À Amatoritsero Ede
(in memoriam, Ken Saro-Wiwa)
The immeasurable ugliness of Abacha—
That peasant Macbeth, that black-tie antichrist!
Ethics just muddy Misery—ruddy as Ebola!
The berserk prez had the “Ogoni 9” sacrificed!
Unbearably mutable, but terribly affable—
His presidential gaffes broadcast daffy bombast.
He deemed poets best as corpses—“laughable”;
Schemed pathological ballets for each iconoclast:
Such undignified twerking as rope fanged throats—
The frightful biting of hemp unto the ninth jugular….
Headlong bleeding gushed south in crimson gouts.
Bunga-bunga and mago-mago are germane—molecular—
To Abacha, that common-place fraud, suave IMF crook—
The intuitive victimizer with the constitutive wariness
Of a pope. Who’ll jail that shat-upon face, CIA spook,
Cet hitlérien, this public butcher, so psycho, so carious?
From the dirty soles of his feet
To the dirty feats of his soul,
His precious, vicious, noxious, “luscious” fascists eat—
Like whores of whores of whores, on all fours, the dole
Abacha pays out, that yellow-belly, me ne freghismo joker!
Where the Niger flows into the Weser—the tint of a moth,
Ama Ede iterates Virgil, Plath, and Syl Cheney-Coker,
While cream-crest waves beam distressed, distraught froth.