i.
The route to school was tarred
With the fury of faiths parallel
Blood of two voices bowed
In worship from different ends.
An eye buried
In themes where x is fugitive
The other, Screening
the pathway to my dorm.
Where we are welcomed
With news of another body
Never returning with groceries
Like the cadavers he studied.
I had traveled miles reeking in a full man’s age
Heels propelled by doubt
Naps cuddled by mares
A scientific heart beating for art.
The wind carried mother’s tears to my thighs
Return home.
Only the living can live
On a placard of honor. Return.
Isn’t arithmetic a language spoken by dead men?
ii.
The day I die
Is the day I pour
Into a classroom, once below
Into a classroom, twice below
Into a classroom, thrice below.
In a town reeking in the laughter of steels
In a neighborhood adorned with fragments of cartridges
To extract the core of a sting as an antibody
For a society breeding in the way to our open graves
Is the way to live in death:
There go a girl
With future like x in my own eyes
There go a boy
Eating tomorrow in a brewing pot of vengeance
I hum a dance with my feet
That says Earth is littered with dirty money
Let us pick them and make food
From my old garden
I fetch converse plots:
A menu of my potholes and mishaps
(Having, in the pool of learning
splashed. Seven years for four)
Puking a map into young palms—
The route to failure is a map
Hidden below my tongue.