FAKE PICTURE BY TAYO TALEY

FAKE PICTURES
.
after Adeniran
.
I’m the only one left in this room;
wait I thought I saw a shadow walk through the walls –
I just remembered, it is the silhouette of
my former skin that I dropped on the picture frame
of my wall. I hear its footstep, the cracks it left on the
wall & the names of each heartbeat pounding its
flesh in the mortal of my face. now we are two left in
this room; maybe three – myself, silhouette & the other
remnants of its bones trying to find home in my body.
.
my father told me I was the black sheep of the house;
but I said, I have no home, ‘cause the house is no home
when there are no loved ones. my body is the only home
left & it is a desert filled with darkrooms of dusts
& sand dunes – with a tincture of elixir & cactus, which I
squeeze its juicy thorns into my mouth as a meal. there is
also a ladder on the walls of my body which I climb at night
into a pinnacle to hear tales of Arabian nights, which bears
the story of how my mother first had a son like me that
went into a poem, only to fall from the hills of dirges as each
lines where distant cities, where boys were held – in chains &
fetters. I later knew the place the boy truly fell – my anus.
for I hear his echoes somewhere in my nostrils each
time I sit & sneeze his voice into forgotten laps of street lassies.
.
now I know why those bones finding home in my body left
my silhouette. I am a boy of diverse bodies living in a single
roof, I hear how the owls sing elegies on the roof each night,
only for the noisy wind to gossip into my ears the voices of
the men that went to the river bank to search for the
voyages that brought them when they were boys. only to echo
silence as they couldn’t clamber the walls bounding the rivers.
those men somehow came back with the gossips of the wind. I still
hear them, as the sighs on my face whisper their names in my ears.
.
I’m the only one left in this room. the rest have gone into
the mirror on the wall & I see them – as my reflection – as they
wave at me. then I knew that I’ve been sitting on the shores
of a mirage as the waves come knocking on my feet with wet songs
& my body as the DJ. somehow, I hear the sound on my the broken
mirror on my wall, there was war in there & those that went never
returned. now, I’m the only one left in this room with a pile of shards
in my body, bearing the images of broken memories as they seep
through my cracked wall.
.
©Joshua O.Aire
#TayoTaley