Rock of Dakota

You stumbled into Nigeria
A stone,
For a season
In a jungle where
Rocks like you
Take root
And flourish or flounder

With your eyes wide aware
You fell
Headfirst into family and belonging:
Ndiowu and Ngwa orbiting around you
Special stone of bonds
Formed for eternity
In the eyes of God

You have outdone yourself
Paving way for other little rocks
To follow,
Not in your footsteps of
Impromptu tantrums and minute-long madness,
But in your quest to conquer
Motherland and Fatherland alike.

Negative Space

Your reign begins with
A crown of grief
In a throne of thunder!
That rips
Hurts
Burns
Flesh
Like sulphur,
In a void
Where death exists
Supreme.
And your head tosses
Uneasy;
A king in your rights
Yet unkingly in regard
Because the red dust
Dictates obligations in the shade,
And wild Angels
With scarred wings
Sing of your trauma:
              Of lost days in the tropics
              Of last days in the arctic
              Of overrated organza fabrics
              And dancing jewels
              That must adorn you
              Involuntarily

The Incest

Fleeting was your touch
Yet it sparked magic
Like another's wand would
Bound by blood
Before we were
Before we lived
This blood now forbids
Us be entwined
So I am
Strait-necked
Staring into your eyes
Dark;
They sing my song
And ask me why
I covet the things
I cannot have.

Flower Song

An ambush in amber is
Heather in bloom!
Sky flowers and
Plain green rockets
Tossed and drowned in seas
Of dressing,
To make it
Edible
Lovable
For fickle you.
Calla lilies to sing your dirge:
Blood orchids to fool you
A Rosebush for your soul;
Thorny for your vanity
And Peonies for the epoch
Of your initiation into
"La Pauvrété"

For Norma

I thank you
For teaching me to love from a distance
The Postcards from Italy still carry the scent of fresh Olives; a
Token from the waiter, whose eye you caught
All I can ever be to you, is the darkness that you know:
On our trip to the river
I remember how
With my head bent and my face in the water
At the riverbank
Held there by your strong hand
You taught me how to save a fish from drowning
I remember the times we had
Floating in Limbo, weightless.
Every moment was synchronised bliss! 
Here Lies a changed man, Norma
For rain will only be water as long as Man says so.

Doe of the Morning too.

I'm here waiting for you,
I'm waiting in my best dress
By the altar of your doom
With my heart in duress
And a bouquet of calla lilies, beheaded.
But you
You're busy being dead
Cold and stiff in the heavy gloom.

BEHOLD, GOD

Go! stand outside in the air
Just before the rains  
And consder the dark remains  
From dusk to dusk
With the sun no longer
Giving its light      
                
That will be the age to come
After God with his sickle
Has reaped a harvest of his people
With their fruits and deeds
In thirty sixty hundred fold
And the chaff left behind

Ready to burn, to breathe sulphur
A warning today,
A reality tomorrow
Behold God now while he tarries,
Otherwise behold his wrath
When it is unleashed.

Echo

Azure was the sky
When we conceived, nay
Conjured you
For it was magic in magic
A moment full of God      
Fireworks flashing             
The making of you     

Azure was the morning
When you came forth
Quiet and naked
Like the African desert dawn
With a shock of red hair 
Like Daddy's
And a cry like the phoenix song

Azure was the day   
When the world fell and you with it
Beyond reach in your utopia
With your marksmen, and your footmen and your battle hardened warlords   
When the bullet pierced your psyche
And brought you peace.  
You have come home.

TITAN

You should never have been afraid

Of the colossus rising out of the sea
Your first mistake, a Tsunami
Sweeping your soul clean
And the destruction in its wake
A hole which burned became
A volcano which spurned
Your soul some more

To evil, To beget evil
That Poseidon may become a statue
Stubborn and unmoving
Angry like Jack's giant
But a myth always
You should have seen the truth
Reached out to touch and know
That he would scatter into smoke

You should never have unlocked the gates to Gehanna
For Hades gave life to your worst fears
So that the ground beneath is fire,

You sink with each step

Your unforgiving roots bore their tendrils deep into the earth
Binding you in eternity, with your weak heel

