Abiku is born — Uncredited (Nigeria Magazine)

Dried fingers, long needing joy,
Clutch at my annoying beauty
Dissolved in bliss of birth-mirth:
Abiku is born
Born to live and leave again
I am
Abiku.

My brother when last I came
Would not believe truant plight
Bits of broken knowledge cudgelled on him in college
Often he would recite.

And poor Mother loved me
Who would gaze insouciant
As ontologist-brother
Diffused shy metaphysics
On Mother’s sightless stare.

But as bound I am
By passion of the human
Legs, and arms, and all
To you Mother
—worn-wombed with my vicious cycle—
Shackled am I (as thus you treat me)
By strings un-human
To anarch of anfractuous spirits.

As thus I come
To see you die, Mother,
Choke this last breath’s escape
That I may live.
Enshroud my life and all, transient,
In Hammock of herbs and leaves
So I may swoon
In rubbish Nature’s halitosis—
Eternal blissdom.

When wantonly
My teeth glide and glean your stringy nipples,
I feel
The teats of your breasts
Burn my lips
Wet my lungs with viscous fire
Like the pouting craters
Of boiling volcanoes