a good number of lines in this poem would be unnecessarily prosy; maybe
because i want to make points for number of races,
catch up with our ancestral misdeeds, undoing what our fathers
did to themselves, resultantly did us, not letting our
egos alone, and learn to be sorry for ourselves, excuse me
for i don’t want to blame you for someone else’s sins but learn not to call me
gorilla and i won’t call you chimpanzee, as we all have beasts who answer to our names,
howling birds with bald red skulls, carrions with black throats,
i want to leave please do live too, we can always choose our names and exchange
juices that smells no race, maybe some roses’ ones, you
know roses grow everywhere, and my fathers were some
lame roses of the seas, yours were horses carrying spoils away to europe,
man, the is not a remembrance of where we are coming from,
no, it is not a recapitulation of the sins our fathers were crafts of,
or the collage of ugly things not exhibited in any gallery across europe;
purple boys turned to objects of banalities, lilies, daffodils of honor,
queue of ancestors; chains of losses; the only thing they owned, women;
roses of glory turned bland stories, histories driven off the shore, how
sea loses its good record with the black boys and made it to the merrier hearts of some;
the very place of sight, a mere bank of shells, but no one hears the language of seashells, not even
urania, but a black boy who hears his fathers’ voices everything at the bank, maybe enough, play me some
violin-made blues where people turned the color of their violators, it is coming to an end, let’s learn from these drowning stories;
with many versions of chaos, let’s not forget who discovered who, my father too discovered the
xylem before the tree, nothing is ever alive until he touches it, to
you who discovered me and introduced me to the world, gratitude, gratitude, gratitude, though this is not some
zoos, i deserve some apologies too, i am leaving so live too, now that i am worth more than cannon and my mother is not a mirror any longer.

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Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo is a Nigerian poet, a veterinary surgeon, the author of a micro-chapbook Sidratul Muntaha (Ghost City Press, 2022), the recipient of The Storyteller Grant, and a nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best New Poet. 

His work has been published or is forthcoming at Poetry South, Oakland Arts Review, Carolina Muse, ROOM, Potomac Review, Jet Fuel Review, Miracle Monocle, The Citron Review, Santa Ana River Review, Ambit Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, Oxford Review of Books, Olongo Africa, Stand Magazine, Louisiana Literature, GASHER Journal and elsewhere. 

Fasasi tweets @FasasiDiipo