I do not sleep tonight, my eyes choose the certainty of light / stare up at the ceiling and write poems in the air as the night brews and boils outside, then again as the night calms in the anticipation of dawn. The world stops revolving & I’m stuck in this cocoon, so I constrict my lungs with the need to breathe / again / to rejuvenate the wilting flowers in the heart of my being. The internet carries my mind into the horror of a man who now wears a necklace of thorns. I do not want to imagine these thorns as skeletal hands squeezing the breath out of a man, bathing him in his life blood, because can one know what it means to die / to be dead & still look it in the face, unflinching? I know so much about sins because their claws have made a map of scars around my head, but death is an alien bringing extraterrestrial fears into this alliance of bodies. My depression is a mirror & blasphemy is a mountain. But repentance is thunder breaking rocks into powder. I imagine myself in the body of the judge / in the mind of the convicted / in the breath of a bystander and find peace in the remembrance of God and the hereafter’s promise of justice because life is built along the road of death / & death is a crossroad to glory or another death.
Timi Sanni is a Nigerian writer and literary enthusiast studying Biochemistry at Lagos State University, Nigeria. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Radical Art Review, Writers Space Africa, Ethel Zine, Cypress: A Literary Journal, Rather Quiet and elsewhere. He recently won the SprinNG Poetry Contest 2020 and is the recipient of the Fitrah Review Prize for Fiction 2020. When not writing or studying, he is either painting or exploring new places. He is an editor for Kalopsia lit. Find him on twitter: @timisanni
Serotonin 