Anxiety is a way of life – Adesiyan Oluwapelumi.

Anxiety is a way of life

Filter

Like a sieve, I am drained

Of every dewdrop of happiness

Through the mesh of my hollow body.

And I– dust in the fireworks of light

Escape the drizzling storms of darkness.

I– billowed tusk of winterbourne

Streaming down into a gorge

Of landscaped realities

Acculturate the mimesis of shame.

Here, fear is a fleece wool

Unfurling in the cotton eyes

Of a cowardly man. 

And every prayer is the blossoming

Of nightmares, before they ripen

In the garden of dreams.

Residue

The cremains of dead memories

Haunt us alike.

In fragments, we break into our death.

Say every light born of darkness

Must return in a wave-tide motion

to its origin.

Say the mind is a haunted gallows

And we wheel thoughts along

Like cringing vehicles enduring

The bruising art of locomotion.

Say to move is to steer the gears of the mind

In a non-decipherable conveyance.

Speckles

The body knows the littlest wounds.

Every ache– a mountain depressing

Under the gravity of tactility.

I touch this skin

And it sheds into an ecdysis of monologue.

I am still waiting for what

Won’t stay.

Anxiety is a culture

And here, I robe myself with the regalia

Of a holy pessimist.

Contributor’s Bio

Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a young genre-bending creative who writes from Oyo State, Nigeria. He writes to explore themes of identity, religion, and selfhood. Some of his works are published/forthcoming in Poetry Wales, Visual Verse, Kissing Dynamite, IceFloe Press, Unstamatic, Afristories, Opinion Nigeria, Eunoia Review, Fiery Scribe Review, Salamander Ink, African Writer Magazine, Brittle Paper, Lumiere Review, Asterlit & CultureCult Press among many other publications and anthologies. Oluwapelumi is the winner of the Cheshire White Ribbon Day Creative Competition (2022). He is also an Honourable Mention recipient in the Coexist Lit International Metamorphosis Writing Contest & the Winter Starlit Award 2022. He reads poetry for The Kitchen Table Quarterly. You can find him on Twitter: @ademindpoems, on Instagram: @ademind17, and on Facebook @Adesiyan Pelumi.

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