A poem is an enclave

By Divine Inyang Titus 

I wager, outside poems, a mother who falls into a ravine does not rebirth in a burst of angel wings. Her son does not seduce the rain with his tears or beam his glee when the thunder barks home his mother’s laughter. Ashes do not retain that beauty of dark metaphors. Everything is as it is; bare, unbalanced, a little too broken. Ask a drowning hand if it must cling to airs that will betray it? Hear it tell the parable of the ol’ mouse of the infinite treadwheel – in that language of choiceless faith. It can fathom the ocean’s guffaw in its face but the sneer of its mother’s derelict prayers will forever be a mystery. Someone said God cuts off his ears every morning, before the world’s supplicatory noises are loud enough to terrify his sleep. Who is it that can argue? Definitely not the 15 swallowed by the road, or the 3 cut into warnings, broadcasted in the gutters. Notice they are all of them numbers. Outside poems, names are an oddity. Outside poems, pain does not taste like magic, nor grief like the murmur of visceral art. Tragedy is too drunk to not attempt another bad joke. Another punchline that ejects like nausea. If you grow too fast, you may learn too soon that perhaps autumn is only the beatification of colourless deaths; the destiny of all things is cliché. You may learn too soon that the destiny of all life is irrevocable decay; we are all fodder for teeming microbe orgies. You may learn too soon that the destiny of all who love is a loss that sits nicely on pages of poetry, but festers like warm poison in the gut.

BIO:

Divine Inyang Titus is a writer, performance poet, and songwriter keen on exploring the nuances of the human experience through art. He is the author of the chapbook “A Beautiful Place To Be Born” and his works have appeared or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, The Kalahari Review, Eye To The Telescope magazine, Seven Flowers of Gratitude Anthology (BPPC, April/May, 2020), Journal Of The Beautiful and elsewhere. He deeply enjoys reading, making music, and observing the rudiments of excellence. He is ‘Divine Inyang Titus’ on Facebook, @IcyDEEE on Twitter and @wolfgang_frost on Instagram.