Now, I fade night out of the mix
Fade out these puddle-spotted streets 

To replay them in altered time
Purge any reflection of day  

We are here, staying in love to believe in ourselves
So hard we stop responding to our inventions  

In the presence of these energies
You’ll slip on lightening robes  

Play, god, your heels make craters
Make sure the door is bolted on your ascent  

Where the world flatlines on an operating board
After Phaethon has crashed his father’s car  

After abuse of combustion has come without surprise
In an upward spiral for new heavens  

Hanging onto a slither of hope
Where along this horizon will we situate mid-air?  

New edges take form from the fall
I exit a station and there we are not  

A superfluous minority
More of us than there is a fair shot  

More of us than there is luck
Somehow, too many to be completely forsaken  

We compose mythologies for ourselves
Half-gods cued up at 6am for a flight, trans-galactic  

Reaching for Sappho’s dangling apple
Putting the love back in amorphous  

Flying on nothing but a notion
And the phantoms of desire  

On those mornings when a gloomy light is bestowed on us  

And movement is worship  

To rush for the train would be bad theology
If you die, we will riot  

Deathly, vengeful,
Almighty reveling, riot  

Won’t be sorry you died
When the wrong anthem plays  

We will riot
State of emergency  

Stutter the snares
It is Friday and I refuse to run.  

Venus’ bind is a familiar pattern of crazy
Revives everything around us  

Like God’s scope on a sparrow:
I love and allow you to keep on, madly  

Love, deliver us from our separation panic projected into infinity
Keep our youth and lunacy and see that it leads to your glory  

I’ve heard a song so good, so old
I want that feeling forever  

I don’t give a fuck and I see a planet burst
I don’t give a fuck, the flame is beautiful  

This is a universal symphony; for the love-insane strictly
That is what beauty is  

Do you have the ears for it?  

I crash land in a city gothic with grief
With streets named after false saints
Canonized by their friends  

I’m too early for sleep
A good meal costs an hourly wage working retail
The night blows it clean through a line
The snow inside falls impure but for a while
Nobody dies 

Sadio comes close
Wakes up to some white folks, professional types, feeding him
Strawberries to get his sugar up
The devil is in his ear suggesting
He turns stones to bread
All this kingdom will be his someday
At this point, I’m sure I’ve seen it all  

And worked out the price of escape
How to sell an African?
At the exchange rate of fate
How to free all the world’s species from Noah’s genders  

I hang a rosary on Sadio’s bed post
He is near exhaustion and still works late
Outside a pop-up nightclub, the hood of an abandoned
Mercedes 200 becomes a throne
He walks down a bridge and all of the Mile End rises to meet him  

This is the tempo when an advance is due
Pay it tomorrow with zero returns
At night I take refuge in a cozy bed
The sheets are geranium scented with absence
I track planets on an app  

To keep in tune with Africans reclaiming their right to hold multitudes
Showing the world’s peoples their bridges to source
Their true origins on ornate trays, and their wealth intact
Near a lighthouse all the way back in Swakopmund I lose my fears
Jetting past a field of wilder beast and caribou  

A log gate is open wider than the veld
Rattle snake pits perforate the granite path  

A shipwrecked Angolan vessel baths in the Atlantic
Fata Morgana of New Earth dots the horizon  

The miners lay precious stones in reverse order
I put back with them, twice as much as has been unearthed
That’s on Asaase Yaa
That’s on my cradle in Oshun’s oceanic womb  

Sometimes a little spark will consume a lifetime
An attachment to wounds might, at the same time, limit the pain
Not everyone escapes these little fires
Steps inward pave the way through  

Emptied of people, none of our cities look bad as graves
Curfew begins, many lives ruin in parallel
The words across my screen are weighty with yearning
I come to you on kaleidoscopic impulse
Just off centre
Christ and Gibran eat watercress
The streets are washed in metallic light
Aesthetic dilemmas echo an evocation without form
I live in an unadorned grey block still somehow touched by beauty
I want Donna Summer’s Berlin, something close
I don’t want a text; I speak sighs to you
Bunkered in this cozy last haven
For more than a night, cautionary tales will land on my ill-advised side
The poet is a miscellaneous nigga, a quick dick and dip
Shit posts and smokes fast
Blows over
Locs windswept, naked as a concrete wall
In a forest of smokestacks waiting for a call back
No solo trips to heaven
That taste of you is hitting like enlightenment
The crown face of a coin is hitting like dispossessed land
The poet wants to throw Keats’ bust on tan leather seats and drive off cliff
The poet is escaping Salome’s veiled dance, a message at the tip of the tongue
For all us insiders, post-human and dizzy
Listening in on each other’s emergency calls
Feeling mortal by proxy
The Siren’s song is an alarm after all
This world is really that over
At least psychically, while I put another pause in your breath
We are mortals reinventing eternity
Everything is forever, every time is now, everything is for real
The poet is Parajanov’s young Sarat-Nova in a sea of open books
Yet doesn’t become one
You don’t want drugs you want surrender, the high is just
The way you found to get there
The poet is present, hailed as provider of other means
Like the blood of a king, or the light of the sun
God save us while Babylon succumbs
At night we tend a fire with money and freedom
A hint of nigga weather is promising
African’s invading the west with a groove is promising
Yelling stateless open secrets across balconies is promising  

