To you, oh man of clumsy fate

yinka ogunlami

May 8, 2017 11:37 AM

My acuity is of the assessment that Oedipus's life was left to be moulded in the irrational hands of Dionysus, the god of passion, sex, wine, music, fertility, irrationalism, festivity.

Life

Dear you,

After I read your last poem in which you detailed succinctly the irrationalism, the incoherence, the futility and stupidity of your life’s narrative, I concluded that your life’s not the only thing that’s pointless – a collective fate binds us all.

But the intestines of your diction reveals something soul-searing than I imagined. Your kind of life is even beyond the collective pointlessness, yours is pointlessly dark and void like the state of the earth when the spirit of the Biblical God first moved upon the face of the deep.

I had to come up with a conclusion that erased the earlier one: you became another Oedipus. So I only know two Oedipuses in the world: the one Sophocles wrote about and you, my friend. See, never doubt my serendipity for the fortunate things.

My acuity is of the assessment that Oedipus's life was left to be moulded in the irrational hands of Dionysus, the god of passion, sex, wine, music, fertility, irrationalism, festivity. Without doubt, he made for Oedipus an undisciplined, irrational, illogical fate. If Oedipus had been left in the hands of Apollo, the god of discipline, reason, self-control, his life would have been better ordered.

You make me think of you as a painter who thinks less of colours and thereby spatters on the canvass according to the dictates of some opium. Remembering Coleridge. You created a grandiose chaos like T.S Eliot and his Waste Land. I tell you, you are but a waste land of metaphors, convoluted abstractions, and wavy streams of meanings hidden in the hard shells of language.

Friend, what is your lucky charm? I feel for you wading through this labyrinth and falling upon things here and there. You are the modern man in search of his soul. What can ever keep him calm in the middle of self-inflicted vortex? Could hope be his talisman? Could love warm him up in the mad winter of existence?

Please let me know when you eventually stumble on your "cordial high". Some of us have found it but we do not have the art to articulate it.

Author:

yinka ogunlami