Author: Tim Fab-Eme

Tim Fab-Eme

I understand you don’t like talking sex and indoor games

when the Sun is high and the winds take on

the warmth of a kiss. Everything takes the extreme nowadays;

it’s no longer the luxury of race, religion, and politics.

But I’m bored because there’s nothing else to talk about

when the heat is high and my lips crave yours.

Our kids are in school learning new ways to take

more from the world. Do you wonder what life would

be in a century or two? There’ll be fires, floods,

droughts, and pandemics . . . oh, I forgot, you dread bad news.

You think there’ll be more love if we hope more.

We walk around and talk about paradise whenever we want;

I try to laugh loud more every time my mind

wanders away from the lair of a world beyond love.

But the heat is on and I’ve got no way

of looking away from sex, and the heat is much

and we’re afraid our bodies would rain heavily again

and the bed would be soaked and you don’t like that.

So, we sit out under the almond fanning our faces,

giggling the way foes feign smiles, thinking more of heaven

than what we feel now and will ever have. Earth.

Tim Fab-Eme

You must know Darwin—not any darwin

in forums with telescopes on his eyes

always singing the beard like a puppet,

or one having his tag by accident;

I really mean the God of chance—

he respected me, no, he deified me

not because I once mirrored his incubation

when we sat alone on HMS Beagle,

but that I surpassed him in jest—

this, too, he dismissed when I reviewed

the Origin long before it absorbed us.

I had asked as throes gripped him,

what he would be after the time—

My friend, he called, there is no death

but transmutation, and we laughed at sophistry.

So, Darwin never died as you presume,

and not only he, but every extinct thing:

do not compose elegies for Tiktaalik roseae,

dinosaurs, Raphus cucullatus and golden toads

or remind me of Suyá and Ostrogoth,

St. Helena olives and Sri Lanka legumes—

they have, indeed, been transformed—I know

he would agree wherever whatever he is,

that the Holocene extinction is natural selection.

He knew I detest praising friends privately,

I sing them loud as a thrush

I laud public approval, which he adored,

and I told him in undressed words

that I did not share his lust

and how he swore in the name

of greed and in its night-birthed misnomers

we give all the things that limp

backwards into the beautiful door of love;

the stubble smiled and laughed at me,

yet he did not stir my head

to make differently how we should live.

I never meant, friend, to distract you,

to cut new pathways in your mind

to discredit or credit the new whiskers,

and believe me, I wonder every day

as I walk across shacks and skyscrapers

how many of us daily go extinct

by our fatal greed and inverse love

that wet the long lungs of death—

and which of us, Malthus, is next?

Tim Fab-Eme

You don’t know what it means to live unknown,

to smile in the market square as a stranger

haughtily spills your mother’s name on a pig’s head

and you become a boil on Miss World’s lips.

This is how a mangrove lives without prop roots:

a branch is starved until its pregnant leaves become

ghosts of IDPs walking backwards to Oloibiri Well 1.

def.: Oloibiri is the longing of a surrogate mum

e.g.: She died birthing crude oil for the outsiders.

You don’t know how it feels when a foe

owns your child and you bow calling him, Lord,

while your neighbours cut your neck with snail shells;

you can’t protest because your life’s a nursery rhyme

of CH4 NOx VOCs SO2 CO2 PAHs PCBs HFCs

and the other poisons that eat me away daily.