HYMNS

BY IDUOZE ABDULHAFIZ

DEDICATIONS

To AJ,

To Thomas Stearns whom I recognize in worthiness of worship,

To my beloved Rasheeda who read my work when none other did,

To my sweet Musty for his encouragement at infancy,

To that lover of poetry living aged childhood, far away,

I write this and hope my last touch worthy of your perusal and wakeful criticisms.

1, To such eyes

Lovely sorrow, wrap your burning arms

With its sweetly dredged filth

Dew of desolation, despairing!--

Wrap your burning arms around my waist

And gently caress my cheek

As if it-- a lost dear cried upon found

Under this cruel hottest noon

Of April lack and long stirring rain;

The meal oiling nature.

Once more don your coat loveliest woman

Keep abreast your breast and mind

All tread of starved models on twisted paths

While all eyes sit, watching springing spring

Blast right through the throat of a nearby star.

Why walk with your sights set upward?

As if to hide their glassiness?

Melancholy is classiness.

Melancholy is sweet happiness;

The juice of the Ôgwï with apex pride

Stuffing the bellies of royalty

Glossing the dull and cracked lips

Before speech escapes; the second page

Held behind tinted glass and dark retinas.

Melancholy is classiness--
Extra tinge of bright morning gold

Radiates its hues from the hairpin holding her hair.

Even bed of roses have thorns,

Though thou hath no enemies thou hath thyself,

Even as there is no god there is that beauty;

Her litheness I worship, her eyes soaked in ecstasy

Like she stood under the rain of this lazy April

With its sizzling drizzling, and the dripping beads

Hold more precious than corals; that touch her skin;

Orgasmic in state
As cigarette perfumes

Capital enthusiasm rushing through its veins

Bursting at the chambers of its bedded heart--

She bent, stood under the rain of this lazed April

For herself, nothing else could cool

The flurried roar of fluttering fire

Eating, eating, eating-- filling its ravenousness,

Quenching every desire of fire

Did the roar of flurrying fire,

Quenching every desire with ten cans of gas--

She stands swallowing sawdust ash

Thinking how nothing can solace her,

I find myself lost in this hunger

As evening draws with the vibrancy of a Gogh.

ALL IS WELL THAT ENDS.

Iron men break at the sight of a sight

Revealing their hollowness in movements

Both of lips and hand,

Even the short hairs surrounding their legs

Betray the hollowness of these men!

Take out the gyroscope and they are hollow

And tender as overcooked beef

Flavorless, soft, after the useless spend

Of passionate heat heated in wet passion--

The dreams of suburban men

Walking with weathervanes

In their toes nails, eyes glued to their backs,

Noses ditching air for the comfort of sweet war

And tender as overcooked beef

Empty, empty-- empty of any nutrient

Which could gift a trace of life

To this hard rock of barrenness

After the useless spend

Of a million and a half for all to see--

All that can see what blind men see;

Breathing the romance of recall

While wearing a dark mask--

IT ONCE WAS A GOOD ONCE;

Stuffed with the foam of satisfaction by routine

As if one were some doll thing

With eyes filled with blank memory.

Lunches at the same place,

Drudging through daily tasks,

Journeys home by the howling train,

Food spiced with garlic and preservatives,

Women with multiple faces for multiple events--

Let us smile and frown here...

Let's seat with both our legs crossed

As some dead meat in serial killer apartments,

Stalked and closed to date of last;

At least he lasted this long in this dung.

It was a blast, was it not?

After the party we walk home, stupefied

Intoxicated by sweat and loud music

And mind altering chemicals

Voices screaming to reach the depths of silence

Minds grappling to grip floating time

Leaves whispering to each other in the trees

Clothed in mesmerizing darkness,

Cut off from worry this April night,

The earth was soft and the heart beat kindly

Throbbing with violent peace.

Why do your eyes look upward

When you laugh and talk to me

Like the moment happening happens invisible

And those eyes mourning caged silent speak

A speech hidden in the second page?

 2, Bust of Idia

Burst to life fantastical thing

And submerge me in the elegant

Like a drowned man, face down and floating joyless,

Or rather without a trace of emotion,

Beholding the twinkling eye of a happy night

Where there is that abandon of exhaustion;

Sensual

As after the haggle of negotiations common with loss.

Burst to life fantastical thing

And burn with recklessness and outrage

And curse me with uncontrollable courage; youthful

That does not cease by drown or its after.

Chasing after a master?

