WHEN WE WRITE BY TAYO TALEY

WHEN WE WRITE
.
when autumn leaves fall:
the ground shivers, the trees observe
a minute silence over & over like a pendulum
ticking the chimes of gloom as the climes
tumble & weep for river & lakes - winter is coming.
the sun will shiver & lose its heat as the day
shrinks - like wet cloth - & belch embers of
ice burning bodies into shivers.
.
when we write dirges, we scribble the voices
singing in our bones as the lyrics rush into our
our lungs to breathe, for the song of the dead
as my father said, are gold dusts flooding the
streets of heaven. we hear the voices echoing in the
marrows in our bones, with torches searching for
the mouths that sang them. & those voices fill our
eyes with salty rivers stinging the throat of the air
that took their breath.
.
when we write love songs, we only wish to die & wake
& die & wake till we become immortals of hearts broken
like splinter, for my mother said that love is a beautiful
poison. we wish for roses, & sting our hands with thorns
only for our palms to tell the story of how love they say
can be a bed of bones where we sleep & see where their
bodies went & never returned.
.
when silence falls down the mouths of rivers, we only hear
the slushy sounds gurgling in the throat of our sighs, as
our lips get clamped to the pregnant air spewing tired inks
into our blunt quill. we later hear its footsteps in the ball
room of our hearts, as the our heartbeats become the DJ
& each pounds are like wind bending tree branches into
baptism in howling breeze.
.
when we write, we hear our names in the body
of our scrolls, as they draw us into the walls of their
nakedness, where we see the souls that swam through
inks across the sea of the aegean into the bodies they
left, when they took a stroll to oblivion.
.
Joshua O. Aire
#TayoTaley