(Photograph by J.S. Lean)


Incipience: An Incantation

Tchicaya Utam’si: “we need a dark corner for our atavistic prayers”

In any room I enter, I am what is always coming. First begotten of the beforehand. First fallen of the foretelling

   The verb to be

Unveiled in its shadow hour

The only reason you are here, reader, is because you do not believe in your life. I know all the signs

You are waiting for what is waiting for you. 
Waiting to be resolved. Made flesh & occasion. Made riotous with selfhood

You want the intractability of suffering, substance which must be borne, acknowledged, atoned for

You want to wound, I know. To say, this is me. This is presence. Being. Corpus & chalice. Your body pressing against my body this way so no pore is left without a witness

The word dust can mean both to cover with and make free of any fine substance. Language is the only refuge of the unabridged

Refractive Error


Sometimes, without glasses, I walk in the morning to watch the trees in their original proportions

Everything begins as breath, a misting against time

To see is not to behold. How could I tell you that you arrive always in the speckle of light

I have learned to name what is not there

J.S Lean is a writer and a poet currently in Abuja. He tweets @_Nebular_ .