My implacable canoe abdicated placebo waters, creeks and lagoons, a secure cerebrospinal river to stand in. Paddle, in hand, in current.
Ahead must have been the promised estuary where streams meet their ocean. But suspicion of the unseen makes a better navigator
than knowing. There was always more thread to pull as the shroud surrendered its weave, as course revealed more course,
and intuitions more queries, but it was easy work. In retrospect I should, but could not have known to note the rapids, the barnacle spears
that would glance my under, my craft’s gravity veering off its gentle glide into what my homunculus, existentially farmish,
hungry, had mapped—the soft of my bruising, the dimensions of my lack, my trajectory of crises, the genetic promises I’d been unaware of.
This is how my poems, with tails prehensile, tasting, forensic, found my strangeness before I did. What alexithymia? They knew.
Oracles must have worked the same: braiding drowned memory, pattern associates from the humus of consciousness, and dews from the caves of fear
into ropes they tied your hands with. Therefore eyes, you twin sunsets on this watery dusk: do not blink in the treacherous velocity.
Watch for the rootlings inscribing their tabula of clay, and the delta fingers of my own echo reaching to pluck me before the water falls, and brings me into itself.
© Tolu Oloruntoba
Notes
October is Autism Acceptance Month in Canada. I accept myself. There was nothing wrong with me.
The accompanying illustration was created by Nnamdi Nwoha as part of a series I commissioned to accompany what would have been my debut collection of poems in 2014. I’ll be eternally grateful that I was forced to wait 7 years to get my debut (which contained none of the earlier poems) published. I have often wondered what to do with those illustrations. I knew what to do with most of the 2014 poems, though: ensure that they never get published. :) This poem is one exception, being a rewritten 10th anniversary edition, of sorts, of an earlier one titled “Placebo Boy.”
Brilliant.