Short Love Poems 12: LAGOS ‘TOASTING’
(For a female co-passenger
from Mile 2 to Ajah)
Can I paint you
On the canvass of the future
Telling brushstrokes giving deserving airs
To your graces
And redefining your peculiarities
Beside me in the foreground
Not the background
Can I picture you
In the highest resolution on
A future portrait
Traces of me in every pixel
Can I stitch you
Into future dialogues
Into the lyrics and orchestra performance
Of a future classic
Weave you phrase after phrase
Into a future oration
To the applause of a great audience
Can I carve you
On the rock of history
Can I embroider your name
On the eternal garment of time
Can I
May I
Short Love Poems 13: RABI RAI NA
Rabi rai na
You are the tasty drink of fresh milk
On a furious afternoon
And my heart is your colony
My fervor is the crash of the surf on Elegushi
I look at you- caramel skin and graphite tresses
And think of the glow
That would rival the sun with pride
Taste your lips and am on glucose overload
A caffeine high
You place my spirits on heights
The clouds will not attempt
Ololufe
My anti-depressant
A hit of opium to the brain
I chant you like Hallelujahs and hosannas
By a Cherubim and Seraphim congregation
A Negro Spiritual
I’ll traverse the universe with you
A shell to my back
Short Love Poems 14: MY FAIR TWISTED FANTASY
My fair twisted fantasy
You inspire a beautiful sense of foreboding
The thrill of danger
Like skydiving, bungee jumping and bingeing
I feel you wriggling into my life
Worming through me
Leaving in your wake an itch I can’t scratch
Fearing it might result in a boil
When you smile (you always do)
Your eyes have the sheen of floorboards
Soaked in Premium Motor Spirit
I’d be afire if I spoke to you in flaming poetry
Of the million and one torches
Burning in my heart for you
I require a life jacket in your presence
It’s like an amateurish swim in the depths of the Atlantic
Your absence expedites the Psychiatrist’s invitation
I can’t think of you without setting myself up
On a collision course
Your knowledge of geography astounds me
I run away to find you lying in wait
At every escape route
Who will rescue me from the exhaustion
Of this struggle
I want you. I want you not
P.S: I LOVE YOU STILL
I had a dream
A dream I carried around in my wallet
It was you and I doing the salsa
To a rhythm divine
At the threshold of infinity
Then someone picked my pocket
And I lost that dream
Short Love Poems 15: WORDS TO A PECULIAR GIRL
Sweetness
‘There’s a reason these Philistines
Do not comprehend you
You answer Samson’s riddle
You are the honey in the lion’
A hand writing a Hebrew cipher
On a Babylonian wall
Monalisa’s smile
Nothing is lovelier than you
Short Love Poems 16: TILL THE END OF THE END
When you shut the door indefinitely
Against the world
And draw the blinds against life
When the sun and moon will gift you a smile no more
And the stars cease winking
When the crowing cock and chirping cricket
Belong to yesterday
And the euphoria of the global village fades away
When the track on the radio is pin-drop silence
And the telly presents not even a white noise
When there’s no text in the paper
Or no paper at all
And the worldwide tele-density ratio
Is worse than in the Stone Age
When the world you know is a box in a hole
Peopled by you alone
And on your gate is an epitaph
Gradually being eaten away by moss
I will follow you into the dark
Short Love Poems 17: BROADCAST ME
Some women take a good man
Fold him, tie him in the fringe of their wrapper
Or tuck him in their bra
Concealing him from the rest of the world
Subject me not to this fate
I want to walk with you in the sun
Be your news at primetime
Your commercial with catch-phrases from paradise
Make me your Pulitzer-deserving piece
Your Headies or Grammy-winning hit
Your Nobel laurel cause
Let me be your gospel to the world
Short Love Poems 18: A SACRISTAN CALL
No Solomon or Herod’s temple
Could ever contend with this body
Here, take the keys
Come become its anointed priestess
Open the gates, enter and worship
In its most holy sanctum
Why sacrifice to the baals
On the high places of deprivation
Short Love Poems 19: LINES FROM A HEMORRHAGING HEART
