Thanks to a gentle elbow from my friend, the writer Wilson Oryema, I began (pre-COVID) a poetry project surrounding the theme of consumption. The poems explore various guises of consuming and being consumed—by love, by jealousy, by material positions, by time. I’m fascinated by how we can absorb whole entities into ourselves, and that the action of consumption is always one of destruction.

The French literary school Oulipo fetishized the notion that writing is always constrained by something like time, or even by language itself. Each piece in my work is constrained by a material object—a banana, a clock, milk buttons, a golliwog. My process is to take the object and unravel the film of emotions that cling around it. George Perec’s concept of the Infra-Ordinary dismisses the daily news cycle as only focused on sensationalism and lacking the steady perspective of the daily. I ask, too, “What is really going on the rest of the time? How do we take account of the banal, the obvious, the hum-drum background noises, and that stalemate of the habitual?”

In collaboration with visual artists, I will be self-publishing the project in the form of an enlarged postcard collection—entitled Post Love in the Time of Consumption—this fall.

SPLIT

I got so mad at you today, that I ate four mini bananas in a row

In hindsight, there is a phallic undertone

Maybe even, a sort of colonial type discourse

But at the time I ate them because they are soft
and it made me feel hard.

I took pleasure in readying them for their destruction

peeling back each waxy layer

one finger pinch at a time.

Gag

What poor gut instinct.
What bloating by bountiful-desires.

Stretched out

fatigued

by the binges of our nauseous love.

Gag

Temporary bananas, once bitten, twice it’s gone

aha-smooth and sugary-sweet relief
gasp-moments rest bite
for the hands and the mouth

that once undressed your clotted body, had savoured your syrupy sap

The cavities of you
had me feel the whole

Now my reflux fills it up, swills it with

Frothy bitter acids

of a body regurgitating the mind.

I got told today

truth slapped and bite off my tongue

Split down the middle

Creamed by a sting

that lingered for a while

the gone is good

has gone

Trashed

the leftovers of pleasure

is Trash

just a handful of banana skins

and a mind-full of mad.

TIME

Time doesn’t pass by, you have to let it in

Store it up like a battery
Spill it like a gambler

Bare its wait,
to render expectation

Three hands on the hourglass
Stirring, whirring, it’s monotonous flow

Tik tok tik tok

Tikkedy boo

Thé New is always old,
thé Old is always new.

It’s Eternity’s empty refill

turning itself back over
then pouring it out again

Tik tok

Tik tok

Time doesn’t pass you by you have to let it in

And then it drags, it drags

across

Thé head that puts on a face
Weighs down on Eyes like pendulums
Swinging
Back and forth
Back to go forth and back again

Tik-tik-tik

The ticks of affliction
Turning round and round
Cutting circles out of a recurring present

Three-hundred-sixty-five-point-two-four-two-two      days

One more every four years,
except when divisible by one hundred
but not when divisible by four hundred

Tikedy-tok

Time is a numb-urrrrr

For the moment stopped
Is accepting death
If not diluted by time                      Tik
Human misery

so-so

Life

would be intolerable

If it was concentrated                     Tokkk

suffering would not be moved

No back and forth to back again

It’d be Unavoidable,
Unacceptable.

Jelo

Milk button eyes and buttery smiles
The pouring of one onto the other
Standing so close, but not quite touching
The melting of two bodies smoothly-coming
together
warm blooded and gooey panted
no doubt

snatched moments alone
by the kitchen sink

Whispers rolling cooly down the nape of the neck. Hushed giggles, wavering,
lingering, as kites do, in a brisk spring breeze

Hands circling, gesturing, round and round, fingers twiddling this and that. Like this is how it goes

but sometimes

it can go the other way too

gingerly stepping behind the alcove

I sit

there and there
and here

down, down
and down

And I sit

the onlooker of desires
purveyor of their passions

In the cool Emerald shades
of my jaded jealousies