In the rage of a blind Cyclops

So that you should wake to break free

Eco Boyfriend

Father met mother
When they held hands and made a big circle
Around a dying tree
Friends of the earth became friends in love
Les amies de Terre
You slept in trees to protest their death
It didn't matter
They died anyway

But you canvassed regardless in your dirty brown converses
And hugged more trees
And chained yourself to French warship
In a protest so nuclear
They swore you had gone mad

Friends fell in love and a nought was tied
Mother began to brood and you were born
Mother began to nest
Father was restless
There were still trees to be hugged
So he told mother

And was gone before she could muster
The strength to stop him
She watched, scorned as he left
Then she put you in a bassinet
And swallowed lead
And that earth child
Is how you were found.

Ground

I have reclaimed you
Countless times
I have.
From the greedy ground who'd have you
Stiff in her belly

I have reclaimed you
Thankless times
I fought
Long before your feet
Stepped steady on the bare ground

She sought to own your blood
But I stopped that
With my fantastic indigo pashmina from the dye pits of Lahore
And the gold embroidered one from Pakistan
These, my offerings to the earth goddess
To leave you be.

Alas she wouldn't
She cursed me instead
With a gourd growing from my belly
A new life
So my feet no longer feels her
But she would have you still

Though I send you to bed with my heartbeat echoing the
drumbeat of your forefathers
before you,
It is not enough
Now you must fight

Lark

                                                              The blue lark is a lie,

                                                                  A bare-faced lie

                                                           Like Alouette unconcerned

                                                            About the fate of its tête

                                                                 The skylark is true

                                                  As true as a naked birch in December

                                                         Or wild swimming at dawn

                                                    In the Shepperton summer fog

Gopher's Fugue.

It had to make sense.
Adrift on sea    
Glad rags bound in a red, spotted kerchief.  
Afloat on dreams   
Eyes focused keenly on tomorrow
Today receeded with the sunset
Everything vivid in shades of thrown blue
And burnt orange 
Except the water rat.  
                                     

It had to make sense.
Holes plundered and resized
Waters stormed in gently, smoothly
Glissando. Smoke out the prey!  
Another way of life; It beckoned
So the sand rat is sniffing Maidenhair
Snatched from lakes
In retaliation for every slight
Real or imagined.

It had to make sense.
The Exodus, the future  
The flying rat migrating eastwards
To the past; dangerously:
Mount sodom and a pillar of salt
Another way of life.   
"Moo-Goo-Gai-Pan" 
Beckoning
A reckoning is at hand.   

Behold the Sons of Men.

You know how someone promises you a thing?

How you wait expectantly for that promise to manifest, how you long to behold and hold the thing and it all comes to naught?
You know how the passion waxed at first;  beating hurriedly like the wings of a trapped water fowl, 
How it waned like the tired wings of the same waterfowl slaughtered?
How your hope to see a thing fulfilled fell like dusk upon your expectations & how your excitement congealed and slowly became an anger that burned?

How you see the promissor long after the expected date of delivery only to understand that the promise made to you held no importance for them whatsoever?
And then your anger multiplied, gained weight and sat on your heart like a new born placed in his mother's bosom for the first time  

And how you nursed your anger until it grew further and became a grudge which poured over you like water at an immersion; so strong it makes you shudder with irritation at the sight/thought/mention of the promissor.
                         
And how you realize that the 'enemy' is oblivious to your grudge, created by his inability to make promises and remember to keep them and how much said grudge kills you.

          
Ever felt any of that before?

Well that, ladies and gentlemen is an unfortunate and self-evident truth about the sons of men.

Behold what spectacle we all are....

Another November

Guy fawkes and fireworks
Fill the night with an ethereal luminescence    
Beneath it all we struggle with
Raised hands for a mystical identity
Bound in chains by all the darkness:
The brown of the earth refusing to be deterred by all that tar and fake grass

The ink blue of a sky giving in
To the pull of winter
And above all the darkness that swirls in our insides;
It sits silent behind hot eyes as we witness wickedness done a thousand times over.

