NAIJA BLOG

 Babanginda's shop at Wuse Market  is the shrine to the mischievous goddess of beauty There all women gather in supplication to receive the amulets of the goddess  and stay subjugated at her feet.... there they come, the youth in shallow  confidence, the aging in desperate defiance and old in despair. They cry together to Bababgida the chief priest on his throne and demand he produces the amulets  which  will bestow them beauty, youth, confidence and self-esteem they all want a taste of  beauty, the beauty that will make them perpetually admired the beauty that will protect them from the world the beauty that will bestow them power the beauty that will give them love They scream and claw at Babangida in desperation for beauty and Babangida overwhelmed but satisfied smiles and deludes them with bottles of toxic steroids and hydroquinone  that will silence their despair for a week 

I am a poet gifted with the gift of immortality destined to live forever in the minds of men and words in books A conceptualizer of concealed emotions A documenter of paths forsaken and forgotten a visualiser of time Melancholy is my muse that whispers immortality in the midst of my despair and emotions my catharsis for creativity

Days are spent in the digital world of cognitive junk and dissimulation dissonance with reality disassociating from life The poet with no words wanders like rat in a maze of social dysfunction words are lost in a haze of jumbled words without meaning

The texts stopped abruptly No more good mornings and tears and anxiety replace the dopamine rush I cry in silence and my fingers twitch to text "Why"? But instead, I will cry these tears and dry these tears and smile tomorrow because this too shall pass.

  What happens to a dream destroyed? Does it resurrect like a phoenix or vegetate in the minds of those assigned immortality? Does the dream lie heavy on your mind in the dead of the night? Or fill you with envy at the sight of the brave?

  Dream Killers You who have killed dreams with your words or remarks or the sticking to forms with disregard to the beauty of ideas you who could not see life from the vision of a poet or the depth of a painter or live with the rhythm of the singer

Listlessness settles upon me like a stubborn fly, only the Quest will settle its wanton touch, Conformity, comfortability and rest wring my neck like a strangler, my mind is restless and listless and will not be content to wander about with the mudane and the ordinary

How do I treat you I have spent years building a fortress against you but you still destroy me Oh Weak heart you have been destroyed again by words and insinuations and lies how will you rebuild yourself in the midst of all this pain

My heart beats for you like the drummer beats his bata drum this hunger has awakened the ghosts of the dead Why do I await your word with bated breath and drink into your words like sojourners in the Agadez Is it your eyes,or your silence loud with desire

  Chaos Its the death and destruction its the gender wars and transitions its the hunger and zombies taking hits on filthy pavements its the needless war in Ukraine and mumbling Biden its the psyops, the twitter rants its the intensity of emotions that fade after the next trend

  Dopamine On my brain as I awake and we speak I get a rush of joy and love. You are my dopamine I daydream about you in dusk and long for you at dawn you are my opium, my serotonin, my dopamine when will you be mine ?

  Ordinary I could not follow the path of the mundane deluded in nothingness who found substance in eros My calling was the call of Virgil and Dante and Eliot destined to be immortalised by the crafting of our words the synergy of words and emotion the solidification of moments and immortalisation of thoughts I couldn't be ordinary but reality molded me and conformed me till I became of counterfeit of originality and a misfit of conformity outplaced the restlessness the boredom the anguish of dying in the nothingness of the conformed

  Your eyes like whispers of hope  in the midst of my troubled soul so I drank from it  and wrote my story with the dreams that lay hidden beneath.  Oh how those would save me, would save me and so I waited for your little games and your little words like water for Nigerians in the Agadez in the delusion of hope,  you made the pain that sought me from every side calm and i waited in love with a mirage from the past  but realised you too had become hardened from vices you embraced  and I shirked you had the become the pain I had

  Words cannot tell the anguish of murdered innocents caught up in decades of hate and peace war and rest they pay for sins they cannot fathom burned alive by the deranged Isis is resurrected from the grave beheaders of those of faith path trailed with blood and gore

You who awaken the lion and catch a Tiger by the tail why do you seek the joys of rest alien to you U who have branded every man a foe and peace chaos why do you seek the tears of those you will sting Hamas has murdered sleep and must wander like Cain

  Take me to the past, where my dreams would rise and I would hope the hope of dreamers of the sandy plains and these hopes would ignite the dreams i dreamt Take me from this future that lays siege with dread, the dread at dusk that lurks behind tired yes the dread that stalks or lays supine like a serpent and waits and waits the dread that wearies you and makes you sigh in anguish and makes you stoop and makes you cry, or sad or turn to drink the dread that has become you

  If you only knew what Five Hundred meant to me you would weep at the thin, lost girl who arrived at your door every Saturday noon in Bulukuntu, to cook and clean and watch you play yor scrabble with your friends.   If only you could see what five hundred would buy in the future in the end of your life, broken and old without hope and the little lost girl who remembered your kindness when no one else was kind.   You who gave me succour when no one else did who endured me when no else would I saw in your eyes you were tired sometimes but you gave and gave and I can never forget.   I will never  forget the 500 naira you gave every Saturday in Bulukuntu. The years have piled up,  like dust in the dusty Maiduguri street.   Memories come and go, and people die and are reborn pain is always there, numbed by sleep  but don't forget that flicker and kindness you showed to the girl who would never forget the...

 They gathered like vultures at the smell of blood each ready to bite and kill kill and gauge the dying corpse they gathered like ghouls waiting to rip and shred the bones of the corpse  rip and steal and kill vicious and merciless they waited, panting,  breathe bated urged on by the matriarch of chaos but this soul would not die the corpse would crawl, and walk, blood ripped, in sweat and tears chewed upon and clawed upon her strength as the strength of ten warriors and she rose stronger and harder she rose and they flew and scampered and turned to doves  with pleas of peace but the warrior would never trust the dove's beak  which could turn to the carrion nib at the first sign of blood