To Who In A Wrecked Toyota Shared Jagermeister With A Poet

There was no method to the meanings
I found:

that since you were born your life is
your permission to run.

The first time we chose to walk through
a door what we chose was our distance.

Since we were born the distance took us
all through strange places.

Then for all the destinations we forget
we compensate by running elsewhere.

Put fuel in the car and book a flight
to a Capital you’ve never seen before.

Whereever you go you carry your
load of distance with you.

The stones crawl in your shoes
and your birthplace into your heart.

So I cracked open the window and
drank to the sound of distance passing.

Turned on the metronome in the hotel room
the pillows caved our heads in.

Under the moon we saw the high beams
and darkness of the distance.

And I sank in the chaise longue and drank
then we thought about this:

Things are dead and cannot upset us
without the meanings we give them.

In the name of our love for Nigeria,
you said, we must leave it behind —

Always picked on the meanings close to you
as a thorn to the side.

You believed that in order to truly love
then we must shrink down the object

of love and see its entirety.

The last morning I saw him,
after we had seen the skyline on the
rooftop and cried,
We cried and the manakins sang
on the wire across the road.
Packed his Calvin Klein bag for the airport
and played Lucinda Williams
on the Marley,
We’ve come too far to turn around,
And tonight’s your last in Lagos.
Early runnners splashed through the wreckage
of rain in sweatpants.
On the balcony you felt the wind of a distance passing,
A distance we come to know as time.
We ran through the street a cold line of hotel business
to the boundaries of sight.
Whenever you wonder how to move along with
everything so pure fixed in place,
remember the stars and earth are also moving,
and you’re relative to them.
Remember the rusty rooftops of our iron village
and the decades between them.

That there was a sunset every evening that drew
maps on our faces.

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Glistening waterways; written by Roxanne Barbour; Medium; Contest; poetry; poem; haiku; tanka; writing; science fiction; fiction; aliens; artifacts