Since you’ve been gone
My laughter bears a lead weight
My smile is scary like a masquerade’s
I sing no more
Who loves to be thrilled
By my croaky melody
I forgot how to celebrate
And they want me to move forward
I want to
Believe me
To rediscover my laughter and smile
To chart a new Silk Road to my private pleasures
But my feet are glued in the mire
Even if I can
I can’t find shoes that fit
I look ahead and see yesterday
The future is spelt on a Mesozoic tablet
In the language of dragons and dinosaurs
And their brother extinct species
So educate me please
Teach me how to move forward
Without a glance backward
Show me how to do it with same joy
As before you left
Short Love Poems 20: FLIGHT MODE
I am truly terrified to forget you
No metaphorical glue
Can describe my attachment to
You
No knife can cut the binding rope
No key can unlock the Kirikiri bars
Of my conviction to your mystery
Where words like definition, description and
Explanation are non-existent
Yours is the hook that has caught me
By the gills
But, somehow, against my will
My mind becomes vacant
Echoing with amplified silence and
Cricket chirps
Crawling with roaches and rodents
The spiders have begun spinning their webs
Where you used to lie
And I find myself ascending, gently but surely
And sorely
In a jet of fugue
Into amnesia
Short Love Poems 21: BLANKSPACE
I have a blank space the size of a plateau
Sizing me up, eyeballing me like an agbero
At Ojuelegba spoiling for fisticuffs
Daring me
I could crayon, shade it
Or give it a touch of water colour
Stroke it with a ballad, a sonnet
An ode to paradise lost
Or stab to deface it with rage and infinite protests
Crusades and activism
Corruption’s odyssey
An elegy written in a ghetto graveyard
A people’s struggle for freedom- free doom
The list goes on
I have a blank space staring me down
Bracing for a brawl
I’ll just write your name
Short Love Poems 22: EULOGY FOR MISS ANGEL
The lady is perfected
Her visage bears the decorations
Of a festival masquerade
On her rear bounces the farce
Of political promises
The magnetism of perdition
Her withered limbs, patched with colors:
Agbalumo yellow, tomato red, lollipop pink
Akara brown and mango green
Seem fit for the fire that cooks
The party rice
The once arrogant lactose troughs
Eyeballing one as if to say:
“What can you do”
Now sag in total loss of self-esteem
From overuse, or mismanagement, or both
Stretch-marked and dry like bean pods
In harmattan
She has lost her entertainment appeal
And incites society no more to wet dreams
Her shakara has ended
Short Love Poems 23: GREEN
I can see there is an ongoing warfare
Inside you
Who you are, bearing arms against
Who you want to be
And chances are
You haven’t walked a yard in your shoes
How is it you want to do a world tour in mine
I cannot fold my arms, sit here and escort you
With my eyes to self-destruction
Salsa to your discomfort
And glory in your pain
It’s probably not my place
But to rescue you from you I’ll say it anyway
Since you wear the look of one
Who is yet to taste the salt of his own awesomeness
And earn some bragging rights
Who hasn’t gifted himself a clap-offering
In Methuselah years
My friend
Green is envy’s colour
It’s perfect on jade
And on the vegetation of the field
Perfect on moss, lichens and ferns
But definitely not on your eyes
Scrub off that scowl
Glaring even to the blind
It’s leeching on your joy
Brother, green is not your colour
About the writer “MI THOMAS graduated from the University of Maiduguri and had brief stints as a show host with Globe FM 98.5 then a co-host of a musical show on BRC2 94.6. He is the founding editor of Sambisa Reports and a contributor at TrendingAfrique. His credits include two works of non-fiction- Milestones (memoir); Maiduguri: the untold stories. He has also written over 500 poems, dozens of scripts for screen and theatre and is copyright owner to several photographs.” “He lives in Lagos with his friends, Allen Amadi and Prince Aboh. Connect with Mi Thomas on Instagram@MI Thomas, Facebook @MI Thomas-Author, Twitter @MI Thomas
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