for men that never get to go out

by Taiwo Hassan

Aleksandr Popov

from a friend’s WhatsApp Status on 23/10/21–12:14

in this poem, a boy is a butterfly, joy replacing his (wings) nakedness, ready to pollinate the world with full smiles, with reflections of wholeness. he sets out to be a testament of bloom, to be a mirror of a stranger’s void, a wall smeared by the rays of a morning sun, to be everything that speaks the language of lushness. but how does one convince these pregnant clouds to not carry ironies, to not melt into worries, to not hold knives sharp enough to stab heavy dreams. but if only waves could talk, they would stop sands from being a house for footprints, for memories, for elements who have tasted death even before life finds their lips. this is how a wolf struggles to be a synonym for rain, how its drizzles melt into grins and its torrent, wicked laughs, this is how the sky becomes a sick child, retching all that’s left of its cosmos of grey and blue. this is how grief becomes a familiar picture. tell me to paint its rawness and i’ll haemorrhage into this jumble of words and regret.

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Taiwo Hassan is a writer of Yorùbá descent, a poet and a vocalist. A Best of the Net Nominee, his poems have appeared in Lucent Dreaming, Brittle Paper, Dust Poetry Magazine, Ice Floe Press, Shallow Tales Review, Second Skin Magazine, Warning Lines, Augment Review, Madrigal Press, Nigerian NewsDirect, Praxis Magazine, Wizards In Space and several other places. He emerged as the first runner up for the MANI 10-year anniversary Poetry Competition. A poetry editor at Jupiter Review, he’s also an undergraduate student of Demography and Social Statistics at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Osun State, Nigeria.