Writings / Poetry

Bergson Reloaded

Niran Okewole

In Ife, Diogenes sits before the crystal lattice
Iron rings of the white house,

A neurologist with first degree in physics,
getting the best of both worlds.

Have you not heard how the passage
Of time is faster in mania, and in depression
Time slows down? Einstein’s relativity equation

Did not factor in the observer, the human
Frame of reference, he argues

Over catfish peppersoup and bottles of Heineken.
Champion’s Planet? If Liverpool win,
he claims the victory for the Merseyside proletariat,

Lapsing into Minkowski space, the limen, being
And free will, matter and memory, creative
Evolution, the _lan vital.

Duration is memory, he purrs,
Clicking his teeth. Intuition is like liquor
Suds in an inverted memory cone.

The fabulation function, voluntary hallucinations,
Three images of duration:

The colour spectrum;

Two spools, with a tape between them,
One spool unwinding the tape,
The other winding it up;

Elastic band stretched to a mathematical point,
The now of experience.
Pure mobility is a given for temporal progress.

Dropped Names
(After Billy Collins)

Adler and Brecht drop like expensive china
In the hands of a small town shopkeeper,
When the IRS come calling.

Keys in the sweaty palm of a Beirut liberal,
Castro and Debray and Eagleton clatter to the
Ground, under the shadow of Hezbollah.

Like bombs from US fighter jets,
Faulkner and Gandhi and Heaney and Ionesco,
Tracing neat arcs like the ones we used
To plot in Mr Alaka’s Physics class.

Jung and Kant and Levi are seeds
In the parable of the sower.
Marx and Nietzsche fall among thorns,
Orwell and Planck drop by the highway,
Quasimodo and Rushdie and Sophocles on
Hard ground,
But Trotsky and Unamuno fall in good, rich soil.

Virgil, Walcott, X (for indeterminacy) and Yeats
Are lobes of fresh kola in the clenched fist
Of the seeker, whispering mysteries,
Which she hands to the squatting priest.
The riddle of being is cast...

Zizek is the name everyone wants to drop.

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About The Author

Author

Niran Okewole is a senior registrar at the Psychiatric Hospital, Lagos, Nigeria. He won the MUSON Festival Poetry Prize in 2002 and 2003, and the Berlin International Festival Poetry Prize in 2008. His poems have appeared in ANA Review, Mindfire Review, African Writing and Africanwriters.com. His collection of poems, Logarhythms, was published in 2005.