In this new, new world, you’ll regret nothing, possess nothing
Everything is forever, each time: it is now and everything is real  

The gloved earth is an exogenous hand  

All those creeks aren’t strained  

Trees are trusted with our fears  

There is strength in enduring emptiness  

Whatever is hated, isn’t hated long  

Whatever is loved, isn’t presumed lost  

Religious fervour is transmutable  

All are loved to their fill  

Echoes and howls  

The bloodline surges  

Steps separated by decades  

What’s found cannot be possessed  

What are people trying to achieve anyway
When they pummel each other with symbols?  

I draw a heart and it grows a motive
You’re centred in good light, fixing your voice  

I draw a heart and an insatiable aperture reels us in
A glint of daybreak across a reflective ceiling  

Covers hoisted like sails
To like who you are when you feel  

In viscera  

Like the manic, unreasonable spirit of the sea,
They’ve breached the port of entry  

Wearing the faces of people they trust who are sowers and builders, not seafarers, who despite
that, must surge after their bloodline. 

Circling down sewers  

Paddling along interrupted landscapes – a catena of landing
It neither ends here, nor there
Feet drying at shore, hills rolled into their coats, comforts stored  

In angular and optimistic jars, apprehended by strangers who come to number, and then void
them
The mass of their presence charging the air; their arrival proves nothing and doesn’t conclude. 

Anyone who’s ever shipped out some place merely extended this tradition  

I tweet for reluctant artists trapped in Berlin like it’s a whale’s belly
Also, for decaying swimming pools, inflated degrees and class angst
Also, children who see dead relatives on the faces of clocks they’ve inherited from them
Boy who finds a scratched copy of “it was written” prays it stops skipping on “shootouts” so he  can hear it all the way through for once
For chronically bored Geminis
People who hate tomatoes
For love, homage and tribute
Boy in Accra thumbing through “Ebony Pictorial History of Black America” he finds a portal  For people who witness crystal-face deities making out on a crowded dance floor For Naima, the best name, the best composition
For the night we looked at Venus and burned our straitjackets
For the trio of friends we lost, the unfinished character arcs they’ve left behind  We have to remember it all, we’re the narrator, for that too
For red rusty smokestacks like giant claws over a murky lake
Newcomers witnessing spring sneak colour back into a Canadian cityscape  For futures more urgent than our fears
For showing up already loved
Being in a new country and looking up to see if a swarm of bats will blacken the skies like they  occasionally do back home
For every misheard lyric
Biographies of poets, living and dead
Also, ghost stories, imagined and real
For god when they appear as ants at the base of a flame tree
When they appear as an inscription in a bathroom stall
For freight train hoppers
For prophetic rain from an overburdened sky. 

The spirit of the river wears a face borrowed from a crowded market
To escape the course  

Settles on the promenade, pelican nights on the jetty
Posture of a greeter  

Daylight deadens the flow of people
A truck bulks under a coal load, sinks to a crawl, obscured by plumes of smoke  

The texture of eviscerated forests
Scorched mask face, the sky bereaved  

Spirit of the river borrows a face from a crowded market
To fit on one in transit  

Posture of a sitter
Tuned into a large story  

Engines roar on the tarmac
As loud as a century is long  

Spirit of the river escapes the course
Soul of the currents  

Whizzing along a meridian
And the dead ends written in permafrost  

They run after you, water bird
Shooting into a cracked sky  

Spirit of the river borrows brushes from a garden
Miniature bells of hyacinth  

Love binds the wounded flesh and curls
The earth receives  

Forests have receded past one town and the next
All named after trees  

Trunks bake in earth pits
Concealing a blemish with a wound  

In a harrowing time of pale magic clawing at the eyes  

Light splices too close to thought  

And still, a seedling snug in its pod
A spider suspended off a gossamer harness,
Ants tunnelling through a mound always after the end
Remain attentive to the ecstatic 

Shrubs outgrow a path
The lone termite hill with its cluster of outposts, stands as still as an initiate  

The fireflies’ maneuvers shields us from territorial darkness
The Spirit of the river never eludes its own destiny and hurtles toward renewal  

Spirit of the river against a copper poisoned republic
Trying to close parenthesis near the borders end  

All sky is good sky
Where an all-knowing story bird is etched  

All earth is good earth
Where children sift gold at the riverbed  

Songs write themselves whenever  

I walk to the park, toward the edge of disparate slopes  

The last frost of the season  

Frothing in the heating  

Pearls at the seams of Rue Bernard  

Dirty stone walls arching down a prolonged avenue  

The sidewalk is set to be halved by terrace planks  

I walk the trail, occasionally pausing in search of synonyms  

For real world sounds to fit into a ballad  

To fit into an ache  

To collapse into melodic pangs of beauty.