I wrote the following poem on my 23rd birthday, May 21, 2010, sitting in a pile of sweat on a dirty floor of a mud hut in the Gambia, surrounded by ants, cockroaches, spiders, and Nutella:
Birthday Poem, 2010
I am my former’s only one.
This I know.
I hold my head up as I run.
I draw sharp figures on the wall.
My mind was present at the Fall.
In lawful news, the thinking’s done,
conclusions left to careful sum.
When words are lost and then rebuilt,
a thoughtful ear replaces guilt.
And views of pain act to remind,
a stomach is the bottom line.
And the following poem, I must have written a couple days earlier:
The Wind in the Hollows
O wicked incense, candled out
in burned wafting floats about,
a sputtered sigh before the black,
in smuggled footsteps through the cracks,
my walls have skittered, my breath holds salt,
the night's grip held in concrete faults.
It comes, it goes and leaves its tracks,
in smuggled footsteps through the cracks,
the door is barred by chairs within
to ban the noises and the sin,
the smell's now distant, and yet remains,
like faded thoughts of past terrains.
A pick-axe to his head: he writhes-
only stories of war survive,
a haunted preacher, a pack of hounds
a madman blind, groping his rounds,
excavation reveals lost tacks,
like smuggled footsteps through the cracks
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