Metaphors of Everything that Comes to Mind

By Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo / Issue 21

Warning: the first stanza of each sub are metaphors of blandness.

Few of my mates now make it through the smoky room of louds.

I say I have a township of colleagues; half gave up their sanity, quarter are waiting for God’s invasion,

Few gave up their nights and leisure, they asked for Zenith, there they are, as for me I am learning to give up half of my night and leisure, and ask for God’s help for my insufficiencies and the apogee.

II.

In a bus a man sings in a language I don’t understand. To say I barely understand is a way of covering up for my ignorance.

I say we all have a song, where we all banish the satani and call governments owls, we all have a song for the road, another invocation that we return home like the hand-buccal journey, a way of telling our stories of survival to the road.

III.

Metaphor is whatever you call it.

I say metaphor is a heaven the bombed stars go, garage of lies, for the surrealists, it is an ocean of salt they would never exhaust. I say mount it close to truth, it is not always a butterfly in your throat, moths are underrated in this part of the world, our fathers were moths thrown into the catacombs of the sea, the sea made butterflies off them.

IV.

In a garden a bat fell off a tree, turns everyone into gazelle, I don’t know what they were fleeing from.

I say they failed to see the beauty in spoilt things, broken dinghies were once dinghies, they should never be left out in the ocean photography. If we all have to flee no one would bury their drowned uncles, no one would look the Egyptian mummies in the eyes, no one would read a surreal novel, or listen to the tales of death to praise the autumn in all of it.

At Agege Train Station, a man called this country our failed home.

I say what is this country if not a field of nightingale taking us into a question room, a white boy asking me where are you from? Why do you smell like burnt orchard, beard of dust and cracked soles? I say this country did not only fail us, it sold us into a market of abundant chaos.

FASASI ABDULROSHEED OLADIPUPO is a Nigerian poet, the author of a micro-chapbook “Sidratul Muntaha” (Ghost City Press, 2022), the recipient of The Storyteller Grant, and a nominee for Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best New Poet. His work has been published or forthcoming at: Poetry South, Oakland Arts Review, Carolina Muse, ROOM, Potomac Review, Jet Fuel Review, Miracle Monocle, The Citron Review, Santa Ana River Review, Ambit Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, Oxford Review of Books, Olongo Africa, Stand Magazine, Louisiana Literature, GASHER Journal, and elsewhere.