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Groundhogging
(With a line from Shakespeare)
i greet the roads unnerving into their endlessness. i greet the playgrounds emptied of small lungs, old breaths. i greet the clock whose ticks out of boredom i nurture into time. time is an undifferentiated lump stripped to sameness, stuck in my throat. i greet conspiracy theorists. the beginning of humans is overshadowed, which among its ends is a fig?
i am not one to decide human misfortunes. i am no keeper of pain’s chronicles. but i greet the woman who sits under the smoke of her husband’s pile of ashes. i greet the laboratories who out of sung heroism, chemical concoctions, had to pay with their lives. i greet the little child who never will make it alive. i greet the dead bidden without goodbyes, the corpses wrapped without shrouds, the funerals performed without rites.
i greet God; how does it feel to worship the divine unclothed? cremation, too, is a door. a door could be a drifting line of fogginess. hello walls! hello pervading silence! hello quietude! hello disquieting! hello lonely pigeons in the street, i come in pieces. there is nothing to offer now other than masks, caution and anxieties. convey my humility to your kind.
i smell of grieving homes, windows and voices whispering into dust. i smell of panic. i am paranoid of the end. i tone-down my dreams, lower my ambitions like a sheath. come spiky novelty, this is where science comes to roost. come suck me out like others. i am sleeping early. i am sleeping late. i do not seem to sleep at all. what is today’s date again, nemesis? there is nothing worth calendaring anymore. tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day. please tell me, what is this real world we refer to?
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Aremu Adams Adebisi is an economist. He has been nominated for Best of the Net, Pushcart, and Best New Poets. His work of poetry, “Force Mechanism”, was adapted into Lucent Dreaming’s first theatrical performance in Wales. He has works published in Storyscape Journal, Lucky Jefferson, West Branch, and elsewhere. He served as a mentor for SprinNG Fellowship and a panellist for the Gloria Anzaldua Poetry Prize. He edits poetry for ARTmosterrific and Newfound and facilitates the Transcendence Poetry Masterclass.