PEACE AT WAR


Woman standing in the ocean


Sometimes I wonder, so hard my head

begins to pulse, if dreams are connected

using different circles, or they just draw

their own squares to sit in– because

I've noticed, my dreams are not like that

of the bloke who snores beside me at night

I wonder how they let him snore!

mine taps on my arm, gently, rosy, like

the fingers of my mum, when my body snuffs in its chocolate flavor, and I'm 

fallen into its love/ they—his brothers—

come out and banter, with me at the peril of my

tranquil. & I'm tired, really/my hands

are swollen from pushing their needly

faces, and my feet are retired from running

away from something, which sits in

everything, but is actually nothing/such irony, yet it 

still whispers; tells me he is here with me,

not as Romeo—who couldn't fight the

sea—but as my shadow, and even when I

can't find it, it's there holding & latching on to me. 

So I stand here on my back— silent, on the bank of the 

unbothered ocean swelling right inside of me, a sound dead yet again.

© Balogun Ayoola Joseph 

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