Poetry

By

Kanyinsola Olorunnisola

The Weight Of Being Great At Acting

You have mastered perfectly the art

of being someone else, something else,

of trapping your tongue between your teeth,

breathing slowly with the borrowed lungs

your father left behind as his last wish.

Afraid to love what you love, you carry

others’ heartbeats as your gospel, watching

them live the lives they chose for themselves –

while you follow the scripted lines to the letter,

dead men have no wishes, you tell yourself,

yet your feet ache from walking a ghost’s journey.

You play it all so well, Al Pacino-style,

but the thing about being great at acting is this,

you begin to waste away into the wind, scene after

scene, wondering why the scriptwriter wrote you

so poorly and when it is all said and done,

you fall and break into irreconcilable pieces.

Bringing Pangaea Back

Somewhere in Kano, a coven of alchemists

converge for a witchery far beyond the reach

of mortal men. They are guided by the night’s

unwavering dark, like candles inside an ocean,

they let their light dissolve into a liquidity which

will haunt the world into submission. They are

attempting the impossible – they are indeed bringing

Pangaea back.

Millions of years ago, the first man lost his way

and we all parted into pathways swaying into the

mouth of devouring waters. Pangaea broke into separate

lands we call continents, contingent upon our folly

of wars is this severance, this tragedy, this unravelling

of the body as the empty hiding place of skeletons

of discord. Can you not see that we are hurting?

We have cut ourselves into pieces. Piece back together

this puzzle, this hustle, this battling of battalions, search

for calm in the birthplace of horrors and maybe then, with

the right amount of magic, the world can be fixed.

Kanyinsola Olorunnisola

Kanyinsola Olorunnisola is a poet, essayist and writer of fiction. He writes from Ibadan, Nigeria. His writings border on the themes of unease, racism, colonialism, terror and all things familiar to the black folk. He describes his art as that specialized literary alchemy which aims to extract beauty from the frail commonplaceness of words.

His experimental works have appeared on many platforms, including Brittle Paper, Bird’s ThumnKalahari Review, Bombay Review, Lunaris Review, African Writer, Sprinng.org, Tuck Magazine, Gyroscope Review, Parousia Magazine and Sampad International Anthology.

He was the 2016 recipient of the Albert Jungers Poetry Prize. He also won the 2016 Brigitte Poirson Poetry Contest (February) and was shortlisted for Ogidigbo Poetry Prize and Eriata Oribhabor Food Poetry Prize. He is the founder and president of SPRINNG Literary Movement.