Dubai Days manuscript

This is a detail from a painting by the Nigerian
abstract expressionist artist Yusuf Seidu Okus.

To learn more about his exhibitions and to purchase
his work, please visit
http://artbyyusufokus.blogspot.com/





















Empty Grey Suits




May 17




I'm following blind strangers

Down unlit, unfamiliar streets


In a town riddled with scavengers

And the heels of the shoes on my feet


Are worn down to nubs.

There is chaos at the hub

Of the city


Where the townsfolk paint the place pretty,


But have yet to build the walls.

In the halls of power we stalk

All rank and file


In perfumed, empty, grey suits



Amid the bedlam and pungent stench

Of discord.


The board room is divorced from the trench.

Behind perfect alabaster facades,


There is rot and ruin and things crumble.

In my dreams there are humble visions.


In my sleep I saw apparitions in the night last

Of homes wrecked by errant paint


And minatory figures of my past.

There is a black cloud that rumbles

Flocked in the distant sky


That flashes with fulgent light.


It is sent to either deluge and destroy my crops

Or give them the sustenance to survive.































Encore

Dec 17

Now I know that the pulsing heart of the city had
plenty of pretty words

To say

To sway

My comatose heart.

Lead me back to a fresh start.

In the grey,
There is a flash of plush indigo and startling violet
and strawberry red and dazzling peacock blue.

All the butterflies flutter where the buzz is heard.

Take me to where there is music and actions and not
hollow words.

Take me away from hollow men and empty suits,

Away from slippery snakes and drudgery boots.
Take me to where the bells ring out

And the crowds shout out for more.

Curtain fall, curtain call, spotlights, roaring
applause.

Encore, matador.



England, My England



Mar 18


On this third rock from the sun,

I have seen 44 summers;

10 of which sojourned in foreign lands,

As an errant immigrant.

The son of an immigrant

Become
An immigrant

Migrating away from the land his father migrated to

5 decades ago.



In this foreign solar world,

Looking for a source worthy of my orbit,

I found it and lost it
And lost myself in the process,

The procession and parade,



In the endless cycle of public triumph and personal
prices paid;
The hustle amidst the jostling triumvirate

Of superego, ego and id

Digging manic at the peat

layers caked upon the relics

That time and mind did

Conspire to forget.

I have let go and given in.
I have sought solace

And escape. To eclipse

The dark side of my moon and spin

The celestial missiles

Off their collision course.



I am not sure
What I miss any more...

Maybe loved ones that I no longer love to the same
degree.



Maybe state and mission,

Simpler years of modest ambition,

Maybe crown and country,
Territory, turf and earth,

Kin and kith, home and hearth,

Maybe the streets of the town of my birth.

Maybe a golden past that never was.

Maybe nothing.



But like the Genesis, from nothing came everything
and it spiralled downward from there.

I am everything you say I'm not.

You are everything I don't want to be.

The blind should not lead those who can see.

I am not the prodigal son.

To the hinterland nothing shunned,
Nor yielded with cunning to the front.

I am a progeny hammered upon the anvil of my
parenting and forged by bitter necessity,

Beaten as some of us begrudgingly are

Into the distorted shapes of our times.



The signs were, of course, there before.

The nuclear family exploded long ago,

Don't you know?
The fallout was immense

Littered, as it did,

The social landscape with enclaves

Of flash friends and louche lovers.

A citadel of saucer-sized social circles.

A sandy fortress of insular intimacy

Bound by divisive technology.
The unblinking, unthinking masses tap and fumble
and drool over devices of their own demise and are
appeased

Because ignorance is bliss and bliss is peace

And the pleasure principal

And deceitful images of the body beautiful,

The only things worth living and dying and lying
for.



Great Britannia I loved you once,

But I've had many other lovers during and since.



My finger tips

Still glissade over your porcelain limbs with a
racing, redolent heart.

But I leapt into bed with duskier harlots of almond
eyes edged with lapis-blue

And you and I drifted far apart.



We live in a different time now,

A different land, a different mind.

No longer tethered to the stump hammered into the
point where we were born.

We have shorn off our locks to find,

Our power lies not in our hair,

But in us.



We have chipped away at the crust of the shell that
immured us
And from the nest of listless restlessness

We shrunk

And burst forth from and sprung

As blazing birds of passage



And leapt from ledge to edge,

from fledgling to soaring,

at once, at once, at want, at will.
Fly

With feathers flustered by stones of sin,

Fly with plumes

Fluttering in the four winds,

Fly past over far-flung pastures bristling with
promise and resplendent raptures,
Flit from thinking to drinking and living again,

Flap from swimming to sinking

To treading to swimming once more.

In agonising ecstasy,

Adore

Being

Fuelled
By blood

Thunderstruck

With glimmering dreams



of intrepid expedition, pyrrhic victory and wanton
revolution.
The clash and fusion

Of dreams dreamt tall

And lowly reality lived

Comes to us all

In the end...