Stream Poem by Niran Okewole

What does it matter if
today at the round the cleft-lipped doctor
snacked on my innards? Elevenses, my ears!

Awodi bird grows fat on curses,
feeds fat on the fury.

Tight like a sphincter in communismus,
what does it matter, anyway
what does it all matter really?

Hiding behind a copy of Homer's Odyssey
("Perhaps he would have preferred a more
liberal education ," she said)
Editions of "Economist," Beckett's Malone Dies,
Whoroscope, the trip, lost chicks, seeing Efunsetan Aniwura.
Tolstoy's borrowed boots, purchasing watered palm
wine with cowries, kinsmen of the gourd, the proletcult.
Like the foetus of chapelizod, a coral on old string.

Abiku, Boston, Gottingen. A lance that bleeds not
blood,not pus. White chalk, camwood, stars in Hawking's
night.
A crescent fragment of Ela's broken calabash, lamp-
Lighter in Eliot's preludes.

The sodomy of Higg's particles. Shells. Old
Tortoise, poet, listening to himself, undying, dies to the
crack of ancient-shelled wisdoms. Like King

Ubu, eating iced body cream, in micro-tubules. His
black people lachrymostly, mostly misled . EBT can't
help the only child, poor Mrs Ubu.

Walking into the twilight, ingénue, simple as
life, like Templars. Was the tower
of Babel a phallic menhir thrusting vainly in
search of the whoring skyhole?


II

The old sea-dog with towering mane,
the gong of Meinong, ringing beasts in our logic.
Ithaca (Itakun): Telemachus sits in a hotel
lounge, waiting for his father.

The Jew of Princeton, the Spanish Jew, the one
who did not fight in the war
where Orwell got his throat shot.
There is another war in Cuba-
We will bury you! -bury the capital markets.

No more lies, girl, no more innuendos
About missile defence. Nightmare girl, you dance
Seductively to the makossa of guns. Largo, diminuendo.

Ulysses is a quest for the soul.