Pain

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.

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.

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.

Banker

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Where to. Going. Expediently. 

Where from. Coming. Cosmological. 

Where now. Owing. Everytime you leave is a return. 

A banker. Loaning a teller. Waiting at a table. Tailor is sacred as cloth talk for dress made face time. 

Savage. 

Time lives rent free. And richer still than a free man who is owned by home. Running to pay for permission to live by licence. 

Lawful. Unwedded bride taken by the L. Lawfully cold to a touch. 

Found. Racing to die by returning the favour.

Pleasing is the plated tongue. Golden. You’ll house me and the thighs that spread like the gut of a gluton. 

A believer. Till undone. All lives in a sentence to command the fool to stop. Landing is not the feat. Foot in arms, not so fast, I’ll be on time when you get there. 

Here. Is fortune. Lost. For certain and unsentimental.

Curl

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

The streets are paved with prophecies. The lost and unclaimed find it, are housed by it, they pick at it, and bend to it, they laugh while they tend to it, no cry while they are gamed by it.

Whispers curl at corners, straight through they run to you. Have mercy when they wake from side to front of cue. The time they spent asleep was all they owned. The ball finds six holes to fill with dreams, whip creamed, the lies always sound new.

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.

Windows

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

While I was tinkering and thinking about whether a Blues guitar solo should share amicable space with an alto saxophone on a number, I was captured by this captivating photograph of Tsehai Essiebea Farrell which led me on a great train of thought for the lyrics to come. Ethiopia had been on my mind recently because of a conversation I had with a great Ethiopian Artist about an awakening he had. A revelation about his place in the world, his vocation, and the micro of the worlds within his wider perception. So much of the telling if not the toiling of life, both in our written past and living present, has much to do with our vantage point and the dubious nature of our muscle memory where matters of the tender heart are concerned. Uncomfortably numb but our eyes never tire of seeing and being seen. Or do they? Do they know? Do they look in on us and play our hand against better judgement? Our windows remain the seducer and the seduced, for perpetuity. It can seem that way. And what is seen is unseen. What is known is a mystery as I am to you. Always the stranger from eye to eye. Yet familiar in some kind of way. Never fully known.

Phillis, A Poet

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

On There’s A Riot Going On, Sly Stone sings with ancestral depth about his vocation. He declaritively sings that he is a poet. There is the poetry of rhyming words. But there is also the poetry of a life that reinvents itself or endures something which is far more profoundly poetic than the rhyming of words. Verses so lived in, that survival is not even the monument. A Poet who not only survives but thrives before words are accorded to her voice. We may never read her words, yet she existed.