Lying on my Bed

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by Chukwudi Ezeamalukwuo Okoye

Lying on my bed; naked as usual like a yam tuber peeled clean of its skin – its white interior slowly turning brown with time – I turned around and around. Lying on my bed; a little cold, a little apathetic…windows above my head wide open to allow the air in, the air pregnant with rain and reasoning and with sweet thoughts that bring sad thoughts to mind.

I wonder in this hour about things…small neglible things like the shape of the water dripping from a lonesome fern, like the number of sands in my shoe, like the beauty of the fly trapped in the spider’s web, like the little birds that wobble in their bones among the trees…I wonder about fate, about priviledges, about how it would have felt if I had a head start in this interesting journey called life. I think about that little soul I saw one night in the traffic, clothed in rags, eyes deep like the lekki oceans, singing softly her sad soronous songs. A child too, a child of two perhaps…lost in the music of her voice, oblivious of her fate, begging for alms for a mother who sat at a corner with another child in her arm, ready to fuck again and again to populate the world with many sweet little children who may know no love.

I think about love and what it really means. That drunken feeling in the basement of the heart, that aches with jealousy, with longing, with pain and occassionally with smiles and pleasure. I think about love making and how many women have loved me, that I’ve never loved back. And also how many I have tried to love but like a Robot equipped with sensors far more accurate and precise than the human senses yet lacking the most basic human emotions, I failed to love enough to withstand the first quarrel.

All I want is someone that I will love enough to put down the burden of pride that weighs me down…and by stroke of luck loves me the same.

I think about money. In fact these days it keeps me company while I sleep. I have actually always believed that I will make it in life; that I will blow like a terrorist in a crowded park. But I’ve never known my left from my right or how to collate the myriads of colliding particles – ideas – runing riot in my head into a constructive design to empty the pockets of unsuspecting men and women. I think that it is far more easier to lie down and dream. But again you have to get up at some point, either out of hunger or because your body is beginning to cry out from over-laziness.

Sometimes I make fun of myself, crack joke to the empty room where all my secrets are daily masturbated for the momentary pleasure of a perverted mind. Personal secrets hang like clothes on hangers, securely locked in my wardrobe. Secrets that I will sooner die than admit to anybody in public. Sometimes I look at the mirror and laugh at my empty pockets. I watch my broke self shatter into a million pieces, littered here and there like plastics in the belly of the hungry ocean…I do wonder how the sharks haven’t gotten me.

Then again, I like to think that I am lucky. in fact I know I’m lucky. I know that fate has dealt me a fair card. I must admit that I am priviledged, though still far less than some, but priviledged all the same. I actually got a head start in life…far more than the child upon that road, far more than many…I do not beg to feed. There is a great chance that I will step out tomorrow and meet the love of my life. There is opportunity to make money…more and more money. There is sheter, there is a bed for me to turn around and around. There is security in my empty room. There is life and there is hope.

And tonight, I just want to close my eyes and fucking sleep…+

(C) Chukwudi Ezeamlukwuo Okoye

Ink15 — Imagine the Impossible