My tongue darts out to lap up the drops of poison falling from my lips.
It tastes like a strange mixture of dandelions and chili peppers and erodes a bloody path through my throat, like a deadly river.
Oh, but don't worry, this is a daily routine. 
The rhythmic tolling of the alarm clock fills the room.
The mucus-filled, dead flaked scales burying my eyelids is shifted away and with some effort the grooved dark skin is lifted.
Out come the eyes, pale and grey.
And out reaches my hand for my coveted little bottle.

It is gilded with silver, composed of the finest blue-tinted glass and the poison itself shines like a melted pearl in the sea.
In the sea glass and the pearl poison, I see myself.
My mouth is weirdly kinked.
My nose is disfigured and lays unnaturally to the left of its bridge.

My eyes sway and churn with each undulation of the fatal liquid.

I know the whole thing was a birthday gift from my parents, though I do not know which one.

Perhaps it was my father-
an heirloom from his Nigerian ancestors.
The witches, paganists, witch doctors squatting in their red clay houses with the thick palm-smoke wafting through a carved window.
The blood of some sacrificial animal staining the wall so that they could put a spell on him to be so heavy handed,
always obsessing over who to beat or who to sleep with.

Or, maybe it was Mother.
Mother.
Mother always stood so tall for me,like a sturdy tree set defiantly against a thunderstorm.
She was always trying to protect me, but I saw the lightning strike her.
I see the scars when she trembles like a leaf flung through the wind and tears splash down her dark cheeks onto the hard earth.

It was most likely the both of them.
Perhaps, in a past time, when Father’s eyes still twinkled like the night sky above Benin,
he plucked naive Mother from her home.
She must have been drawn to those star-eyes,
containing the universe and all it's promise with a boyish vigor.
They lay together in some dark room, youthful gazes intertwined, plotting to create the deadly brew. 

Regardless of the culprit, I will drink of it.
It is simply my fate, my heritage. 
And, anyways, I have no fear of dying.
You see, the closer one gets to death, the less scary it becomes just as a child loses fear of the dark as they grow used to lying in it.

Even now, I can feel Death clambering up my spine into my eyes and ears,
whispering to me that my time is near.
For a moment, I want to scream.
I want to grind my teeth until there is nothing left but ivory nubs and spit the bloody remains out onto the earth.
I want to writhe, drag my belly across the dirt and curse the world as it curses God.
But then I see myself in the blue glass and the malevolent desires erode
like obsidian hit by the roiling sea waves.