'The Hate Artist' by Niran Okewole

In the death camps there is a failed landscape

Artist with a meinkampf, brushstroke moustache

Mounting a collage of bones and hair on a canvas

Of Aryan pride.

His reincarnation in Alabama,

Worshipper of a black cross, cross upside down,

Cross burning, burning

He loves the texture of grief, like velvet,

Loves the feel of passion in heat

Waves, shock waves, the erotic melody of a

Bomb blast in Ulster or Beslan, shattering

Glass and crunching steel, the counterpoint.

Today he sculpts wood, leaving splinters in the eye

Of his imago, the other subculture.

He loves to sculpt the lean, lanky Tutsi frame,

Does Darfur bronze casts on the side.

(Nothing like molten ore for

drawing deathscapes on the skin.)

Brush strokes on tarmac, he paints with bombs,

Smouldering pastel, the soothsayer’s recompense,

Like de Chirico, wrought iron sticking out

Like ribs on the kerb, it could be blood or ketchup.

At a council flat in Leeds, munching a sandwich,

Plotting the mother of all intrigues, hate is the juice

That trickles down the chin when he

Chews on a red apple,

Libido rising at the thought of the crowd on the

Madrid metro, a baseball field in Nevada,

A market in Damascus, cinema house in Mogadishu.

Or Wimbledon. Or Kigali. Or Freetown.

Niran Okewole studied Medicine at the University of Ibadan and thereafter trained as a psychiatrist. His poems have appeared in Mindfire Review, Farafina, African Writing, Africanwriters.com, Saraba and Maple Tree Literary Supplement. He has published a volume of poems titledLogarhythms. He won the MUSON Festival poetry prize in 2002 and 2003.

His poems can be found on http://www.lyrikline.org/

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