The troubador sings for the last time

Hail fellow traveller,
before the dark hands of this month's
troubles meet us, you must, the broken
flute of your body sing.
The sharp grease, the rain full of paths
flowing out of our dreams,
the tang of incomplete fruits,
the early dome of a half opened morning;
these are songs that the tiny eye
in the camera of the world must see.
But there are boot fragments on the way,
shells of dispossessed cities
line the cavities of our sorrow,
the shattered spine of books litter
the walkway of our minds & the calls
of vultures bump the broken down poem
of footprints unsutured through turrets
of torn soil. Please do not leave us
desperate for a voice to guide us
through this tortured lung of the world.
This silence has hollowed out our ears.
We cannot hear the beasts
rising from their fat thrones,
their huge eyes eyeballing the parchment
of our skins, where our treasures,
the stories of our mothers now reside.
Sing through the broken flute
in your throat. Don't let the troubled waters
tumbling down from the capital scare you.
We have all died, my friend.
This is my mouth, the bullet wound
in the trachea of our country.
Sing fellow traveller, sing—of the free
wind's dress, the moon's reluctant moods,
the fever in the skin of the thrashing night.
Sing before the hail of dynamite,
the rage of grenade launchers.
Sing of the time before the silence,
before the grinding noise at the back
of the world, where hell opened
its fiery furnace, done forging the doom
of our freedom. Sing before the ferryman
comes to take us down the river road,
down the bleached bone beach
into the anthill where as masquerades,
we will dress in shrouds & masks & dance
to the smoke, oghene & the endless flute
of the dream. In that place, your song
will be muted, useless. I have seen it,
my friend. I have seen it all.

Pixabay