Road to the Skeleton Galleria
In humid spaces
speech sleeps on your lap,
you gouge serenities
There are no holidays
no workdays
you pack your skeletons
from an anarchist’s throat
The river divides inside your skull
laughter drags itself impassively
from a graveyard
You feel like a rapacious eye
beaten by uneasy light.
You sense another life inside you,
a self that rages until it turns to tobacco ash
Imposing noisy self
housed in your body
all these diaphanous years
Faithless, you stand upside down,
your hands tightened
on ankara edges plastered
against your abattoir skin
Your spit is a lake running up to the river,
a cloud of grains through
the vaults of your mouth.
Now’s just your time,
it’s just your time,
it’s just you and you who is you
lost in your big band world.
Onis Sampson is a young Nigerian writer and legal practitioner currently living in Port Harcourt city, Nigeria. He is the winner of the 2013 McPherson University Essay Writing Competition and the winner of the June edition of the 2015 Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest organised by Words Rhyme and Rhythm, Nigeria’s biggest online poetry platform. He is the 1st Runner-Up, 2016 World Union of Poets— Poetry Prize of Africa and was chosen as Semi-finalist, 2016 Saving Endangered Species International Playwriting Prize. His poems and short fiction have appeared on Tuck Magazine, African Eyeball anthology, and elsewhere. He blogs at www.onisreviewz.wordpress.com. Singing, playing board games and body building exercises are his part time fancies.