This morning,
Just like my blind neighbor, Musa and his son Yussuf
A blind me placed my hand on the shoulder of my muse
And away wandered, walking within a world of words
Ai salam ley ku
Put a coin here and Allah will smile at you
I hollered to walking imageries
And hawking oxymoron-s
Pon-pon piiiiinnn
– It was the endless horns of onomatopoeias
As frustrated verbs vented their anger
For being stuck in a traffic of nouns
The scents of smoky exhaust pipes
Filled the nostrils of ironies
And like incense, it appeased my lung’s long longings
I inhaled and exhaled, it was both respiration and inspiration
I heard the seductive whisper of idioms and my son’s long wait
Only suggests that they must have been dressed to kill
And there came clichés like wizened, weakened women
wrinkled and obsolete, so late that they’d soon be ‘late’
I smelled flowers with sweet-scented personification petals
My son said they were planted in vases of metaphors
From which lines, stanzas and this very verse falls
Under the force of poetic gravity
The whispers of similes birthed smiles to melt the ice on my face
And only a few could see that I had no eyes
We finally rested under a leaf,
tiny yet broad like the canopies of synecdoche
We looked through our calabash, full of poems
And this very one you read just dashed out of it
Photo by Vitto Sommella on Unsplash
