(For Sullivan Walter, Samuel Shepherd, Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, and Walter Irvin)

alone in the stand
you’re faced with faces giving you phases
of expressions you wish you can’t discern
yet, you can. you just wish you were on
the other side of the law
you wish to be the one plunging back into
reality  at the probe of a syringe and your sides
flanked with angels but the guilt towers in
your throat and points like fingers

these people don’t want to hear your claims,
they just pretend to fit in your black coat
and here you are, stuttering words in a
signing  and the innocence smears off your
face, tinting its melanin pigment

here
a blonde girl returning from prom plays
prey  into the claws of night crawlers  after
drowning in her own sanity until she
beheld a rapist in the lad  who offered to
redeem her
from the dark jaws of the hood

and did you not know there’s a colour wheel of neutral colours here?
where beings have their gradations done
in  shades and tints until these shades
admit to be the fremds that the tints want them
to be

Alaro Basit (NGP IV) is a versatile creative who writes and rhymes from Oyo state, Nigeria. His works are/shortcoming on Woven Poetry, Brittle Paper, Boys are not stones