by Narmadhaa Sivaraja
when the sea reminds me of places i rarely visit
i become a gull drawn to the waves of the past & heartbreaks threaten to find a home in me, to be another synonym for drowning, once again. but still, i wallow in its entirety, i swallow every inch of this essence. who knows, there might be so much to a moth kissing raging flames than just the wrath of a hungry fire. somewhere in the head of a boy, the villain of a story wears the cape of a hero & darkness has never been more close to its irony. a poem stretches into more than just a vain attempt at diluting thawed thoughts – metaphors morph into tides that have never tasted chaos, lines into simple foams and words carry no shells in their syllables. who says the beach can’t be an abyss of pain and poison? ask its sands why they’ve never held on to the footprints etched in their tiny spaces, why the heaviness left on them are nothing but elements waiting to be washed away, waiting to be another was once here. what is this life, if not warm bodies and cold memories trying to fade away? just pages of paradoxes trying to find fire? now tell me, how do you hold your head like an anchor when your entirety threatens to be wounded places/ a myriad of love/ and longing/ of storms that never got to taste light/ of lost nets/ imagine the moniker/ you give a picture with no frame / call me a hopeless fisherman/ still i dissolve/ in bits death/ don’t do justice to/.
Taiwo Hassan is a writer of Yorùbá descent, a poet and a vocalist. A Best Of The Net Nominee, his poems have appeared in trampset, Kissing Dynamite, Lucent Dreaming, The Shore, Brittle Paper, Dust Poetry Magazine, Ice Floe Press, Wizards In Space and several other places. He emerged the first runner-up for the MANI 10-year anniversary Poetry Competition. He’s also an undergraduate student of Demography and Social Statistics at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Osun State, Nigeria. His first chapbook, Birds Don’t Fly For Pleasure, is forthcoming for publication by River Glass Books.
Narmadhaa Sivaraja is a nature and haiku fanatic who draws inspiration from photographs. See more of her work on The Chaos Within.