Self-portrait as a Broken Boy with Anxiety
They say grief is the wound that festers the heart.
But I’m only a puddle, rippled without cause;
A vagabond watching his prime tick off from
the face of a rusting Tissot. You cannot blame me—
I consulted the compass and it, too, gave no coordinates
after roving endlessly. In my gut, I harbour misery like
a symbiote. I cannot yell; I cannot cry—I can only
ransom myself with deep breaths that pass for sighs.
You might mistake this poem for a track off a sad girl’s
Spotify playlist, but it is only a self-portrait.
The [F/H]ood [Chain]
“Can’t be hospital–
The life that we live is
so hostile”
– Central Cee, Up North.
Every lip clutching a lit cigarette, every pale face—
eyes bloodshot with brute—hosts hope and despair
like symbiotes, leaving it to morph into a ragged resolve.
It becomes a force, pushing stilettos and monk straps to
keep striding Awolowo Way, urging urchins sheltered beneath
Ikeja bridge to stay hard, hoarse throats not to
quit on passengers, basin-laden heads to
keep hustling through this labyrinth of a hood.
Here, there are no green pastures; greedy
Caesar razed them all. Even dreams feels
Sisyphean. So, it’s off with honest living
and scavenge like a black-backed jackal.
This is the tale of all nickers lurking in
the crevices of Kodesoh, of the
four àgbàyàs who took my Nokia C21 Plus and
patted my back with a dagger.
Ask around, they’ll call this hood a hustle kingdom,
but I see a biological field, reducing its
populace to a food chain:
producers and consumers.
Olaore Durodola-Oloto is a writer from Lagos, Nigeria, whose writing is shaped by deep introspection. His works appear or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, OtB Poetry, Blue Flame Review, Anthropocene Poetry, The Crossroads Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere. He won the Lagos Poem Project 2024, organized by Urban Word NYC, and was shortlisted for the Bridgette James Annual Poetry Competition. A SprinNG ’25 Fellow, Olaore continues to explore themes of identity, memory, and transformation in his work, drawing from personal and collective histories to craft resonant literary experiences. Find him on X @olaore_philip and IG @iam.colossus.