Talking to you bust, should I get a gun;

To shoot as plants and grow you a voice,

To merge with centers of mere being,

The one which melts in the ear like butter

Placed upon heated pan

At once picking shine as some garbage collector,

Greased, and numbed with vigor to do?

To silence that voice when it proves oppressive

All free things are wont to

Biting with a spitting sting

Unrestrained love charged with infancy

Delicacies roasted in delicate attention.

The night, your voice

Incomplete is; without-- at least one audibility!

Some sign spirit-seeming sweeps surety

Towards, through, taking

Us by surprise, her lips seem to want

To want to make a move

It almost resembles solid air

How gracious this loveliness of lip gestures

Rising from dormancy,

How genteel, sublime, how noble;

The little adjustment of her nose

On its first drink of subtle breeze,

Her heavenly hoisted mien

The warm richness of her generous vocal tone

Clearly surpassed the finest music;

Fierce, yet loftily refined on being conveyed.

Rewind runs forward almost exclusively

When she speaks finally,

I wish I had not wished.

Formerly kneeling I find myself erect

Faced away from the silent bust

Of the lion queen and her savage beauty

As if now pasted past

By my backing, I who for her speech prayed

And for whom miraculous delusion made

Now backs her on her speech

Now aims kill on her live

Though dead death solely can be dead.

And to think indeed moments ago

In hysteric suppliant speech

Curtailed by line exquisitely embroidered

Need met was aspirations sweat

Ere the sacred contacted foolish

Then in stately love did self profane

All adorations rent in torrents damned to gracelessness--

As if seeing it was night

The tortoise with sluggish steps hid its head

To end the approach of any threat,

Though this if it was caused by fear

Would wear the skin of a better head.

I could have sworn I was well equipped to receive

All and all everything

I could have sworn I was well, I could have sworn

It spoke but now I honest doubt memory.

Does this thing fail?

As some dull student, without trace of brightness

Except for his face and speech and equipage

Especially how he talks of his books

Word for word; line for line

He could even quote different twenty digit numbers;

A walking IQ test, though in no way bright

An effect which shows especially when you ask him

If he heard what he had been listening to;

What was said?

What are all these in your fucking head!

All preludes suffice insufficient,

I can hear the singing frog dance to her song

As her waist whooshes with every swing

As her arms trace in the shy sky innumerable forms

I sit thinking of old age and memory,

Does this fail?

Was that ball green or black or yellow or red

Which I played yesterday

Those long years so long now; fifty years past

With those friends living now living dead

Living life backwards with a sigh

Living life as buckets of dirty time

Filled with lather:

But would all the soaps in existence prove

Sufficient to evict this grease from his home?

Does this fail?

My heart almost reaches my feet

To think this think even now seen stands false

To be sure the best love is past love—

You were nimble with a pink chin and bright brown eyes

And could swim without deafening strength to dive;

Muscles supple through the long hours—

3, Becoming cliff

I have always had the secret suspicion

That the old man was disguised

For his bald head was filled with hairs

Of different shades; purple, blue, mauve--

Turpentine stank on a closer inspection.

Would his velveteen utters more bone be

For this arising which arises on every occasion

We are chanced to meet, as shutters

In a cold room where ice hangs from beards

Terrified of freezing white marble

And the words pause, taking time to defrost

In the heavy hawking air

Communicating nods and feathered stares

Exchanged on hurried passing

And if there is, millisecond greeting stops.

Beneath this tree, I sit, I watch, dreaming,

Watching from another space the onward

Flow of...

Love is an empty mug

Formerly filled with steaming hot coffee

Currently lost in the metal sea

And the loud music of airpods and speakers

The cheap sex and disappearing confidence

Between the lover and the beloved

As impossible as a smart good man.

You are the most-- wondrous thing!

So do not, my dear, seek the company of tears

What do you know about love?

Of when thunder bellows in the sky

And the mountains gallop like bloody horses

In the silence of pure, mixing heartbeats

And the cavalry, swim in the marshes...

Feel the insects crawl on your skin, no escaping

Here is spring in a platter of wood

The boat giver, so let us stay floating stood.

4, Alienation

Murder prefers zero witnesses

Lions, locked on watching prey;

Thick, dark hide grazing on wet, glorious green

Possibility slumbers at the home of patience

Pestilence!

As all eyes must be closed on Sunday

Let us dream of hope and other futilities

The lions, lock on, watching prey

And we dream of hope and bloody pray

Feeling good and walking out of worry

Eating fruits off baskets of illusions

Every nod, whipped with the cream of music,

Thick, pasty, with drums gyrating

In a city of wordly arsenal, dictionary manipulations

Twisting mind in the fingers of big definitions.

