Don’t ask me whether I have come here by air or by tracks on an old train,
The language I speak is full of dust, you should see and my eyes are

Dust-brown, my body still smells of dead things, dead sea, don’t ask me
Where my father is, I don’t know this myself, whether on his way back home,

Or at the back of a red horse taking his soul to heaven, leaving his body
To cake under the febrile sand of the desert, not even my mother knows

Where he is right now, I learnt she searches for his face in the night and
Traces his foot steps by the day, don’t ask me where I am coming from

Or where I am going to, I am a child of the road; Ibnu Sebil, I go wherever he takes me,
And I have made the sea my mother, I’m no longer her meal and the desert you chose for safari

Is my father and every train station is a home and every clickety-clack is a beautiful dawn, though I also crave
A better place to rest my back, aching from long journey and a jacuzzi full of milk and roses

To moisturize my pores, already growing exilic flowers, I need a night to myself
Not a road full of black legs, to empty every dead boys and girls in my head and not your questions anymore.

Fasasi Abdulrosheed Oladipupo is a Nigerian poet & a Veterinary Medical Student, whose first love is art making. He is an avid reader, who sees poetry in everything, with great interest in storytelling. His work has been appeared, or is forthcoming in: Watershed Journal, Iman Collectives, South Florida Poetry Journal, Gyroscope Review, Olongo Africa, Roanoke, Kissing Dynamite, The Night Heron Barks Review, Santa Ana River Review, Stand Magazine, Louisiana Literature, Obsidian: Literature and Art in the African Diaspora, Collateral Journal, Welter Journal, LEVITATE Magazine and elsewhere. Fasasi writes about migration and its tales. He also writes of grief as a universal phenomena, nature and ecosystem depletion.