Telling Esau’s Inverted Pyramid as Escapee from School Boneyard

because it can only be meal—drawing me nearer to the women i jilted, holding guns close to my chest. because frankly speaking, Esau was not a  jester you tease about in theology. after lectures, the evening sky above us hiding the beauty of refurbished old roads all over Awka 

city. & we take advantage of the dimness, hiding our countable ribs to the eatery in pairs. we 

line in orange & black vests like dead soldiers during mass burial, after the civil war, under blue canopy, shaking edges to light harmattan. i steal gaze at chef’s pot, & it is mesmerized by 

what could be free  back home. the difference between home & classroom is the size of dreams 

chased on worm-kicking stomach. you could tell about hunger by the velocity taken the tongue 

to round the circumstance of ceramics. women who love me assume i am bank of mint. bro., 

you know i am a so(u)n, prophesied bloom in every terminal divide. & i have no options, no 

options than to squeeze seven hundred naira into waiter's palm, & stay hungry the rest of seven days. because loaned cash offers knifing euphoria. you could see resemblance, thick enough, 

between quantity & time taken to stalk dreams out of recession. sometimes, she loans trust.

& if eating to pay later is evidencing trust, then, we have mortgaged her pot, sashaying more 

than you would have witnessed funerals. the women, total strangers. but there is this long you 

become attached, & your canteen philosophy becomes their benchmark. upon all these, we 

pocket the pain to smile at our girlfriends after classes, knowing full well that what matters is 

who encodes what could not pass decoding test a time. once in procession to the cemetery, 

bearing candles, saluting a dead friend through a suicide, i made jokes with a medic as if a 

NAFDAC boss: between food & drug, which stops ruptures of schoolboys in empty hostels, 

empty cupboards, empty kitchen cabin faster? he shrugged off. & i cringed at the defense 

mechanism

fears exerted, dismissing death. forgetting that what we detest, knows our homes. i take time to write this poem in a room of my friend peeling

unripe paw-paw to stay alive, the way i take time to read obituary. because what constitutes death is not death. it is what leads to burying loved ones.

& i am skipping it, every bitterest line of this poem, as i am skipping my funeral by exposing my body to whatever saves, & be named after what could not be buried among soldier ants in the school boneyard.