About Me

London, London, United Kingdom
Musa Okwonga is an acclaimed poet, football writer, musician and promoter. A scholarship student at Eton College, he won the WH Smith Young Writers Competition, the leading national creative writing contest, at the age of 16; he went on to study law at St.John's College, Oxford, before qualifying as a solicitor at one of the City’s top firms, Lovells, before leaving to pursue a career as a performance poet and author. A front man of fast-rising band Benin City (Outkast meets James Brown), he has performed live on BBC Radios One and Three, and has recited his poetry at the EU Energy Summit before all of Europe's environment and energy ministers. He is also a co-promoter of PoeJazzi, a night of poetry and music which has been named TimeOut Critic's Choice No.1 (February 2007) and which received five-star reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2007 and 2008. In 2008 his first football book, A Cultured Left Foot, was nominated for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award; his second book, Will You Manage?, will be published by Serpent's Tail in 2010.

Tuesday, 27 April 2010

"Carnivorous", a poem

Carnivorous -
Clasping a Guinness, as
I slip through the dark, skipping past any witnesses,
Starving and shivering, I charge through the city,
Sniff, sniff goes my nose on the path of the bigoted:
Stench grows in my nostrils,
Scent makes me hostile,
Once too many they have meddled with my relatives,
Now my appetite's turned devilish,
I'm getting very peckish, and they smell so delicious -
Now they've seen me coming, they're running -
Those columnists leaking hate from each orifice,
And the cruel priests who would keep us all closeted
And the policemen who shoot for no reason,
The far-right-winger with the military interests
Who cannot play the skinhead, so funds him instead:
All these, I'll eat -
All these people concocting their viciousness,
I am a fox, they're a box full of chicken wings;
So they flee: they're desperate, see,
They know that they're each putting red on my teeth:
Soon one of them trips and then falls;
I sip, sip my Guinness then I lick, lick my jaws:
This first victim's a man, and he's old -
I've smelled something horrid at the bottom of his soul;
It smells of -
Silenced Jews and borrowed gold
So I take a deep breath and I swallow him whole;
He tasted of capers in vinaigrette -
His spirit pickled hatred into bitterness -
Didn't think that I would be a good cannibal:
But it makes a strange kind of logic, to be honest;
It's the only way I can stomach all the horror
Since each time I feed, there's a little less of it

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