Poems from Dami Ajayi's "Clinical Blues".

Dami Ajayi is a great guy, aside being a medical doctor. We’ve had a few drinks – he doing the alcohol and I watching the glass cups on the table. His first collection of poems, “Clinical Blues” will be published in November 2012. I’ve decided to share two poems from the awaited collection.  

GOLGOTHA

And they brought Him to the place Golgotha…Mark 14:22 (NKJV)

There is also a tourist                    

Attraction domicile

In my homeland called

Golgotha.

The catch is

Golgotha

Could be anywhere

From the Sahelian plains

To the mangrove swamps

Of the Delta.

Indeed any place

Will suffice,

In so far, it lies

Within the confines of

Flora’s christening.

And our brochure

Is replete with captions

Culled from foreign dailies,

Garnished with garish images

Of Musca and Musa’s domestic

Symbiosis—not mutiny,

We do not call it mutiny.

Indeed our brochure is

Nothing like firsthand experience:

Has your pale buttocks been scorched before?

Have you ever been in a soup

Seething with quotidian savagery?

Have you committed larceny,

With or without a PhD?

Our services are matchless,

With black muse and machetes

And it’s toll free,

It’s so free.

Who needs a Complete Idiot’s Guide

Where Conscience is the

First prey that warms

Instinct’s palate.

In Golgotha,

Survival descends upon you

Like a dove

With Avian Flu

And you transfigure into

A famished swine

Gorging on a plateau of garbage.

And indeed no Tourist

Knows when to leave.

You do not when we clad

You with our garb of citizenship,

When your passports become pillows,

As we lay our headstone

Above your head.

CELLULOID

(1993)

All fools make pictures

But pictures are no memories,

They remain darkroom scams;

My mind surpasses every camera.

I’ve tried to touch good times twice

But they elude me, like swinging

Pendulums, cherry mangoes, physics.

So what are my options: Fantasies?

Grandiose ideations? playback video reality?

Or plain youthful CPR?

My thoughts wash in old houses

Fresh with coats of dust.

Torn settees and a creaking dining table

Offering gecko shit as breakfast.

Quick glances challenge cerebral bytes.

Where is the Grandfather clock

With a stainless scrotum, the clattering

Icicles of our curtains, the smell of boiling beans

On sawdust stove, the broken manual rewinder,

The June 12 season?