Pilgrim
Tomorrow flirts with promises and only you
know why you are most comfortable pawing at old
notes, replaying scenes of disaster.
Realize, there are no ports-of-call with sleep-worthy plastic chairs.
Your prayers have become mechanisms
to be pried apart and reverse engineered.
But in the end, you know, there will always
be extra screws and the closing case
never gives that satisfying snap.
More than Minor
Gulls fall and swoop, recovering in time
to reminisce their purpose. Down here, we
walk hand over hand trying to remember an
ache or whiff of a fresh baking loaf,
a burning bundle of sage, a rotting rat
behind the walls. The fields are overgrown
waiting to be tilled and gorged through
with industrious machines. When we barter
love we deal in convenience and the only eye
to be trusted, I trust, are the cold shark eyes
with that lingering gloss, the thousand
yard stare left from each quotidian trench.
I heard crickets chirping, briefly, in the cold
Kentucky night and I wondered what the hell
I was doing with my own voice and why the hell
the loneliness clung to me like a 4 day stink.
When I open my mouth, words pour out as if
I were drunk, but if I was drunk I could pretend that,
at least, I was giddy or, in the least, less mis’ble.
I want to know that if I reached out my
conceding and calloused palms, there might hover
some bonded hope that might give half-a-toss,
the same way one might consider an ingrown nail.
Chukwuma “Chuks” Ndulue is an Igbo-American writer, teacher and occasional small engine mechanic. His most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in BOAAT, Muse/A Journal and Tinderbox.
Recommended Reading: IMPAKTER POETRY WITH LILY BLACKSELL
