Survivor

Even this

your grouchily long and severely warped face

is a most fortunate display, son

trudging all these varied and vicious paths

this whole course of your laden days’

systematically increasingly weighted sojourn—

the mind-racking agonies

born of its pussy-footed mornings

the flesh-scalding rashnesses

born of its morbidly desperate afternoons

eternally threatened with the trampling disaster.

An infinitely multifaceted disaster you have known

severally and intimately vicariously

in Onyeolusi your neighbour sojourner

a one who could only barely crawl his way

through all of these paths’ rampant dangers

his groundward face shorn by the rough earth

from tireless trampling

under ever accumulating survival-drunk feet—

a convulsed cruelty your own even favoured feet

have not been any soberer to eschew—

till a fatal facelessness compounded his handicap.

Every so often did you and the trampling disaster elude one another

just as if Joshua’s unprejudiced dice

were congenitally incapable of ever crossing you

even on your sojourn’s most inscrutable nights

when grim groping was alone the means

to steer your blind floundering feet from consummate faceoff

along these crescent-steady ravenous paths

vouchsafing you this gratuitous and intimate knowledge

that though you wear it so grouchily long

it already is most fortunate to have been spared

even this your severely warped face to display, son.