Yet from the vigorous fires above
A familiar warmth falls from the sky
First new as red, then holy as emerald
By the third it glowers, a cold blue
Though it scalds worse than the formers

And within us there lies no humanity
To bond with this fire.
Leave! Leave! we call out
No soul lives here because
It is November again
A chilly prison in the wake of Autumn
Where nobody claps anymore.

The Fear

I think I'm falling,
It hurts
It's hazy and stuffy too
Like the infamous old hag
Sitting on my chest
Titch! Itch!
And gravity is not friendly.

In a nutshell

The Lake

I would love to see a frozen lake

Any body of water, congealed

Just so I could break the surface

And fall through

Meet the deathly warmth

That will greet me;

The hypothermic oblivion

Into which I am ushered,

Not needing again.

Sheer novelty shed for peace

Which the water gives

Oxygen: a half of the formula

That which kills you

Gives you life altogether

It is solid and interesting

At the top to disguise

Its inadequacy beneath

Likewise a boy

Interesting specimen to observe

And behold on the outside

Thus disguising the empty

Shallowness within

Like oxygen again

Without which we could not

Make life.

Soon...

Nothing more excruciating than waiting for the end.

Bitter sweet thoughts of emancipation from deadlines and lecture schedules and the almost crippling fear of what next.
Even if you have been sure of what to do from day 1, its still not easy; navigating your career (or lack thereof) is almost as daunting as it is tricky.

This is not helped by the constant onslaught of emails and updates by jobsites who can somehow sniff your confusion like sharks smell blood and come for you. They appear to offer a helping hand but in reality they don't

Now you're already proper scared because all I've said so far is true right?
Did you forget about how some if not all housing contracts expire in June and then you're either too proud to move back home or too poor and undecided to move elsewhere. Suddenly (for some like me) you're regretting severing those family ties years ago when you first moved to Uni and felt untouchable. Now you have to go back tail between legs and beg for rent free accommodation.
You have no choice, remember you're still broke with the student loans no longer coming in.

Don't even get me started on families and their expectations for you. Oh and if you think you're confused now, wait till the morning after your graduation party when the rose-tinted glasses through which you viewed the world since your childhood come off.

You're an Adult now.

TO BE FOREWARNED IS TO BE FOREARMED.

49th August

Its good to see that you're alive.

After the news of your shooting broke, I thought I'd never breathe again but here I am. That day, it started like any other day: me teasing you about your numerous girlfriends, searching your wallet for change and you chasing me around the compound. There was not an inkling of the calamity nearby to at least forewarn you or even me. It wasn't magical, it was typical, a mediocre day to say the least but it was us, it was how we did things and it suited us just fine.

I wouldn't go to the hospital after the news came, I found countless excuses not to do so but the truth was that I didn't want to see you so weak and helpless, at the mercy of Science, Medicine and goodwill. I was also having difficulties keeping it together so I knew I couldn't be strong for two. In my own twisted way I was glad they took your phones so that you couldn't reach me and hear my voice devoid of strength and discover that I couldn't give you that solace you needed.

It happened on 30th July but August turned out to be the longest month of my life; I counted 49 days in total before relief came
49 hollow days where fear was dissipated in a sinister ebb and flow
49 days where your body lay broken because the guardians of your peace violated you.
After you were shot, you were lugged from hospital to hospital, in the true Nigerian manner and it reminded me of Dimgba Igwe:
"we don't have that equipment here"
"Please provide police report to prove this your boy no be thief o"
"Sorry we don't have anymore O neg to give him"
"We need a deposit of five hundred thousand before we can touch him"
The news trickled in slowly,
My life seeped away slowly
You lay dying
Daddy ran helter skelter

After the fifth operation, I heard you could sit up and you asked about me.
I'm sorry I was such a coward
I didn't know you'd live because I prayed for it to end.
I wanted it to end
It provided some closure albeit a selfish one
I told myself I could deal with that
I know now that I couldn't have.
I see in your eyes, the worst scars of them all:
The irrational fear that they'll be back
So now I can't drop crockery in the kitchen for fear of jarring you
And I have to walk to sleep, sure footed to calm you
And though the night terrors are close by,
If they want you, they're gonna have to fight me.
It's the least I could do.