Acoustic Giggles
written by: Temitope Ayodeji
@Stoneachi
It is well that war is so terrible; else we would grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee (1807 – 1870)
I’m gratified for the peace we owned,
toddlers; yet galloping downhill.
The masquerades in your lores never scared us,
Panoptic ghouls-twirling,
The magic of our tiny fingers
dissolved their riddles in haunted air. Tis something
that came along with these things western:
A carelessness, certain aloofness, one incredulity
that made an eyeless doll send me into such eerie
ojuju calabar never could.
What makes a person is gradual.
The innocence of a babe should remain
and vice never be born.
We were guileless in that scene,
galloping downhill, a cocktail of dry wind and dust
twitching in every bit of the atmosphere,
ears of flora-deaf to life –
speckled the road side like confetti amidst a brides hair.
In that ambiance, chaste giggles derive
and stubborn knees graze. And so it was
Until our quiet was squashed by
BROTHERS who held peace in their hands, and
tore chunks off of it with conned incisors,
quaffing blood from rifles.
Is the quiziness fed when one says
the system shoved the lance into his limbs or
the devil inhibits so?
She was the braver one, since when we galloped
and comely, with inhibitions
skimpy as her skirts
I called her St Millay and told her
her way ain’t right.
And she’ll always say-as if reciting an invisible script
scribbled by her bold red lipstick -Life always
will find a way of making us feel small,
we should sometimes disagree
she’ll suck her lips and look in and beyond that mirror
In that twinkling, she is a goddess.
She’ll come, smelling of cigarettes
and cheap wine. Collected,
we’ll stare at vacuity, the distant kabooms
and grrs of alien weapons shoving into our ears.
One of those days she’ll come to
rubble or come not.
Beneath I’ll try to die thinking of her,
fighting off the annexing vista
of what and who she does in dimly lit rooms.
I’ll see us once more galloping downhill,
and try to call out, lest she falls and graze
her knee as second time, but what is can never not be.
Ultimately I’ll give in to swirl, and
acoustic giggles bear me home.
- Candelabrum - October 21, 2017
- Acoustic Giggles - November 28, 2016
