an exit. I am walking through labyrinths, every door opening to a world where broken things are made of broken memories. I never meant to be lost but once I walked into the forest with your shadow, the field denoised into its foreshadow.
Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI,is a poet/essayist from Nigeria. He was the winner of the Cheshire White Ribbon Day Creative Contest (2022) and the 1st runner up in the Fidelis Okoro Prize for Poetry (2023). His works are published in Poet Lore, Tab Journal, Poetry Wales, Brittle Paper and elsewhere.
The Marbled Sigh 