National Poetry Month : Tolu Oloruntoba,

 

Precariat

 

If you eat
of this tree, you’ll find
that you didn’t want what
you wanted, only a trunk
for a berth in a lake;
you’ll find

that I, for instance,
wake daily
to find myself
building careers,
knowing not why.
Must be that
startegy I am constellated
within: best practices
of mice and men;
must be that
open-plan plain,
that tattoo
of wildebeest scrums;
that carpet for the new androids,
our downthrow wearable,
that signal,
an augmented hand
in the sod.

If you eat
of the precarious tree, you’ll find it

placebo, or nocebo;
you’ll tell me, or not,
that I’m transgenic,
myself,
part-modified from lunches past;
say it was
some Zod,
alien hand
in a noon slump,
splicing a winter flounder
tomato, the jellyfish in corn,
the people in my sugarcane
into me in a benzoic fog;
say the salamander in the wheat
dust round me is afire;
but let
the menagerie
holding me up
not escape.

If you berth in a lake;
you’ll find

that I,
and my transgressors have found a gulag
of solitude;
I have imbibed
their deeds,
my gavel
a vanquished femur;
my pacemaker: those
shrunken in my eyes in oubliettes,
working bellows;
dig a moat, I sensed, the moat will protect,
and the moat does electrify
a sole
self in a lightning storm,
a premonition
fast-roping
down ticker-tape lengths
of rain;
could be:
a God of escaping
captives
picking my locks;
or laying charges of insight:
what was done to me,
I would’ve done as well.

 

 

 

 

Tolu Oloruntoba has been an itinerant project manager, general practice physician, and editor. His third poetry collection, Unravel, is available now. Find him at tolu.ca.