I have come to the threshold of my fears. Happiness is a wild cat. It is no surprise that I spent a century swimming inside a deep scar just to find it. May it be known that I carved my heart out of the hieroglyphic walls & fed it my tears. I do not understand what grows outside of the borders of my grief, but I know the season is harmattan & the wind wailing against the windows could be my mother’s ghost. In my mouth, I carry the tear-stained edicts of my father’s prayers. Would you believe me if I told you my father’s sighs scythe my bones on lonely nights? The light keeps crawling away from the room & this is when I know what violence darkness could be. I write my grief in the colonist's dialect hoping it’d cross the oceans & not return. Tell me, what is this origami loss has carved my dreams into? Here is my belief: grief has a tongue & it is immersed in the wetness of blood. I have a confession: in the dark almost any light can be mistaken for a star; in the light even a bird can be mistaken for a missile. Forgive me, I lost my way trying to find the cave of joy. Here is my conclusion: a boy can become anything but a premonition. Tell me, do you understand the syntax of ache? —I highlighted the verbs in my dairy & the only noun was death, & the only abstract noun was stillness. Tonight, I empty all the luggage searching for letters to prove I’m under the right roof. God, I am sobbing again —*how else i go fit know say i dey inside the korret bodi? I am walking the length of the room, just to be sure the bird songs in my bones is just a mere hallucination ─a vision sinking into a vision. The first Truth is: I broke every mirror looking for a miracle. The other Truth is: most days I pretend to be dead ―what other way to hear the seraphim's voice nudging what would not move?