How We Murdered Sleep

Never thought to stay awake
would be as daunting.
How many times have I been puckered
like this? Back in college at girls dormitory,
at the bukas under mango trees,
in classrooms when the efficos were gone.

Sleep was a cactus no teenager wants to hug.

With a loud croaky noise from the dryer,
making Don Lemon’s voice over the TV
a Spanish vernacular, the hugely annoying
buzzing sound of a stray bug
crying for freedom, crying for a safe return
home to its kinsmen, kills me. It hovered

around me again and again

refusing to accept I’m in no place to help.
To be guilt-free, I reminded myself
how I once saved a beautiful butterfly
from drowning; sweetly rescued,
briefly sheltered. Wish the little bugger
understands that, understand that

I’m very unracist in doing that

not this. I muttered a word
of prayer absent-mindedly:
may you little, pestering fly find
freedom like the river finds the sea
may my trouble be as little as your own.
I reason every life matters. Though ours

appear to not, the Police cock a side eye.

Final figures trickling in from Iowa,
Arizona, Pennsylvania triggered the bug anew
it burst out in my face, darting across the
TV ready for the morgue. Dirge is the fresh
music to its buzz. Is this how dream dies?
Sirens creep in through the window

I panic as that shock unleashes

a fresh version of amnesia, it murders
sleep and hangs its dead body across the
shoulders of my nightmarish dream.
I embrace silence. Dryer scurried to
a stop. Three “Don Lemons” speaking
three languages on three screens

in my three heads. Am I turning the bend?

All the noise herding toward the morgue
suddenly. This bug hisses and hovers
around unbothered, daring me to raise
a finger of protest now
that my bystander’s eyes would be forced
to unopen doors for sleep now so dearly treasured.


*buka: common slang for any local eatery (Nigeria). Also in Nigerian colleges, a cluster of kiosks where students hang out at any time of the day or night.
*efficos: an improvised word for “efficiency” used to denote bookworms, often used derogatorily (Nigeria).