Bad Dreams

By Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo

The narration said it is Shaytān trying to take us back into its darkness.

I saw myself asking for help, drowning at Nile, some girls drowned too

Some boys have already become logs of wood, bodies self swimming, their mouths

Opened like broke doors, I guess they were busy asking for help until they were done,

A lot of girls with their misdeeds written on their bodies, they still

Smell of their uncles’ cheap perfume, they still hold their losses on their heads,

Their mother is somewhere praying, that their wounds dry up and

Here we are finding solutions to our aching souls, in a way that will become a

Bereavement for another women, here we are ending the biography

We should rather rewrite, giving everything up for nothing.

The Imam said do not take what does not belong to you,

Do not sell yourself to the sea for nothing, do not become a flotsam, or

A puppet in the mouth of a rope, I wake with my body already

Becoming the ocean, her salt all over me, but I want to live to right all these wrongs,

If I would become a grief, let it be a honored song, eminent soul

Being taken towards the eternity of rest, the sidratul muntaha, the garden of birds.

Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo studies Veterinary Medicine at University of Ibadan. He wishes to own thousands of poems, hundreds of pets.

Art by Jemima Storey.