In the clearing house where nostalgia is crated away,
the forklift operator does not see the fungal bloom
in the corner, taking edges off the picturesque.
Mushroom dreams betray where they are from:
phantom bodies. The laser hairs of their fleece heads
spread molten anemone skirts. In the mineral and sepia
cosmos of the warehouse, a luminescence. Incisors
of insolent usurpers spore unsolicited from obscurity.
Basquiat-marked lizards must now be noticed, first
in the rapid-moving lifetimes of slumber, where nuclear
plumes of old experiments cannot be doused, and no sea
can garrote the thickets of growth that crack the harms
that confined them. Know that writs of trembling can glom
arc lights that flicker the lids of sleep. Know that solace
had planned, these long nights, to invade, contaminate
the gallons, the irons of your blood, to deliver your exobody,
and its brain, from machines of death. Before you jettison
your anatomy and board a boat, giving shotgun shells for toll,
know that like children, mendings want to song for you.
Trees of non-salted calendar days want to alarm the cruelty
from your broken fingers. They want to sprout herds of fiberoptic
oxen tumbling down. No lance can negotiate their scatter
to find an animal softness. All this begins in the infrared
of the spectrum. There are supply carts there, infusing tropes
of weeklong wings, into the air. The wonder reaches the floor
boards. A jury of pears casts its stones like the grenades
of an invasion. The explosions turn sand into glass barnacles
that erase more of the room. A mouth like this, once incarnate,
stays hungry. So it was that the forklift’s snoring passage
picked out that ecology of iridescence. So it was that I awoke
with the repressed memory of joy, having been somnambulant
with one divining-rod arm and one metal-detector, outstretched.
This time, I let the hooves of simple desire stampede
from inevitable corrals. Improbably, the tooth oceans survived
contact with reality. Sleep had woven broken forms around my bite
marks. I carried their fire, letting them warm me well into the day.¶
© Tolu Oloruntoba
Note:
Written based on The Luminaries 30/30 prompt: “Write an ‘exquisite corpse’, which is a poem in which a collection of words is collectively assembled, from every poem you wrote during the month. You can begin from day one and work your way down or you can rearrange the order of how you assemble the lines.” The poem quotes fragments from poems 1/30 to 29/30, in sequence. Photo by Fiona Art from Pexels.