ktravula – a travelogue!

Three Poems by Yemi Adesanya

Slayed by a Muse

Once upon a heart beating oxygen rich lines

Valves of words and arteries of rhymes

A muse hit the source, it beat too fast

Flooded veins in shock

They got no weather forecast!

Once upon a girl dancing to a broken song

Steps of yawns, her moves all wrong

A trip to Musedale was too much fun

Drank the whole pub

See how far gone she is!

Gushing streams of crimson lyrical richness

Fight to be unleashed in clots of definite dizziness

Sudden letting turns to pooling bytes

All valves are broken;

What an eloquent way to die!

___

Jack and Jill

Jack and Jill went off the grid

To pet a rampant boner

Jack came first and spilled his spunk

Then Jill came, trembling after.

___

Special Characters

Awaken from a Comma,

As someone shouted: “His Colon is on fire!”

Saved by a timely Exclamation!

Now he’s gotta live with a Semicolon;

Punched by Punctuation Mark

Who thought he could win an Apostrophe for the move

‘Twas pretty stupid, Period.

The hypocrisy of a Hyphen

Joining two unmarried words

In pseudo-matrimony; don’t Quote me

But I’d say, “There’s a big Question Mark there.” Wouldn’t you?

What a bunch of Special Characters!

________

Yemi Adesanya is the author of Musings of a Tangled Tongue, now available on Amazon (Kindle and Paperback), Lulu, and Okada Books. In her other life, she disguises as an accountant and risk manager, in Lagos, Nigeria, where she lives with her husband and children. These poems were taken from the book, with the permission of the author. More of her poems can be found here.

Attempted Speech & Other Poems

Some good news! This morning, my first (adult*) chapbook of poems was published on Saraba Magazine. It is a collection of 15 (mostly*) never-before published poems. It is titled Attempted Speech & Other Fatherhood Poems.

Most of the poems centre around the birth of my child, my contemplations of the fatherhood process, and other ruminations about him, children in general, and surrounding experiences. Please head here and download it. It is free to download and to read.

The publication also features an interview with the magazine, along with readings of three of the poems in the chapbook, uploaded to Soundcloud. I hope you enjoy the package as much as I did writing it. Special thanks to Emmanuel Iduma, Dami Ajayi, and Adebiyi Olasope for their work in bringing this to life.

_____

* I say “adult” only because I find it necessary to give a hat tip to my first (and altogether ill-fated) outing from ten years ago in a collection called Headfirst into the Meddle (2005). I say “mostly” because a few of the poems in this current collection, in a different form or another, have been featured/workshopped on my social media pages at some point in the past. In any case, ignoring occasional outing of one or two other poems in LitMags across the world, this is my first major literary debut in ten years.

Poems of my Present

I want to write about what I read when – in rare times like this when I have all the time in the world to myself – I get the luxury of contemplating sweet, literary stuff rather than bury my head in the tedium of long linguistic theories. If I were to compile a list of recommendations of things to read to a friend – Nigerian or not, this would be a tentative list. There are very many more.

Poems

Suicide Notes. Poems by Dami Ajayi in Maple Tree Literary Supplement Issue 8.

Letter Home by Afam Akeh in MTLS Issue 2 is a long poem that haunts, and soothes.

Mayakovsky by Peter Akinlabi.

Three Poems by Obemata in Sentinel Nigeria Issue #5

What have YOU read that has moved you lately?

Sentinel Nigeria Magazine is Out

A little break from war stories, I’m pleased to announce to you that the new Sentinel Nigeria Magazine Issue #4 is out. It features poems, prose, reviews, interviews and essays from Nigeria and Nigerians in the diaspora (two of my poems made it into this one).

Here’s a poem by Jumoke Verissimo published in the issue:

Dirge

“He who does not mind torn clothes will soon be naked”
But we do not mind our rump in the wind
In this land of my birth, where will has died
As if cast with the curse of a thousand sores
The stroke of agitation copulates with anger
Pain is birthed. Ache will cease if scab will dry.
But in this land, anguish borders human dreams
Men’s brows thicken as the outline for a statue
Lives here are dressed in a uniform of desolation
Many days, we share stories of days we’ll laugh
We tell tales of the heroes who should have been
But as figments we live like we own no soul
The days that we walk like we own our souls,
Are the days when our souls walk with no legs,
Our legs, in a union with million wrongs, are numb,
But we do not curse, for we fear our voice will still,
So we wait and watch and weep, each decade for hope.

You can find the issue here.

Two Poems

Rifling through a sheaf of e-papers bearing lines almost already forgotten, I came across these I wrote a few years ago. They were published on Concelebratory Shoehorn Review Journal in June 2007. Happy Thanksgiving everyone in the US

__________________________________

IF THESE WERE WRITTEN IN TIMES PAST

They would smell of rum, maybe wine
Of a pristine dance on brown keys that tapped,
Rasped in echoes across father’s dusty lounge.

They would reek of innocence, shy lines
Of the toddler whose eyes lay only in the silence,
laden trivia of books, and old record sleeves.

They might show relics of a hopeful child lie
Within a bulwark of rage in the silence of night,
Quiet when adults slept with ears apart, dead to the world.

They would try to hide the author’s disgust
for past bustles, home noise and day jobs,
Useless rants that mainly deter than fuel a budding muse.

But it wasn’t written then, and so the past remains
Bilked in bits of old rum in even older flasks, and pains.

MACEDONIA

Lagos again, December

Speak you must, muse, in taps, raps –
Drum, tat-a, rolls of a furious key.
The tongue to rile a fog of blabbing naps.

As with a lost wing, flap on white winds –
Serrated dots of letters, dice dials of thought
Move the night with mares of omen rinds.

Why do you forget yourself so? Soul-
Journer of a sea of words and flaming fate?
It is I who call. Grant the bearing role.

Speak you must, muse, in raps, taps –
Drum, tat-a, rolls on a furious key.
From this fringe of meagre dream of wraps.

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