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Poems by Raeez Jacobs

An education

 

You taught me how to play the piano
how to use my fingers you taught me how
to eat with my hands
how to use them to aid arithmetic

to spin spider webs from the
edges of my nails
you taught me to own my way
how to comb my hair, flatten the crops,
and drag the bank into the mouth
of the river

how to mould myself
you showed me how to
turn myself into a page for
the millions of poems I’d later
come to write
how to fight, fly a kite

you taught me how
to play by the
rules of the night

 

The Union

 

Codes are being generated,
Unions are being formed, laws are
Being rebelled against, and
All good men are gone

Mistakes precede each glance
Error lives to tell each tale
And old matters are being lagged
Through again
As if there is no apparent
Sense of mankind amongst the egos
Currently elbowing ‘gainst the tide

As if all good men are
Gone

A child waits for a train
Escaping the world in heavy
Exhales of toxic air
Making bedlam of his making
Numbing silence and sucking lights
With chimes in his departure
He stops being a child
Again

Because all good men are
Gone

 

Colonised Egos and Demented Democrats

 

Our voices drown in the murmur of lies
they repaint all the walls, change street names,
they reconfigure our sight, alter the colour of our eyes
stalking our skin, haunting our ancestors
attempting to threaten our lineage, they don’t
know how crazy about our origin we are-

They make us rely on their deceptive hands
to fall for their programmed gestures of
concern- they speak to us, as though we’re one
and the same person, declaring that complexion
can’t prove more than our blood can
but separate us soon society must become
loud and apparent again- the crakcs can never be
seen

but this time we’re serious
it’s about more than just service delivery,
water, and the little, none of them big demagogues
couldn’t do, and still, no can do
in the face of innovatiom; of which we but merely boast
nor is about the other injustices, I reserve to the
word of some law-verson person, because inexperience

would make me do exactly
what they’re doing to you, to me,
the dead, the dying, the rich, and certainly
the poor, the sick and the healthy, the homo- and
heterosexual, and the faith and faithless
right now as per this very second

on the doorstep of innovation
we assume on social change
and bite our breaths this time
so that we’re not once again made to feel
like all we live to do, no matter what else keeps
us busy and sustained, is to anticipate
or shall I but just say…wait?