Dami Ajayi is plugged as a lyrical poet whose use of language and style is daring, visceral, empathetic and sweeping.
… You picked the best place to have an argument. A train coach heading from Berlin to Cologne. You picked the best time, too; the quiet time before travellers eased into siesta.
The above lines float the same texture of bewilderment spooled by Brenda Hillman in the poem: During an enchantment in the life. The poem details how we are consumed by love, get beaten more than twice, and become unwieldy disposed to new possibilities – and how we drown in the river of disillusionment trying to save face from the furtive cuts of a revocable love. The poem also spills our stubbornness to unroll the mat of affection from the garden of impassioned loss – and still linger with red herring questions when the object of affection has already set sail and taken our inadequacies like threadbare madrigals to a bewitched tribunal eviscerating the honesty of our frailties with smirks and calumny – and multitudes of sins adjudged in a kangaroo style while we are still mustering exhibits for reconsideration and a fair trial to slid back into the warmth of that once upon a time inglenook.
The incongruence of desire between the estranged lovers and impurity of intentions stands slap-bang in the ensuing lines:
… I lingered with questions, but you dismissed them with a tentative smile, with faux warmth, with a hospitality soon to be replaced with hostility. Yet, I lingered with questions.
In this collection of poems, we step onto a vulnerable concourse of evocations garbed in galvanic lines and verses as we meander the swelling waters of scalene affection and other accidents. The persona in the first and titular poem, draws the first blood of narrative, filleting each consonant of grief on the skewer of incendiary postures, albeit floundering amidst an abundance of red flags that the heart would/must have refused to take into cognisance; which is the albatross of every helpless romantic. The opening poem would magnet sympathetic eyes as the persona narrates how the spark of friendship evolves into a promise of something cosier / eternal before waning into long-winded fits of arguments that always fermented into chaos and a grandstanding circus – levied on the opium of indecisiveness and self-excoriation that demystifies this persona in the throes of enchantment. The persona painted searing scenarios in up the creek lyrics that remind me of the legendary Orlando Owoh in the song, Yellow Sisi; describing the leviathan taste of a fair maid and how she held everything they had in little esteem and a palpable disdain. The refrain in the song is a question consigned to the wind in lines like: and what happened between us, lover?
The comet of disgust aligned in the cadence of this heart-wrenching piece and began to burn in lines and verses with refined locutions; amplifying the frustrations of the persona in the poem hung out to dry as depicted in the following lines:
… You were waiting with a worn smile. I was loaded with suitcases of your contraband –locust beans, dried fish, dried ewedu, leaves, fiery ground pepper… I became an appendage in your house, that guest who might have overstayed his welcome…
The above lines are testaments of the persona’s attempt to redeem himself and travel miles to offer libation for some sort of transgressions but met with a gum shoe bent on ensuring he gets the comeuppance for those wild oat sowing strays that tow behind his emergence and tilts the aggrieved soul off balance. We see a strengthened tone in the denouement
why me, where he lampooned about the inevitable fight between himself and his beloved. Line of erupting crater from the in his sweat crusted quill. A river of lava guides the viewer’s eye, while thick smoke rises into the sky in the land of ice and fire disembowel.
