Broken Windows Theory
by Tolu Oloruntoba
From the entropic raft of my body
I surmise the heat death of the universe.
It was cruel, or a mercy, to make us aware
of the bell curve of our lives tolling.
But we needed death, or we’d be bottomless
stomachs, gorging Gehennas of gas-
tric acid. In evolutionary time, where everything
wants to be crab, we turn into cancers.
Boudoir sprawls of lab frogs presented
the seedlings of our mitotic wishes. We needed
to understand, to wring the blood of ferrets
for vaccines. Wrung, wrong, rung. We climbed
canyons of sacrificed mice and gerbils to get here.
We had, ghoulish, predestined their sacrifice.
Descendant compatriots of Skinner rats avenge
their kin now, throwing plague over siege walls.
Warts are the armor of the biome within, fighting
consequence. Heart disease is the revenge of birds,
for eggs. Alopecia is the traction city tearing back,
up frontal slopes, sebum escaping sub-skin volcanoes.
In the movie glaucoma, where optic electronics are damaged
by aqueous flood, edges of the picture smudge
into absence. In vain do diuretics bail waiter from the sinking
body. In vain do bucket crustaceans execute
their pincer movements against a gravity they cannot flee
fast enough. But if I do not sleep, terrors of the night
cannot carry me, squirming, away. Let me, thus, fight death.
Then let the crashed automobile of my body burn.
I will not need the wood panelling of a grave plot
just yet. I will be awake to meet daylight
savings at the gate. I will watch that hour
slip through the grate from the grasp of the sleeping,
I will follow where it goes: to the sewers that the pipes
of our micro-chasms empty into: a river of time.
I, voyeur, will pay doubly for this sin: to have found
the codex in an inverted world at the delta; the volumes
of the city, the book-spine panes; the sagging shacks;
the worn jerkins lost titles wear; the friable pages waiting;
the porpoiseful dark in the echo of waves beyond;
the swallow flocks as divers the ground regurgitated.
Pay for having seen the marble burden of karyatides,
the carina they made with their parting,
the milk-in-coffee cosmos they flanked;
the corporeal form as helical balloon animal
and having returned to tell you: we are messengers
of the genealogic telephone game.
Can you hear now; forgive, forge now,
forage yourself now?
If you sense like I, the expiring warranty
of our connective tissue;
your long tail of commerce,
your vestigial coccyx;
the enamel picket before the welcome
throat buckling, cavitated by termites;
tattoo sleeves of skin tags
mapping decline,
then why save the house?
Or why not save the house?
And will you ask whose wall
we are the biological clocks upon?
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Tolu Oloruntoba won the Governor General’s Literary Award for English Language Poetry and the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize for his debut collection, The Junta of Happenstance. He is the author of two other poetry collections, Each One a Furnace and Unravel. After an early career as a primary care physician, he currently works as a project manager. He lives in Calgary.
Website: www.tolu.ca