Triggers

By Odukoya Adeniyi

By laying on my father’s bed, I have come to memorise the triggers of art.
The body so frail, ashes chorus the last laugh. Dreams begin like a painting.
In water, they form quakes, captives, canisters and other unsightly instances.
Through an atlas, I touch the integration of surrender— how God kept a fire alive in the poise of dominance, calling & calling, till history hit distortion.
Tore out the lights earlier. The dark knows so much freedom.
Unlike these fancy fares cradling into pleasure-pleats, these cracks leisure between bones & being.
Numbers weren’t possible until God removed Adam out of an apple.
Thou shall not eat became the root, bellied by the sum of a finger-point. I am one with life’s crosscut.
Faith goes before surrender— ask the ribs of my outstretched quiescence filling a broken garland.
Some nights, I stay awake, listening to the music with hurt, a little animal unafraid of the fizz of vestiges.
In the past, my father roamed a garden in search of a child until my mother, from a white distance, filled his illusion with rain— gave him a name, the boy I have become.
Father’s groan is God’s tender knock on my room’s door. Love too bright, her feathers carry the ghost of flight.
In the morning, there’s a hole in the sky in the form of sunrise, my mother is somewhere in her room rinsing god’s feet, my father is somewhere behind her, asking if the stitches of his failed dreams are his children.

BIO:
Odukoya Adeniyi is a Nigerian Poet, Essayist and Freelance writer. He is the author of the poetry chapbook, Preserve This Light, published by PoetsInNigeria.