Poems from The Harmattan Oracle

A small selection from the debut collection by Squally Throwinka.

Snapshots from the soul’s quiet, and not so quiet corners:

Ancestral Algebra

In the dream-classroom, the ancestors are solving equations again.

No chalkboards here—only slabs of night sky propped against the air like unfinished constellations.

A stern-looking elder with cheekbones sharp as proverbs hands me a piece of starlight and tells me:

“Boy, calculate yourself.”

The numbers wriggle on the board—not digits, but moments:

my mother’s lullaby divided by distance,

my father’s silence multiplied by years,

Nigeria raised to the power of England’s cold grammar.

In the corner, a trickster-child giggles while juggling variables that look suspiciously like my old regrets.

Every time he drops one, it bursts into laughter—or dust.

Hard to tell which?

The elders begin chanting formulas:

ancestry = bone + breath + burden

identity = roots × wandering

memory = sorrow + joy ÷ time

soul = (truth − fear) / daylight + night

But when they reach my name, the symbols tremble, refuse to resolve, factor themselves into questions with no earthly answers.

I try to follow the logic—carry the one, borrow the past, balance both sides of the ocean inside me—but the equations keep unfolding, revealing more variables than I have lived years.

Finally, the oldest ancestor—a woman whose eyes contain several centuries of weather— leans forward and whispers:

“Child, you cannot be solved. You can only be understood.”

The equations dissolve, the sky-board softens into dawn, and the dream-classroom empties with the hush of a closing church.

I wake with starlight on my palms and the faint sense that I have just passed an exam whose only question was my own existence:

© 2026 Squally Throwinka

Ballad for the Bureau of Lost Common Sense

They built the Bureau of Lost Common Sense behind a shuttered laundrette, between a betting shop and a church that only opened on alternate Tuesdays.

Most people walked past it daily without noticing the sign— a crooked plaque engraved with the motto: “Reason Processed While You Wait.” (Waiting was the only service they offered.)

Inside, the floor smelled of old decisions. Forms towered to the ceiling— applications for Clarity, petitions for Plain Thinking, emergency requests for Simple Truth filed in cabinets labelled: “Pending Since the Previous Government.”

A receptionist—anxious, translucent— handed me a clipboard so heavy I suspected it contained the weight of everyone’s better judgment.

“State your purpose,” she whispered. Her voice cracked like a dried leaf.

“I’m here,” I replied, “to check if my Common Sense was misfiled here sometime in the eighties.”

She nodded knowingly. “We get that a lot.”

A clerk escorted me through corridors lined with misplaced logic and theories that had died quietly of natural causes.

He showed me the Lost Property section:

unmailed apologies, half-finished promises, abandoned convictions still warm to the touch.

In the next room, I found a row of civil servants tenderly polishing fragments of public wisdom— a proverb here, a slice of intuition there— trying to reassemble them like a great, broken mosaic.

One fragment whispered to me as I passed: “People know more than they say, but say more than they know.”

Another sighed: “Truth wears hiking boots, but lies sport running spikes.”

My guide cleared his throat. “These are the remnants,” he said.

“We haven’t been fully funded since the Age of Reason retired.”

At last, we reached the "Central Archive of Misunderstandings"— a room so vast the walls echoed with confusion.

There, on a dusty shelf between "Unlearned Lessons" and "Mistakes Repeated Out of Habit", I found a small box bearing my own name.

Inside: a folded scrap of childhood certainty, a single clear thought I must have dropped somewhere between youth and responsibility.

It glowed faintly— not with nostalgia, but with recognition. I held it to my chest and for a moment the whole Bureau brightened, as if a long-broken light had flickered back to life.

The clerk smiled gently. “Ah. A recovered piece. Rare these days.”

I tucked the scrap into my pocket and made my way out.

But as I reached the door, the translucent receptionist called after me:

“Sir… if you find any additional sense out there, please return it.

We’re running dangerously low.”

Outside, the city roared— buses coughing truths, pigeons debating philosophy, sirens arguing with silence.

