The Geez POEMS Nii Ayikwei Parkes CONTENTS Game Of Language Offside Seeing Eyes Frankenstein Variables A Gimbal of Blackness Hangman Ballade for Wested Girls Who Want the Rainbow Of Serendipity Trumpet One Night We Hold Eros Bottle break/able Contiguity Travelling Solo Blowing Smoke How I Know Of Sides Locking Doors Year AD87: BM14 A Concise Geography of Heartbreak Underbelly lenguaje Kɛ i’tsui aka shwɛ Dark Spirits Eaux Oscura y sus obras Caress yorkshire bath displays The Furnace Inheritance 11-Page Letter to (A)nyemi (A)kpa Tree of the Invisible Man Defences sub.marine.blues Zest Our Love is Here to Stay Crossroad vs Blues Interpretation #Labour Moonwalk To Be In Love Casablanca Vogue Game Of Language It might have been one night celebrating a mother’s birthday in a Paris hotel room, or some breathless minutes at the in-laws’ whispering like experimenting teenagers – still, out of the fifty-thousand scent memory we have there is now the smell of a baby girl, one born in a war zone less equipped than Syria but, for a child at the front lines, perhaps just as damaging as time unravels. You are her father; she is a cheeky, fragile joy, but, because you love her, you must leave. A coin tosses endlessly in your head; sleepless nights have your heart torn and off-kilter. You wrestle your selfish urges, find strength to walk away. You know it is right, but you have never known pain like this and how can a suckling baby understand why a shadow inhabits the space that was her father? Except, your first time alone with her, after she has left her mother’s arms, she holds you doesn’t.let.go for the longest time. Offside Because I know about green mangoes more than I know about any woman I teach my sister about boys, how to think like one, play one step ahead. I tell her not to step back, any time they lunge forward, but to side-step, stay focused, show no fear; I show her the same thing works in football, before the age of positions, they rush like dogs; that’s when you pass and move, hold on for a minute, then accelerate. Speed combined with timing, like a good joke, and you have beaten the offside trap. I teach her to punch too, and for good measure, where. By sixteen maths is play for her, she has boys rapt for her punch lines, waiting, hoping for a chance to slip a line of their own in. She foils them all. Years later when she has settled, done her 38 weeks, I get the call. I am told It’s a boy. It’s a boy, it’s a boy, it’s a boy! Seeing Eyes Pretending I can’t find my bi yoo bibioo simply because she has covered her eyes gives her as much joy as the silly faces I sometimes pull. Out of the 43 facial muscles I should have, I stretch, contract, contort, conjure shapes that get the desired reaction. But when she hides she is in control – even ridicules me for not seeing her: I’m right here, Daddy, she screams, then runs to hug me. Already the time is coming when the trick will be too old. I know so well how soon our pleasures go. I recall hiding from my grandma. Her dark eyes imprisoned behind cataracts, I was always stunned how easily she found me. She didn’t even move; she just pointed, and my reaction was always – How? Some quality of those hours with her is how I see God: something of her certainty that I had my late father’s physiognomy just from the sound of my voice; how she hugged this inherited body, this borrowed shape and hue, close to her, cradled its shifting face, seeing and loving a grandchild with no eyes. Frankenstein You know that Kareem Abdul Jabbar hook shot, right? Drexler’s glide, Pippen knocking the ball away from someone’s control to send it up to Air... Something you could always count on when things got rough. That was Victor for us; the opponent’s worst enemy. He came on when games got tight, when pushing, shoving and trash talk started to creep into the game plan. We knew the secret; he only played well when angry. They’d make their own monster. The more they pushed, the sweeter the song of his bounce; the harder they shoved, the surer his aim became, his balance impeccable as he let his shooting-hand hang limp after each projectile took flight. He had something we all didn’t, he knew gravity was a kind of violence too; you had to ride it. They just reminded him of his father; a short man who had shredded his mother with his sharp tongue, slapped his son until the day his six-foot-six seed snapped, grabbed him by the neck the same way he plucked a rebound out of the air. We thought Victor was freak material – a unique beast – until we saw his sister play. She was good all the time – every quarter of the clock face – moved like a whispered insult, precise as a second hand, her fury constant as the force that held us down. Variables (a gambil) Asked about heartbreak, X might drop a matchstick and raise a finger to point at a delivery van rolling heavily past a home. Let’s say it’s blue as a flame’s heart and it stops in front of a brick building where, on the third floor, a boy (Y) is framed in his window perch by the yellow lamp light beyond him. Y has headphones like planets over his ears and is bent over a sheet of paper, shading blackness into faces. The window next to his is an animation; two adult figures gesturing, their mouths black holes. Because of the galaxy he carries, the window boy – Y – will not hear his parents’ battle, but high above the van’s blue, a beat is breaking. X has not said a word, weary gaze focussed outside. The match X dropped will grow into a fire X won’t notice but for its heat, won’t recognise – for who would call a window a mirror? Has no one ever told you heartbreak is always elsewhere? What is Y in the world of Xs? A Gimbal of Blackness for Pops Night cannot grasp the swift flight of wind, but blackens every tree the air moves, paints them darker, pushes them against the light, the shapeless light that gives them shape to shift before my eyes. I am often in the embrace of night; I am myself a dark thing – the kind that was once called boy when man – that was born of a woman descended from hills and a man delivered from boyhood by the sea, a man now lifeless though he gave me life. I am often in the embrace of dark thoughts, in the dim grasp of memory, a bottle in hand, reflecting the light of the moon. I recall a can of Guinness left
