NAIJA BLOG

  This is the season to mourn, As the leaves fall among the dusty streets  And children’s noses are filled with snot and At night their tiny chests wrack with cough This is the time to cry, the days so sad and short The nights so sad and short And memories that have not been buried resurrect to torment The pain-filled souls This is the time to stare  The two-thousand-yard stare into the abyss called the future Bleak and filled with horrors And pray to the ever-silent God  Who mocks? Cries? Or delights at our plight  

  You were my light and I grasped you Afraid of the darkness that you would bring You were the joy that would herald the sadness that Would outlast the happiness My pleasure and pain The pleasure of the times fade dread and angst replaces  This dream, forsaken I was already ready for the pain to come Pain destined to make my heart its home The signs never lie, instinct or fear? I can never tell. But I know it weighs heavy on my soul, And the tears remain unshed and the thoughts stab in me in moments of quiet And my hands are anxious and touch the buttons that bring me happiness Alas, my happiness is still a myth, still is, and will be  Pain makes me its own so I eat with sorrow  My own. I must love my fate 

 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?