Hope-filled smiles and grief year after year and we thought love had brought you to stay. So we learned to love you with all our scars and yours kept in love’s garbage. You were from us and we were in you. We refused to see beyond that. Would that she knew that love would be … Continue reading Abiku My Daughter
When I sight your stretched hands in tattered green, I hail you king of the woods. The greatest of other marvels seen Is your oil not one of the trader’s goods? Is it not your kernels that bless my food? Without you my world would be no good. When I see the red nuts from … Continue reading Ode to my Love
Now that the rushing wind has gone and air comes in trickles and sumptuous snatches, those songs come to me. They come from the days when my unborn daughter young and free, a ponytail and a plain dress, hit the bumper of my drunk car and watched the bumper disappear with a throat filled with … Continue reading Echoed Songs
Love is a multi-coloured word. Green for the growing, black for the dying… So I ask again my love, what colour is our love? Is it the bleeding red? Is it the sweet sad blue? Is it the tasty orange or the shining yellow? Love is a multi-shaped word. Square for the truthful, circle … Continue reading Love
The auditorium was filled with my excited classmates and their equally happy ‘persecutors’; the priests, the reverend sisters, the ‘wicked’ teachers and the reverend brothers. I was probably the only person who was tensed in the whole auditorium. I looked around for her and in less than fifteen seconds my eyes caught a sight I … Continue reading Locked Lips
That poem has not been written. The poem that will classify me. The poem that will release me. The poem that will vindicate me. It is yet to be written. On the day it will be written; lions will bray, goats will moo, sheep will cry, cattle will roar, dogs will crow, horses … Continue reading I’ll stop screaming
My name is Edidem I work at the airport. I am not a pilot, I only clean toilets. Yesterday my colleague joined the poets. He said, “Edidem Dreams are made of diamond Dreams are made of gold Dreams are made of silver Dreams are made of bronze Dream of making history Dream of impossibility Don’t … Continue reading Dreams
Here we are again brought together by feelings as magnetic as gravity. I should not be here neither should you. Still here we are. Like Lancelot and Guinevere we are helpless. Like Lancelot and Guinevere the earth became our bed. Shame sowed a seed but here we are again. We have heard about love God’s … Continue reading Again and Again
She screams as I cut through her but my selfishness won’t let me hear. I slice through her unborn children but my selfishness won’t let me see. She stares helplessly as I kiss her but my selfishness must assuage its thirst. I suck on her skin, oblivious of her screams till she is dry and … Continue reading I Rape
For some of us, everything gets better after we die. We are the ones who need to lose our lives to find it. My story is a story of loss. The story of a boy who lost everything for a man to have it all. Remember the theme song for the Multivite commercial that ruled … Continue reading Dying to Live
I am writing a bible for souls like mine. I am painting a bible with a blunt pen for souls that sought and found but cannot keep the light. Souls like mine that know the road but cannot tread. Souls like mine who should have a world, a language, a heaven, a hell, a law, … Continue reading Souls like Mine
i) I see you with him and you see her with me but we have learnt to bite our lips, smile at the ones we truly love and give them the remnants of our spent passion. We cannot be soul mates shouldn’t be together… but as I bury all of me in you, your lust,not … Continue reading Six steps to what we have become
Since my dad bought his Nissan Pathfinder S.U.V, the rumour mills had taken their business to a higher level. Everywhere on my street, groups gathered and discussed Jamie’s death, casting pitiful glances at me whenever I passed by. The women who came to console mum played their ‘comforter’ roles very well but I knew better. … Continue reading Losing Jamie again
The wrestlers circled each other under the scorching sun;sweat dripping and eyes focused on the other the same way a predator focuses on his prey. For people like us who knew,Chima was already the winner. Ten time champion,his fame in wrestling circles went past our little village in Diobu down to Elele and then as … Continue reading It was all a dream
“…Men don’t know what they want till they are forty. That is why they need their parents, their friends, teachers, a bevy of girlfriends,a wife or wives and in serious cases like yours, a little persuasion to set them on a path, right or wrong. In this situation however, I’m positive that you are making … Continue reading A Little Persuasion