by Semilore Kilaso
"When you are silent and calm like a dead river, you would listen and realise the body too has its own sound."
You have mastered the act of hiding crawling into your own skin,
searching for light in places too small for your enormous body.
You hug solitude and kiss silence in the face but it quickly
turns to dust — molecular fragments travelling with the wind.
You think running into oblivion would grant you unlimited access
to peace. But oblivion is only an abyss of people burying their sins
in the dirt of time and bleaching their skins in hope to become pure.
Like earth you summon all four parts of yourself, pour yourself
into February but you are too scared to fly so you leap and fall.
Your voice echoes through the walls of insanity, begging your
demons or god to kill you — relieve you of your chaotic life.
When you are silent and calm like a dead river, you would listen
and realise the body too has its own sound.
When you break into nothingness forgetting your father's name,
you would remember that you are only humans seeking solitude
in places you do not belong and happiness is in little things.
LISTEN BELOW
Semilore Kilaso is a Nigerian-born poet, a writer who loves to collect photographs of humans, architecture, wildlife, and landscape. When she is not reading books, she is reading lines from architectural drawings. Her work appears in Culturalweekly, Entropy, Litvalley and in the anthology: A Country of Broken Boys and Lullaby of Silence. Follow her