The Wickedest

by Caleb Femi

call me by the name my exes gave to me in love and in turmoil

Rank your bad days in order of blackened hearts, the worst a shuddering spectacle.

In your twenties, nothing can kill you the caption of your Insta story.

remind him your presence is a luxury

isn’t that what it feels like? hearing a song for the first time realising that it’s always been playing in the background of your life?

we just stared at each other for a while then burst into laughter like two halves of a soul scattered across a field of lifetimes finding one another again

Baby, make your love visible like the smudge of make-up on my shirt, shadows in an abstract painting,

It is true what they say: no drug is more potent than puberty and after it peaks the comedown will last your lifetime.

this scam that is adulthood – you will become jaded, washed of your colour. Your juvenile eyes will harden. The days will become sticky, harder to rinse off your skin.

Love is to be full in all that needs filling.

How frightening to think of tomorrow without you.

shout-out to the lovers in the house big up the couple lipsing by the window you lot been there all night though you’re blocking the breeze please kiss somewhere else

shout-out to the ravers inside who came to have a good time cos we don’t always have a long time

When I am in my room alone, midnight lights off, Blackness makes sense as every thing looks like me:

what is suffering for if not enjoyment this could be our last dancing night the day is dangerous we know that

I wish I was naturally light-footed but it takes lifetimes to learn the dance of acceptance; how to pivot around destruction as I move through the days.

[putting your hands in the air like you don’t just care]

Dancing is your body falling from a skyscraper and suddenly learning flight.

I know how to save a life – we all do – it’s what to do with it afterwards, keep bracing for the next crisis?

Every morning the sun comes up smug and unconcerned about my little life

Decades from now in the twilight of his life, he will sit by a window and in the distance catch a glitch of lightning and recall an echo of her face.

Shout-out to you, who will outlive the rest of us and carry the last memory of our youth. The stubborn weight of our giggling skulls painted in your years. Remember us well. And when you leave here, do not speak of what you saw tonight. If the outsiders ask, tell them you saw nothing, no poetry or anything worth calling [art], only cobwebs, stinky food and trick mirrors.