Uche Ogbuji's' home

Your smile loops to a cursive ell—
We’ve all learned its complexity—
Your lush hair springs up from the scene,
Great mushroom cloud of ecstasy.

An uprock cyclone sweeps the room
With Style Wars on the parlor screen;
We dodge the rainbow shot of toys
Propelled by legs in floor routine.

Light on temples, Nepal to Sri Lanka,
You glide, traveling soul, earth-bound fixed foot,
Each step mounting from base camp Casablanca,

From past-life luxury of Hatshepsut
To present serene, composed asana;

I've stroked it while it gently weeps,
Caressed each trembling string,
Cranked up to weapons grade at times
I undertake to sing.

And yet I disappoint, I rip,
I charm a wicked scar;
Hot venom as the scorpion bows
To cantor de Ronsard.

If poetry and song provide
The island with a reef,
What heroes championing what gods
Are left to my belief?

Some randomized permutation of genes
Spelled these very left and right brain cortices–
Spotlight nerves on sheer possibility;
Some Mendel melody conjured these eyes,
These muscles, grafted these veins under this skin;
I am too many pin-point faults to be
By design yet I crown my own life's fitness:
I am perfected fortune of my chi.

Maenads are snarling their decree:  
‘So who d'you think you are,’ they howl  
‘To seal your bonnet from the bee?’  
Those bouncers at the Muses’ hill  
Take down attendance in their hall—  
You’re conscript to the gathering  
To rouse the skaldic clan again  
With clinking roar of brannigan.  
Yield bruckle skin to miching flea.  

If all our vision's shallow
And all our cares a sieve
If market gains short all our brains
How shall our children live?

A mansion for each family
By standards understood worldwide,
An LCD TV, three cars
And surplus matched to kingly pride.

The problem lies as yet untouched:
Demand for clean water and air—
No bill to slap a UPC
On molecules found everywhere.

Every bush has its berry
With soft fingers and a long tongue,
Slow, wide open like a Sunday afternoon.
But she doesn’t fool me,
Alcohol all on her breath
Like a ghost in the window
Of an abandoned house.
Her hips don’t tell my hands like yours.
You’re a soul flame.

When your eyes learn to look beyond state,
          to peers beyond infinity,
Okigbo, Villon, Pound, Plath, sometimes
          you forget that misfit can grow to vanity.
I've come to grow into readiness for company,
          the scent and crinkled space of shared humanity.

Collage is completion from gestalt-spackled gaps,
          pieces that never fit, that itch.
These rub away their corners into the circle
          of the whole.  They don't match,
They mate; their seed elaborates the daisy chain,
          fit and unfit bait and switch.