Memoir

Dish

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Last dish of the year that was… 

And the soup is a mixed affair much like life. You got your meat and your fish. Your Okoro and Ogbono. And in there, do I find disillusion swimming in that liquid hope with the greed of my soul? The bitter with reason outdreamed by the short lived sweetness, conscripted into the war of hearts, I’ve tasted the best and worst of it. Yet still, the seasoning dresses up our fate, masked for the ball of confusion we perspire on. Keeping the secret hidden inside out of the pot and expositioning the plot would be one heaven of a ride out to sunrise.

Saturday

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Saturday on the lowly with Ketchup and other life accessories. Blossoming nights chitter chatter away, and our sky will reckon with us if we stay up on it. When she comes. She goes. And where he leads, she follows through with her lightness of touch, an iris torch to paint the saturated night of his tribulations into the green and grey of her becoming.

Nature

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

I conceived you in my heart. Nine months was nine lives riding on an eternity that was nurtured in us. Seven times before I went for mine, to spin jewellery and the world, and your head is gone. Half the time between the world and you. You thought it was. You. And I. The World is yours. Don’t lose your heart. Again.

Barber

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Cutting in. You want out. Got off the chair, and you’ve been racing to the start. It was never yours to own. A fault like a bone, you were never theirs to scorn. Just backed up in decisions and the barb is a wheel to the wire. Closest shave was the kindness for his kind. Yours in kind and candid to the skin that a blade would kiss.

Wounds & Things

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Crying skies can’t hide from the sight of bredrin’s backfaced accusations played with the mute. Shift work. You got all the baggage in the skin hanging off her lies. Do you know how the thief negotiates for the crimson kiss before closing time?

I’ll tell you a secret. An open heart dies before it learns to close its eyes. For bad. And lives before it overstands to keep you out of mind, folded and tucked away from the words she didn’t keep. You were right and wrong to not keep her broken jar of sugar and fantasy. Empty words. Selfish belongs in the ocean with them and other strings, wounds and things of unknown possibilities. She goes this way. You go that way. Out of hers. Closed. For good.

Gallery

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Inside. You are an outsider and the room knows it. You do not belong to them. The walls stiffen in defence of the inflammed human heart that is present. You will never be of them. The wall knows this fate you bet your fears on. Too swell. Tooth picked. You tilt your hat before they turn you down. You haven’t asked anything of them. Yet. The floor sucks on the sole of your swift footed analysis. Daring you to overthink the feeling that is stirred up in the forest of invention. An idea. What is an idea? Just like us. And nothing alike. 

Wet of eyes, the paint sounds the welcome. They despise her too. And her ghosts. Colours come for real. Want all the sparks. All the action that imagination can fire up. They want you to want them too. And you know how they like it. The thickness. The trust in the thrust. The oh so bitter sweetness of us at our worst best. You would buy them if you didn’t already own their desire to have you or the image they paint of you in reflection. And what are you?

Outside. You are an insider with no throne room for Benin’s bronzed hypocrisy, but space for double bedded love making with case sensitive words for a thousand books and one. You make the way, they see through you, what they think you are and never were. Rust of Scarlet, blood conscious to a fault, who would have doubted the waters that ushered you into this world? If you were I and I knew how to speak, I would not paint you into the absence of mind that silence suggests. You haved loved loudly in your time, and the ground will not forget, even if you are never spoken of. All love is memorial but all is not lost. Except to time, when bound to art and held captive by the memories of those we have longed for. And have hungered to know intimately, the internal walls of our lover’s throbbing heart without the shades on. 

Breaking through to be inside of you and all you aspire to breathe out into damnation when you dreamed us into the merciless canvas of mortal life and the infinite glory of Agape. How cruel, the truth convicts the dead as though they were sentenced to life in unfinished paragraphs. We have only fallen in love with ideas and risen in the acceptance of our fallacies. The multiverse. The continents. The ocean of oceans that we are. It carries all the Hell and Heaven that resides in us. With us. For we are hung up in the awakening terror of love’s gallery for the broken and torn apart. 

Yours

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Your opalescent eyes drown in the silent brown of his evacuated skin so that he wears your melancholy like the second hand clothes of a new born. He is as much of you, as you are of us. His language is caplocked yet without sound. Write him into the fire of your existence, for he has burned in waiting. You know how to sign. Yes. No tie for a native tongue that a Cinnamon sweet kiss could not release.

Honey of truth, blood of your soul, you’ve always known him. Remember how he held you once for what was forever. You embraced him and erased Gregorian time. There’ve been other lost boys but not like this one, swimming in the rivers of your fertile subconscious, and climbing your mountains of longing.

Woman of substance and sequins, find him in the seven caves of your intuition. Reveal him. Paint him as you know him to be. As if he was made of wonder and sacred flesh. Your fallen man of mirth and unusual incense, broken into pieces of love to fill the cracks in your labyrinth of secrets and hurts. You wear his deathless life, like a vintage dress of freedom. Shadow lover, he is yours to claim in the Moonlight of day.

How Long

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

The double drummer accents the beaten heart. Take a deep breath and inhale. Perspiration crawls out our eyes for what we have dared to see, enduring the years locked in a moment. Not of wonder. How much better to survive even when you cease to be necessary. Father’s words were never mine to keep. She turns the head as he learns the hard way home. Never cease to be necessary in the bullsweat of silence. Enduring love holds you hostage to freedom. A twinkle of an idea that winks at your foolishness. You earned it too. Your coffee is late. 

And Speaking Of Hands…

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

“As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles.”

– Walt Whitman

It has been noticed that I sometimes hold mine as she does hold her own. I wasn’t aware of that until it was pointed out to me. However in my case it may have more to do with the sack of fluid pressing on the nerve which restricts the fingers and forces the hand into a mildly clenched form when not active. Or it might just be that I am my mother’s son and have inherited a physical trait of hers. 

Last December she told me that before I was born she prayed for another boy. She had read an article in a Reader’s Digest magazine titled ‘If your dreams came true’, and that was her dream. I was her dream come true. I was a little startled when she shared that with me. The idea of being someone’s dream is rich food for contemplation. Naturally I was destined to disappoint somewhere years down the line. Lawyer was not becoming of me with my head high up in the clouds. And there are some other things on the vicarious life through your children box that I didn’t tick off. But the hands have not failed to live up to the weight of dreams if not expectations. I’m not the baby in the picture and I’m not the differed dream. Just the dreamer still working with troubled hands that turn inwards but reach out for impossibilities like love. Some do wonder if fate and destiny, like some parents, have favourites. And yet children take sides too. I had only the hands of my mother so there was never a choice to be made. The bastard is fathered by the world he reconfigures. Made up mentors in books and elsewhere fill up his imagination. He chooses to love. He chooses to believe. He chooses to never give up. Bolder than stone. He chooses the hand he was not dealt and the hand he has not felt, to hold. And to be held, not held back.


When I was a child I was taken to see a Palmist who revealed something that would happen to me when I was older. It happened but I survived. Do not let people speak into existence your present or future if it is not for the good of your life. And that goes for your children too. When I was lying in bed in hospital in 2014, looking through an open window, I rejected those words spoken over my life. A hard lesson learnt. I spoke words of my own aspirations and decided I would live on. God would have the last word. And the hands of time would have to fall in line.