Etymology | Excel Chinagorom Michael

& what will you say to the boy
who displaces his history,
concealing it in the body of a turbulent dialect?
His tongue is a disaster.

a part of him can tune a song into a crime scene
& still misplace a morpheme.

he mumbles disaster on a consonant
& squirms his tongue to knife nomenclature—
he keeps phonetics at bay.

here, brokenness stares at him
& like adrenaline, it rushes to embrace his body, a tsunami.

& for every word that he croaks,
there is a grievance;
heart lending the flesh their secret.

& for every echo
there is a seismic disturbance
lending out volcanoes to suit his wants.

there is an anglophone
inside the body of a fish
waiting to be secreted.

& for every language of
self-redundancy
stiffening its muscles like a wet blanket,
there is a yawning force:

the binder of grief.

What will you say of this boy?

today he is a bullet empty of smokes,
tomorrow is a gun empty of bullets.

you cannot tune him,
as his body will not strum a string.


About Excel

Excel Chinagorom Michael is a poet, blogger and content/graphics developer living in the suburbs of Aba. He is anxious about documenting realities into streams of words. He was shortlisted for the Konnect E-Zine poetry prize and the best of the finalists, 2020. His most recent works have appeared in Poemify Publishers Inc, Poetry Soup, Williwash, Fivers of Mind, Thirty-Two Shades of a Rose: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. Excel is a Gospel vocalist and one intrigued by music, sports: A Manchester united fan and fashion. You can wave him on Twitter: @ExcelChinagorom; Instagram: @excel_mike


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