Come and spend some time with me--

Let us not eat and just watch TV all day

And write joyless with the joyest gay

And then slip to slippery sleeping, and dream

Converse and live in the throne of lordly Morpheus

Parting with the obvious

And dipping my head in pools of obscurity--

Love's consists: belief, hope

And a pool of maintained façades

Postponing the-- aha of insight

Yet I choose to love and sing and play

In my little garden of heaven

When spring rings and sings its dings that glint

Those yellow aubergines!, come to life!

Don your attire soft ray of sunlight

And bask in the drums of heaven's earth

And eat the afternoon fruit with haste

But do not smite the mite I implore.

Let us go everywhere on all fours

As the going of dreary days

Brightly animalistic, living idealistic

To last in the collisions of bomb blasts

In the mines and in refugee camps

In suburbs and workplaces and schools

As the going of dreary days

Brightly animalistic, brightly as shadows

In brightest light, proudly opaque

With a million ayes eyeing the tip

Of dazzling dances of drooling merriment

The gold watch on the sleeve burning expectation

Like spliffs

Leading like the charges of celebration.

Living charged with strong feelings of bold

It is all a talking to you:

In bits and bloody pieces

In rings and moving pictures as balls

And Dé Bruyne scoring his impressiveness

The daring done dreadfully with drags--

Everybody is mad! Every body is sexy mad.

Even the plants aggressive toned, the green

Reaching into the tavernas and hearts

Of fine dining, and commentators grand

With enthusiasm, it is just a collectivity

So dear in single joy, unity, expansion

Then one feels so sad

In a flash of sacred remembrance

Of holy time, what lack, what daily death?

The metal is metallic, the flowers flowering

The feeling of injections for psychotherapeutic

Care, I presume, warming beds with warmth

And expressing self, far away, amidst birds

Hear them tweeter!

A whisper, then the loud actors, in the bloody air--

I hate constant electricity!

I love to hear these birds!

I cry to hear these birds

I live to hear these thrushes in the shrub

Doing their saintly singing of melodies melodious

Then you hear the voices...

"the heart beat makes my heart beat."

I can't feel my hands.

The tendencies towards totalitarianism

Flourish as fertilized floors

Giving gregarious growth till gigantic

Lies leaps left from leaden living

(Aspiring apathy with all attempt)

Where is the rubber behind the pencil

As we wipe ourselves off this page--

The crook joins a racket, laborers join unions

All in the hope to scrape few pinions

And place it on their sides hoping flight

In the next second is plane of sight

The cockerel stretches its neck;

Phase through productive air

Its mountains of psychological problems

As it wishes, dearly to free itself

From the shackles on his black wings

Bodies sown with care, congealed in rooted earth

As beautiful as youthful women

Of their various ages and sizes

Hausa iron pickers with dusty feet

Found forlorn, faced forward in deserted streets--

With difficulty does one resist perfumes of power

And more difficult is its success

Lions, locked on watching prey;

Thick, dark hide grazing on wet, glorious green

The forest never sleeps but wildly wakes

Confidence doesn't fill empty bellies

Honestly, am I(?)

Please who can, do deign a reply

Please do not wear a raiment with a shade

Of soul clattering clandestine.

5, Ixora

Earthenware never could contain thee,

Thou scarlet vein stream streaming virile strength;

The well fed stallion, race-drooling, stabling

In equine rejoice as apart the fence.

March marches matchlessly on for thou

That thrives in the breaking harmattan;

The dust given galore of sweet age

For none mixed with thee is foul.

Freshness captured in a flowery span--

Left youthful like some immortal sage.

Perhaps birth destines thee for life's throes,

Vibrant with this peaceful morning dew,

Bestowing binding blessing by shown blows

Hitting precise as breeze in Vester bloom.

Hungry, most sights rush to touch on sate,

Speeding as fast cars with womanly curves,

Filling bellies in spring to stay year round

In due preserve. And the repay?

Charm at once drained like post-wash some sponge

Falling out of relevance-- naira to pound.

If thou vanishes like ephemeral waters

Placed in a bottle, hidden from all air

Since it mixes quickly with what it can

Be as spirit does, cool as clear reflect;

Or if thou is silent as passing shades,

With nimble feet, shy of earthen floors,

Why, like glittering rocks, thou would be cherished?

