The Things We Do in Dark Dorm Rooms; Son of The Sentinel; Thoughts on a French Monarch – Three Poems by Ghanaian Writer, Alexander Egyin Nyenku

the things we do in dark dorm rooms

set your naming day
in the palms of your lover.
move to his rhythm,
the ripples in his chest,
your beat.
another bell, another seashore,
we keep wings on our backs
so the winds do not strike us
against the ground. the new deity
is song, but the old wine
threatens to soil new wineskin.
pleasure, the boundless hunter,
searching forests and faces
and old shoes, her eyes drip of red
life, and her scabbard
holds more knives than one.

pleasure breaks the knot
loyalty cowers in her presence
how do we talk to heaven,
when our bodies
bind us to the earth?

son of the sentinel

I have placed on my mantle, a figurine
wrapped in the nets of dark skin, a mask
we forged in the fires of a brotherhood long ago
and so you look like a bowl of black fire;
your back, unseen in the cloak of dark.

even when we cross the boundary between the here,
and the silvery waves of the real,

we are bound by the shadow of your father
his glare and his smile, twin whetstones
to his tongue
standing guard at the gate of your hands.

do you stand with me in the face of fire?
or run to hide behind the rock of your blood?

and then i wake.
and then I am a tiny piece of skin at your doorstep.
and then I dream of a taste, of the sliver of your flesh.
and then I leave you to the winds, to be your father’s son.

thoughts on a french monarch

awkward and beautiful and intricate
and never mine. adjectives start forming
senses, a world of their own. you see
substance in a defining spool of thread, and you wonder
the depths of your utterance.
you look, yet you do not look. you are made
in broad strokes, unfurled in faint colour;
beauty in the song
of words and the birds of shimmering
flight. you can barely
mouth a word.
I can never save you.