By Dami Ajayi

Break-Up Instructions

We do not need an intense
Courtroom drama to let me go.
Let me fall to the ground
Through Gravity’s fingers,
Like slippery China.

 

So much for favorite crockery
Rendered imperfect by factory errors,
Factual terrors!

 

We do not need physical contact
To let me go.
A keypad and Internet Subscription
Will suffice.
Make it cold, inert.
I choose to let you go.

 

Leave the memories in the incinerator;
Autoclave yourself.
Draw a long bath and let your robe go.
Do it slow.

 

I will not need a fresh hankie
For sclerosed tear ducts.
That knife will not pinch through
The Titanium shield over my rib cage.
But cold words will.

 

From Clinical Blues

VI.
Three hearty cheers
To the Registrar who gave
Rave morning reviews
At the sitting of grey
Obstetricians and medical students
Who warmed his bed and beer table.

 

Bleary eyes are smoke-gray tints
That contradict the pulsatile discharge
Of lingoes. For last night, only last night,
We all were basking in wafts of nicotine
Smoke and thumping loud music,
Wetting throats per anointed lager.

 

Medicos, the lowest rung of clinical cadre,
We give standing ovations. For
This is our main vocation. Empty heads
Don’t give what they don’t have.

 

Nemo dat quod non habet.

The clinic is full of expectant missed periods,
Gravid uteri awaiting time, abating term
Time that expedites doctors,
Doctors that glorify Leopold…

 

All eyes fix on the clock that
Slowly ticks the end of day,
The sweet welcome of night,
The tolling of bells.
All good days end in brotherly
Communion at Sinners’ Chapel.

 

VII.
This room, of such a Spartan preserve
To have made Hippocrates proud,
Shifted across centuries and instances,
And hardly changed.

 

Caged therein are the past
And passing demons
Of many nights doused in doubts and semen,
Of zealots who picked the curse
Disguised as a fine heritage.

 

Emotions
Of wailing wives and waiting families
Ricochet on hard surfaces like laser
Beams, squash balls, inert gases.

 

You may be 47 or 74
If you leave to see tomorrow,
But live,
Leave now—for there is
Nothing noble about playing God.

 

VIII.
Jiya ne kawai abin ya fara*

 

Make me a T-shirt that says,
“I was there when Cholera came
To Ife.”

 

Remember the child with
Pea-soup stool, his
Morbid applause which left the
World a guttural thunder?

Now an Isolation Ward is full.

Pampered kids, like
Exhausted engines, demand
Wringing; Ringer’s Lactate
Being the oil of choice,
The anus is exhaust.

 

The myth, about how thirst
And angst are the flagella on
Whose whim every patient-child
Goes home, is valid. But
There is also a virulent mum
Who fights back with antibiotics.

 

Whilst Paediatricians deliberate probiotics
In conditioned seminar rooms
And Residents bother about their
Uniformed kids and school runs,
Students are on Facebook.

 

A dark year has passed
And I remain the lonesome
Observer who stands still to
Wage wars at the infirmary.

*In Hausa: “It only started yesterday.”

 

If Tomorrow Comes

No one knows tomorrow,
Even dreadlocked soothsayers
Make educated second guesses,
Let alone baptized apprentices
In white coats.

 

Who knows tomorrow?
From inspecting nostrils of intussuscepted
Infants exuding mucus,
One last cry might fall and
Another death certificate gets signed.

 

The mournful cry of a pained mother rises,
Ricochets on nosocomial
Walls of the Paediatric Ward or was
It the Male Surgical Ward (?), on Sunday,
For Sunday, who gave in to an intestinal condition,
Who knows?

 

Not even the coffee-sipping pathologist
Who diagnoses the incurable from
Cutting thin visceral slides.

 

We live in a world that does not pause
To mourn, everyone’s in a rush
To board the next bus to tomorrow,
Who falls short?

 

Some quietly leave in their sleep,
Slip into purgatory; they forget to breathe.
The Orderly wheels the old gurney
Mortuary-ward, death is his business.

 

Death is transaction, bills we
Pay, bad debts made good,
The law of diminishing returns,
Last breaths are gavels at the auction:
Going, going, gone.

 

But if tomorrow comes and your
Ailing bodies choose to sit still,
It might just be for another tomorrow. E

Dami Ajayi is a Nigerian writer and psychiatrist. His first volume of poems, Clinical Blues, from which these poems are taken, was a finalist of the ANA Poetry Prize.  Affection & Other Accidents is his most recent volume of poems.