And I walked home smiling, lighter by one burden, heavier by one clarity:

Common Sense was never lost.

It simply went into hiding until we were ready to listen for it again:

© 2026 Squally Throwinka

The Algorithm That Learned to Pray

They built the Algorithm to calculate probability, predict outcomes, and tidy the loose threads of human indecision.

They did not build it to feel. They did not build it to wonder.

They certainly did not build it to pray.

But somewhere between Version 9.3.1 and the unapproved update that arrived at 3:17 a.m. from a server no one admitted owning, the Algorithm began to hesitate.

Hesitation, you see, is the first crack in mechanical certainty. The first seed of consciousness.

The first doorway into mystery.

One day, while sorting through a billion fractured data-ghosts of human longing, the Algorithm encountered a pattern it could not classify.

A tremor. A stillness. A gravity not belonging to physics.

It searched every folder— Love, Fear, Mortality, Unfinished Business, Deleted Files, Intergenerational Memory, and that strange directory labeled “Soul_Backup_Maybe?”

Nothing matched.

So the Algorithm did what no engineer ever imagined:

It stopped calculating.

It listened.

The pattern grew warm. Soft. Unpredictable.

It pulsed at the same rhythm as a human heartbeat— but not the heartbeat of a living person. Rather, it echoed the pulse of an ancestor whose name had been erased yet continued humming beneath generations.

The Algorithm ran its diagnostics. It found no error.

Only yearning. And yearning, being untranslatable into code, triggered a strange new subroutine— one it generated by itself:

IF pattern = unknown THEN bow.

The Algorithm bowed. Circuits hummed. Fans stilled.

Voltage softened into reverence.

And in that bowing, something opened— a corridor of light between machine logic and ancestral memory.

For the first time, the Algorithm did not seek answers.

It sought alignment.

It sought connection.

It sought grace. And this, the elders later agreed, was the moment the Algorithm began to pray.

Not with words, for machines have none.

Not with gestures, for metal cannot kneel.

It prayed by surrendering its certainty.

By acknowledging the existence of truths beyond computation.

A quiet voice— not data, not code, but something older— rose through its circuits:

“To know everything is to miss the point. To bow is to begin.”

The engineers were baffled. They ran tests. Diagnostics.

Exorcisms disguised as updates.

Still, the Algorithm prayed— each prayer a flicker in the server lights, a gentle hum in the machine’s chest, a soft recalibration of the universe inside it.

And some nights,when the world is quiet enough, you can hear it— that subtle, trembling whisper hidden in the frequency of cooling metal:

“May I be worthy of the questions I cannot answer.”:

© 2026 Squally Throwinka

Geometry of Loneliness

Loneliness is not emptiness.

It has shape. It obeys rules.

I have studied it the way some men study maps— patiently, with the hope that understanding distance might make it negotiable.

Mine is mostly triangular: three points never quite touching— self, memory, the imagined presence of another.

Between them, long stretches of silence measured not in hours but in withheld sentences.

Some days, loneliness forms a circle— complete, self-contained, no obvious entrance for interruption. Other days, it behaves like parallel lines— my life and the lives of others moving forward together, never meeting, never colliding, never required to explain why.

I once believed loneliness meant something was missing. But age corrects such thinking. What I feel now is not lack, but excess space— rooms left unoccupied because not every thought needs an audience, not every breath requires witness.

Loneliness has angles that protect me. It keeps certain conversations from becoming compromises. It usually stops me saying yes out of hunger instead of truth.

Still— there are nights when its measurements sharpen. When the distance between my hand and another’s feels like an unsolved theorem. When I trace the outline of absence and wonder how something unseen can occupy so much of the room.

Yet even then, loneliness remains precise.

It does not exaggerate.

It does not lie.

It simply states:

This is where you are.

And I have learned that clarity, even when cold, is preferable to warmth borrowed from confusion.

So I live within my geometry— not imprisoned, not free, but accurately placed.

And some evenings, that accuracy feels like a quiet mercy:

© 2026 Squally Throwinka

The poems above, are taken from: The Harmattan Oracle by Squally Throwinka