Abecedarian with Fahrenheit 451

After the movie, Fahrenheit 451

At the flame-rimmed door of trial, you’re given two options—give up the
books that honed the rust-faced crust of your consciousness into a mirror that
catches the light & interprets reflections into words, or walk, with your memory
dented, into a warped world swirling with the ashes of burnt knowledge. Come,
enter, with me, into the dim light of the night. I will walk you through the fire-lit
fringes of a city doomed to retrograde amnesia; be sure to smuggle with you a
great deal of your classics, lest you find yourself languishing from an emptiness.
Here, flame-throwers are deadlier than guns; one breath of fire equals a multitude of ash.
Into the crevices of the city, books are either encrypted into databases or committed into the
jungle-green shelves of memory. In the shadowed outskirts of the city, there is a house with
kids named after the books they’ve memorized. The wisdom of the past transmuted into
life-sized gold held in the yolk of the mind. Years ago, when the ancients wrote about a
multiplication of knowledge across generations, and muse, like crystal dew from heaven
nethered its way down to the earth, awakening the folded buds of the mind, did they for
once dream of such swift and sudden extinction? In a vision inspired by terror, books are
piled like an evening sacrifice towering up to the heavens, the ruffled pages groaning with
questions. At the pinnacle of it all, wavering in the dark-clouded breath of the sky, is the flag of
redemption—the spirits of the greats singing in the wind rippling its star-studded body.
Sever the past from the present, and watch tomorrow bleed headless. Set the pages of history
to flames, & its ashes, storm-driven, will haunt you in the darkness of your future. You must
understand, a man once said, that what we have in hand is a civilization at the mercy of rot.
Vibrations, like castles crumbling in the ghost-citadels of heaven, shake the foundations of the
world— the voice of God is shed in a chorus of rain-song. We are each returning to a silence.
Xenomorphs made alien for their thirst for the unknown. The unknown, burnt away from reach,
yearning for the tenderness of fingers. Here, what lingers is the ash, the feebleness of it.
Zinc roofing sheets rustling weeping in the dark. Once upon an age, men read in the dark.

Dream-Surfing As A Survival Mechanism

With a line adapted from Saddiq Dzukogi’s Marshmallow

In the beginning there was the terrible fever of desire;
the ceaseless undercurrents of a stream buried within you. 
And because pleasure is the bitter-sweet venom running 
through your veins, you traced its trajectory back to the
sizzling tongue you first heard in the darkness of your
loneliness. The shivering of hands that followed. How
the poem demands to sit in the pulp of your vulnerability:
for what is a poem but a probing into the dark for the light-
beam of redemption? Away from this shelter, there is the world,
a potpourri of moving facades, and there is you, far from the center
of yourself, but way closer to the edge than you've ever been.
There's the gradual bloom of wonder, like the spread of an oil-
drop in cotton, that comes from the otherness of the self:
this version of you that craves the succulent plum of love
but dreads pricking its tongue on the spiky seed within.
At night a silver ray of moonlight, like a flower-headed arrow,
alights gently on your cheeks— a lunar kiss opening the
gateway of your dreams. You glide into the garden of yourself
where the flowers abloom is a miracle; you kneel by the
whispering stream ferrying its songs in an otherworldly
spiral round the garden, & kiss your reflection in its lucid water.
In the gray sky bald eagles make a ritual of circling the sun,

screaming into the distance, the wildness of life. What is alive,
here, is either singing or supplicating to the ubiquitous god of wonder;
the cotton-white flamingoes are seeking in the water, what the land
cannot give them. You wonder if this is what you’ve been doing
all your life—seeking in dreams, the love the world cannot offer.

About The Author:

Omodero David Oghenekaro is a writer from Delta State, Nigeria. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Fiyah Literary Magazine, The Dead Lands, Yaba Left Review, Trampset, and elsewhere. He’s an undergraduate at the University of Port Harcourt. 

*Featured image by Breno Machado on Unsplash