From the pantheon of African kings,
from the blood of ancient Ogodomigodo,
I arose, a twisted tree from that red mud,
crowned myself with thorns,
carried my cross & climbed
the slumbering hills of my lover's
geography of pain. I, a fallen seed
from the teeth of Kwale, where the iguana
is sacred did succumb to terror
within my malformed legs.
I crawled from my cubicle of life,
a small thing, to claim the tip of ecstacy
from my lover's tongue. Like a vagrant
without memory, I embraced
the white man's telling of my body
& wandered all the lies his broken wisdom
fed me. For a time, it was the wine of life
& I communed with his god of money
& blood. He had lied in my name,
so in anger, like a god I summoned
the ancient flood from inside my body
& picked two of a kind of each animal
that inhabited my bones. From the bowels
of the Atlantic, rejected from Olokun's
embrace, I arose, a deity, an abomination.
My name was stripped from the annals
because I chose to become
what my mother had moulded me to be
in the clay of her body. Now like Cain,
I bestride the earth, unsure of my father's
love, wise in the ways of human hate.
I have become a god's spittle;
lukewarm, I stand alone in the pantheon
of the abandoned, a deity.
I am black as my earth
& I too have worshipped the god
of my body. I have sinned & fallen short
of her glory but for the first time,
I know what it means to exist
outside these broken gods.
Is this not emancipation?
Is this not illumination?
