Light and Other Forms of Fire
The day breaks open everything except nightmares.
All this while, I've been against the normalcy of the world's definition.
Thanks to God for giving us a book of destiny,
a hand that can scream, and a fate that tastes
like every season of the mouth.
I gather every twig and thorn that was given to me
and bury them under my tongue.
Every petal that fell from my mouth rose and bled wine.
How I drink to myself through mirrors.
There is a part of me in some multiverse staring back at me,
their hand empty except for the bouquets I give them
after everything they got yesterday was touched
by the wilting hand of time.
The demands of necessity are too high
even on days that cannot afford anything bright.
We are wickless candles, melting
to the slightest heat of bodies.
There is fire beneath our skin.
There is light in our breath, burning a way into every minute.
Scratch that. We only let time burn and burn—
all the thread that span our bodies.
Maybe there are other ways to light a candle.
Maybe the warmth of the fire is the warmth of the skin.
Clock Faced
Don’t tell us about time;
that’s a thing for people
that are planning to end.
Dawn begins again,
like it does for us,
tearing through the dark paper,
recklessly—
candling away insomnia—
a newer flavour of depression.
Noon came,
as it does,
warming our bodies,
melting away cold hearts—
become a stream
flowing back into our eyes.
The day ends,
as it does;
a blanketful of glittering
falling over us
with a mouthful of wishes—
falling
until it doesn’t touch us.
Daffodils of autumn
Do you know why the stars never fail the night
when it’s young and early?
We’ve lost more time
drawing ourselves into a tomorrow we aren’t in.
The greenness of sorrow teaches us
what we make of it.
Joy reminds us of how sorrow tasted,
like daffodils from a garden
fenced with autumn behind our mouths.
When you peer closer into the abyss,
you see time—every second
that could have come first in your life.
Every minute, a purpose becoming reasons,
every day you could have lived
with or without the excuse of visiting someone else’s heart.
When I wrote of sorrow opening up like flowers,
I was only giving back to the world
what it gave me,
in well-arranged days of messiness.
Untethered pages from the hymn of the damned
Between his fingers was a plantation on fire,
from his mouth was an exhaust of a cathedral.
Tell me there is holiness in our lungs even
when we burn this world. Tell me home is a clean tense
and its past can never be dirty. Tell me I'm sober
of my hands and I've had them perfectly between
book leaves. Tell me I can be so light, so heavy,
I won't even feel fall. Tell me we will run home
in winter, from the cold, and into their cold mouths
so I can write these poems and mail them
into the future, hoping I don't find them, hoping
I get carried away by life. Tell me life is just a line
that can be alone and so shocking. Tell me we
can move closer to people without seeing our faces
in their eyes. Tell the bull's-eye to close and dream
of what can be a target. And may they wake up
with a mopped memory from the flood
of yesterday's sunset. May they dream a good dream
and forget it. May happiness find them for no reason.
May the prayer reach out god's hand and unlock their
rib cages. May they remember to breathe this world in.
Self-embodiment of sorrow
The days tap into a reservoir of years,
And when tears lose their sorrow,
Tell every drunk of my wines.
We are the ones with big dreams
Who can't carry their bodies.
To want is to live.
The body forgets its hands often,
And anytime it remembers,
It finds them as corpses,
Wrapped away in pockets.
“I want to live”.
We all want to forget
That we are running from something,
Somewhere, elsewhere,
Into something else, we will come to know
And we will come to forget,
Because that is what it is to be human.
Sometimes I watch the world
Use the brakes in its jolly time ride,
And observe a world of fast-moving faces
Who would rather sleep
Than wish on a star.
Slow down.
We will all arrive at the meadow
Where we picked our bodies before autumn.
This is my root signature.
Tell me the scar I was gifted
By the brambles of this world
Will cement into an autograph.
Tell me they will grow roses
From what they learned of my blood.
Show me your backdoor,
And I'll tell you how it leads
In my home with no windows,
How I cultivated escape into a body
And lived in it for seasons.
How I carried winter in my mouth
As if our house will always be on fire.
Because we are always burning
To burn slowly into a sunset.
Because we want the star,
After all, to wish to have nothing
To wish for.
*****
Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi, a black writer, won the 2025 Rehumanize International Contest and SEARCH Magazine’s Poetry Contest. His work appears in POETRY, Strange Horizons, Blue Earth Review and elsewhere.
