Redolence; Precepts of a Slivering; Geometry of Godding The Gaol – Three Poems By Nigerian Writer, Osieka Osinimu Alao

Poetry on self-evolution, redemption, and the mystery of existence

Redolence

I’ve gone full circle in these marshlands
of misfortune; the skin on my feet excised

by the excesses of ramparts erected in cognomen
of self-trials. Is atrophy not first precept of putting

in the pulses? The air valiantly wears the robes
of the rotten, like a warrior unsatiated by talons

of victory: a battle births a battle births a battle
births a baptism of breakage. The attar cascading

the sphere is subterfuge of dead mackerels;
nostrils nuzzled into nefarious negligence

plead the oxygen gods into tireless gyres,
the concatenation splinters my heart into two

meridians of mirthless music—say, the moment
we acknowledge the silence sutured into satchel

of a boisterous bedecker is when the chords
come alive like risen ghosts in a graveyard

of disharmonies. My galoshes, girded into
the gravity of crescendos, are spawns of dust,

how then do I seize the spine of the wind
and split it into obeisance? All elements, etched

in the ardour of boughs, inserted into this loop,
reek of distrust and sabotage—doesn’t nature

conspire to nail our frailties to its stump
of mercilessness? All soles rooted into

this rouge of fatality. I’ve gone full circle;
now on my knees, I unknot my chest to the ozone

of all things, ready to brace the arrow-tides,
ready to bury the bone-stifling arias,
ready to brawl for the redolence of revival.

Precepts of a Slivering

The tongue of humanhood was a sole tapestry
before God opted to splinter it with heaven’s
scalpel into a philharmonic of pandemonium:
now the music dissipates in unfathomable notes?
But what seeds the conception if not the beads
of higher afflatus? What sets off the quest if not
celestial thirst: now the whizzing waters of dust
clangoring from earth’s etude flurry the supremacy
of the skies? I’ve always known mystery scoffs
at a poke. It revels in a nimbus of veneration,
stoked to stun. Stroked by the reverence of all
consciousness, and climaxes in the denouement
of the unknown. The collusion, clad in zest of
possibility’s vestment, only spawns a concinnity
of warps. Frozen by the hertz of contortion, is the
mirror not always gratified by an introspection
of ashes? What breaks the fluffy bluish myth
of the sky into multicoloured tongues of frightful
canticles if not the foray of a tower that yearns
to tango with that which lies beyond it?

Geometry of Godding The Gaol

I, too, have been sunk into the abysm,
not once, not twice, not thrice…

isn’t it fathomless fatality fanned by contorted
chords seeping from all earthling cords?

That is to say: sometimes,

we find ourselves grovelling
at the feet of death when all
we seek are shoes of sunbeams.

For every recurrence, my tongue, clamped
by the inpouring, is clipped into its shell: am I

now to fling my arms to frothy brows of sky
in billow for this crucifixion, for the world

to glimpse the glory of holes in my palms,
in my pericardium, in my prayers? But I

fold my fate into hollow portmanteaus of my body
like a distant planet folds mystery into guts of galaxy.

Say, without haze of God’s acrolect, I’ve been
hypnotised by hymns of heath: something,

without lenity, without love, without lease,
in spine of sky keeps splintering my days

into shards of sacrilege: to be lost within
the curtilage of my own body is a transgression

before the god of wild: say,

my body is a metronome
of loops and lashes,
of hooks and crashes.

To be consecrated to this distortion of gaze;
to peer the world in polychrome of peril,

where the hues are a marsh of blurs.

To be consecrated to this dislocation in maze;
to peer my being in tinctures of tarnishing,

where every fibre is fickle of faltering.

To be consecrated to this disintegration of grace;
to peer all existence in solstice of blindness,

to surrender to the incipience of nothing.

I won’t unearth my arms to the embrace of eager sky
as sacrificial specimens for the hallelujahs of holes:

I won’t unfurl the wayward wind a tune of triumph
broaching the hessian of my essence into ecdysis:

neither will I unsheathe the feathers
of idle birds with testaments of descent;

neither will I writhe warps of this world
with tales of this junkyard jump:

I will unwrap these wet shawls spooling
my tongue into a cold room of conflagration:

I will rise from the deep of my body

a god of my own chorale
a god of my own compass
a god of my own cross.