situation report
because silence wears the tongue / with every second it nibbles on it / & absence smothers the mind / into oblivion / i’ve been staring through the cracks on these walls / awaiting the arrival of your voice / so long / i know how much concrete / have to thin into ghosts / fore mother earth opens her body to a plague / i imagine you’ve also seen mirages of our memories / on nimbus clouds / everything now belongs to the past / days the sky wrapped its blue around our frailty / our bones / shuddering to the music / from the wind / me / kneading your hair behind your ears / & kissing each star falling from your brows / you / finding your voice in my voice / me / reliving pieces of my childhood / in the punctuations of your laughter / the world / flattening its limbs in saltwater / we / running & falling / we / almost drowning & waking / on a frozen new world / where contact / blends with the color of dead stars /
today / the sun rose blind eyed / today / i get to watch the same prayer / leap from one lip to another / drawing circles round the silence / of god / every patient wants the same thing / answers / how long before the soul withers / into a noun without a bone? / my mind races through images / of the star-shaped freckles / under your eyes / i struggle to say something audible / to myself alone / two breaths escape a ventilator / heartbeats from a cardiograph / transmute into songs / the universe dissolves / a tsunami of emotions pins me to the sky / i’m not dying today / i haven’t written of the élan of love / meandering in cemeteries / this course is not unnatural / who else heard when outcries / liquefied into eulogies / before leaving my mouth? / it is not a question of when / but how / did we get here? /
whichever part of us dies / in the storm / shall rise with the sun / for every part i miss about you / i sow in a poem / i wound my soul around litanies / your body finds me combing the city / for your chuckle / in the sound of silence / i’ve been breakdancing to sad songs / & do not know which / my mouth would sing first / when i die / nobody knows how long / our heads will be entombed / in this whirlwind / i do not know of an emptiness / i’d hedged myself in / that the world doesn’t have between its teeth / a preacher on radio says / the Day will come as a ballerina / with silence for a language / the sky─ her stage / constellations─ her audience / he says it’s a metaphor / for how our own hearts / will eat our bodies away / inside out / i find a drop of poison in his sarcasm / he wants me to watch the sunset / & remember how someday / we will both say we are alive / & will not see / that we are all corpses / somehow / but hold on still / you are alive / today / alone /
Bio: Abu Bakr Sadiq is a student at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He dabbles between page & performance poetry. His works have appeared on Rockvale Review, Kreative Diadem, and the second anthology of BoysAreNotStones. He loves gurasa, scrabble & his mom. You can find him on Twitter & IG @bakronline
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