WHILE RUNNING MY BODY FALLS BY MESIOYE JOHNSON

WHILE RUNNING MY BODY FALLS

There is a butchered memory
resting on every man. Like music
we mould what is & what may not
together to form a piece of ourselves, a
quaver, a couplet breaking back into alphabets,
so an alto of bitterness our body is
in our lover's mouth becomes a medley,
I mean it determines gravity of dreams,
falling & rising & measuring depth of silences,
of promises searching for history between
a memory wearing a brown cloth of pebbles.
Sometimes we know we are in the wrong
place & still want to place our body right there,
as if tucking a small paper in a hole too big
like a wound is a way to inject healing on our shadows.
My lover says I belong to prophecies
of her shadow & a night falls from my eardrum
making a sound of my emptiness with the ground.
You say music is life, so is silence death?
We get tethered to bitter halves of us
& after having a fine knowledge of the darkness
we just want to move to pick our reflection,
we just want to run into a new unknown song,
but like magnets something holds us back
to nothing, to what remains of a widowed night,
howling cries, a movement folding us into eclipse,
halt! darkness is sometimes the best place
to understand where you've been without light.

- mesi