I
- (For the Bleeding at home, in London and in other lands)
I‘m god
I’m Mobutu Sese Seko
Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga
you must pronounce my name in full, else you breach
my democratic rights
I’m the herr to the fuehrer’s reich
Ich spreche in diktat
You must pronounce my name in full
or go the way of all heretics
I speak not yet of infidels.
I’m god.
I’m baban bajimi Sani Abacha
ka chi bura ubanka in ka manta suna na
the one for whom the sun-and-moon had to stand still
so he could distance himself far enough
from the cashless society
you must pronounce me pious
to avert a fate of pregnant fatwahs.
I’m god.
I’m the blurb of intoxicant books
the blade of ethnic bigot fans
the razor end of all reason, marching
like nitwit armies to the beat of Beethoven,
along the icing on caking cliffs
I’m god.
It is the season of recompense, and
I have followed the slime of the slug around the homestead.
I have tested the axe head of the hurricane
I have peeped at sacred groves where
men have drunk and hung their gourds
I have searched the thatch hats
atop the huts trodden out by the muddy feet of men
But I have found none
of the hunters who did their target practice
on the softest undersides of diaper-ed babies
I have found none
of the signatories on the cheques of bleeding cities
none of the source rocks of the flow of red Thames
I’m god.
I have searched the password hunting limits
of wikileaks’ idealisms. Today’s gatsbys surfing
on foamy peaks of romanticism
topless riders on freedom trains
stopless past the very last busstop
on the bigot’s expedition
to perdition
I’m god.
But those were the udder days that breastfed today
now I’m a mere clothes line
on which men maim and hang their horrors
But google them you find the hidden knives.
