If I could write anything at all:
a dark room
dead as the elephant grass of harmattan
left in the leniency of the cold, trembling night.
I veil my face with my hands,
but not my eyes.
I can type still:
but for one more time,
my mind goes willingly blank.
One is not lost in thought when one thinks:
or I am lost when I come not to think.
As soon as my thought wants to flicker
like a sea bickering over its banks:
whose right it is to overflow,
my thought ceases again,
like that sea drawn back.
It must have been a force from within
or a line
pulling poles and pillars
and its tempesting terror.
Its banks do not wither its strength;
its strength tears it apart,
like my thoughts:
they drift,
clouds from clouds.
If many waters go separate ways.
An ocean's weaker than ten rivulets.
Little by bit,
bit by little,
my disdain is revealed to me:
it has long been there,
my unthinkability.
Or who casts a dirt on iron's face?
Hasn't the rust endured times with it?
Yet, one day, its glory shines:
the full spelling of nemesis.
I do not say I have misery:
A man of misery rarely judges himself:
he has no time to see the worth of others,
the cave of a snail or the shell of bats
or the carvings on trees and lovers' gambling.
O, what misery has done to his soul:
his eyes is torn from daily murmurs
and all nights pass as no different from daylight.
Buy no fantasy, my soul:
it is not daylight that glistens your night;
it is the murkiness of your night that sits on clouds' palms.
If I shall ever have to finish this poem,
for my love of it
or for the use of my pen
or to mourn the loss of my thought a night,
I shall have to write the rest
when I have the```
_Adelere Adesina_