Alas, headstrong holds the name

Of thine, thou with scents sublime in scourge,

With stamens of lengths without perish.

Death rushes to me like a raging stream

Swallowing all who come it's way to cross,

Overflowing it's fighting banks' edges

Till a submit to the imperial force.

I wonder, does death ever rush to thee

Who blooms through the dust and rainy storm,

That hits the spot like some perfect cue

Pooling points effortlessly?

For it pushes me like a tidal surge

Engulfing and displacing me in waves huge.

Life can get tiring, begging for an end

After all is spent--one ascends mountains

Only in the past, starvation appease.

"End it all!" The mind cries. "Stop the pain!"

And what one learnt through past ascension

Avails not, and the chest throbs for eager burst--

Cursed lark, whistling forever in the skies.

How, O venerable one,

Does it become thee, or does thou it form:

Abandoning will to eternal apply?

6, Degenerate beauty Queen

Hack grit as Achilles's sword

With a warmth of wondrous sighs

Spread evenly as well mown grass

Across the breadth of a lovely night

Causing all sense jugs to exclaim, "loss!"

For this depth holds bright than far stars.

This surfaceness smoking lengths

Of white cigarettes, this dark skin

Asking, "Identity crafts the girl?"

Then I must to stupid to breathe.

Then I must off to fuck to free--

The nature, fucked, only knows not

To move one more step, chains circling

Till the sights are shields which cold burn.

7, Subtle sublime spectacularity

Many a moon I have mooned

Beneath this tree, sitting, dreaming

Of a golden age of strangled loss

And gallant men unbridled by nature:

Fear leading like a loving father; through tearing

Spikes and fields of potent mines--

Like a loving father afflicted

To sure in and for child an atrophy of ill;

Boxing every slight drop of it in

Tightly sealed golden vases

Frozen in blocks of ice

Thrown in the depths of the Arctic

When the bears laze in hibernation

Till it sinks and merges by homeostasis

Held in the dogmatic fountain of chilly religion;

Cut off from the offspring--

Fear leading towards cruel glory;

A product of perfect conflict

Pressing on with protracted arms,

Apathetic men and women suffering gory felicity

Birthing a golden age of unbridled natures:

Where there is mix of man with water;

Woman with pigs and racing horses;

Birds with dogs barking with lecherous stir

Stirring spirits to birth lustrous divine heirs,

Where spring of limb and leaping mind

In serene harmony coexist and live illumined.

Wrapping as rolls of weak tissue

Sluggish snakes with a full belly

Resting content after a generous feast

Richer than ambrosia soaked with godly nectar

The water walked and ascended liquid stairs

With a countenance of aquiline superiority

Under this after sunset crawling light

A handshake of night and dying day,

Get me a deeply thinking chalice

Let me feed it with philosophic thoughts

Confound it in a mess of confusion

LET IT CONTEMPLATE SUICIDE

As it should for why should optimism

Become its sole daily cast

While it takes its daily lusterless walk

Wailing happily his base song

LET THE SPOON DIP ITS HEAD INSIDE MY GAP!

Let me shake my arse in joy

SPEND MY TIME IN A BROTHEL

LET LEWD CHINA PROSTITUTE FOR AFRICA

And paint her face with ash; the courtesan.

EXTRA- Green ray of sun light

Time moves faster when you know

Exactly what it says, the pm's

When you can hear it speak

Their silent message:

You are finished! Death is coming--

Fast, coming your way

And it is obvious you are unprepared

Hence the fearful panic in your heart,

Your impatience with your beloved;

The hate you feel when you don't receive

A favoring reply to your silly "I love you".

Be of good cheer, rejoice my dear!

Watch the disappearing sun with its green goodbye

At the tip of the horizon

And see the snobbery of this gesture

By humans and cats, the whole of jealous nature

Taking no notice of the mundane magnificence

The majestic retraction of a splendid feat of light

Never light on its alighting

Yet most generous and kindly,

Divorcing night from time

And with gentle reconcile, sleeping once more

Under the eigengrau shade of eternal night

That consternates and clothes all color

And her heavenly host of blinking silvery stars

Still guiding sailing sailors to sands off charts

Till they die from the excessive poesy

Pouring from the shy bosoms of the fountain

Which they advertise and say holds

Purses of divine youth, and expels

It only to those which hold absolute worthiness

Life is ugly and heartbreaking, however.

Well, I want to eat. Off!

How beautiful the nakedness

One chooses not to show,

How sad, how kindly dreary

The tears of a lurid glow.