before, after & for the Christchurch mosque attack
last night, i was an omniscient again.
the evening sky was orange like crushed carrot.
i didn’t die though my body fell off
a bridge, limping away like a serpent bruised
by the son’s gunpowder. in the dream
i carried all my dead inside the wide casket
of my wail and to leave the city now
is to find a crack in the world: which is why
i’m stuck in this poem. my bladder fills
with blood. my heart stopped ticking like a clock
marking the end of time. & i ran & ran
as guns whistled their venom in the open harmattan.
my country was burning. all the men
were singeing into a pile of raven without wings
their birdsong fossilized into lukewarm char.
in my vision, a danfo omnibus was heading out of
the world; the bus stop filled with one-legged
tarry, one-legged panic. i was no more a child
picking bullet casings like cracked peanuts for fun
like i once gathered bleeding machetes from a world
war that started on our porch, circa forever.
but i am trying to gather what is more forbidden:
an apple before it falls on eve’s hand, a bullet
still in motion, a hand grenade before it unfolds its
fist into smoke, a tongue after it says brother—
meat flesh is more pleasing than cabbage flesh because
of blood. you cannot blame me. in the dream,
a gunman my age shoots his voice & there a small
war gathers in his throat. but fear can
no longer hold power when it’s come to pass.
i cede myself to the belly of a whale to find
water to drown this dream of fire. i cede myself without
feeling naked like this sky with no star spot;
like God stripped of his parts he wanted unrevealed before
the fruit was plucked from the field of vision.
then i stirred and jumped out of the dream back into my eyes
and unsaddled my bladder but there was no
blood and i wrote this down and i quaked as i pulled out
my cell to seek out the dead from the night.
tonight dreamland is the unsafest country to stay.