Lying on my Bed

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.

INSIDE NIGERIA: On The Need to Encourage Hardwork & Eachother

A serious look at our literary icons will reveal one distinct pattern, those are men and women that were discovered by the west. Achebe, Soyinka, Okigbo, Clark, Chimamanda and co were all recoginised first by the west before we all joined the band wagon of cheering fans. We have many great writers today that wallow in the jungle of obscurity, waiting for one white man to discover them like an Oil well in Egbema. How many world class writer have we discovered on our own. How many great scientists, engineers, philosophers, doctors, technicians, athletes, sportsmen etc have we groomed here in Nigeria. No! We are either waiting for the world to recognise them before we do, or like some of my brothers in Alaba and co we are busy waiting for them to release a record or publish one book so that we will pirate. We are majorly a people who are mentally lazy, who have lost the capacity to think, to envision and to appreciate hard work. We are busy waiting for new ideas from someone to plagiarise…thanks to lawlessness of the land, copyright is a word for those who have promises to keep.

INSIDE NIGERIA: When Exile is an Elixir

Perfection is never achieved by praying and fasting or by wishful thing but by striving to live as perfect beings. Wherever you are, try and be a patriotic Nigerian. Keep your surroundings clean, speak up fiercely against injustice, tomorrow might be your turn. Do your own share perfectly…it might seen like a needle in a hay-sack but who can predict Tomorrow…Arab’s Spring started as a result of Bouazzi; a nonentity setting himself on fire…an event of no importance at the time. Please do not set yourself on fire, rather set your old habits ablaze…because if we should continue this way, who knows; one day Nigeria may become empty except for the rotting corpses of our failed aspirations as a Nation.

Last Night as We circle the Streets of Abuja (Poetry)

We circled the streets, looking for parties and prostitutes, Plundered the night – smelling of cigarettes and alcohol. Our drunken laughter rang loudly around us As we picked up a prostitute from the roadside. Who said, “A naira for a night, we are the best the city has to offer, A naira for a night, love cannot be any cheaper.”

Labels & Stereotypes

Imagine a world without distinctions. A world with no variation whatsoever; where A to Z fall within the same vowel and consonant sound - one figure of speech summed up into a singular alphabet - and all languages are but one word; Unus (Latin for One). Imagine a colourless world where everything appears like water - transparent and indistinguishable - slowly but steadily falling from the rock of creation into the river of unison. Imagine a world without white, without black, without race, tribes, gender, religious sects, countries and all other categorisations of Mankind. Imagine such a world; a world that can only take form for the briefest of moment - a flash of light in a distant galaxy - before disintegrating under the weight of its own monotony, unable to sustain or justify its existense because creation by its very nature is diversity. Creation is boundless, and so is life.

IN DEFENSE OF GAY RIGHT

Our lives are filled with issues, we are miserable and we feel helpless to tackle the issues. Hence to forget our miserableness, we remove our eyes from helplessness and go looking for flaws in others and try to convert them to our miserableness. Where was religion during the Slavery Trade, during colonialization, during the inquisition, during the caste system? Religion was silent in the face of these evil and in some cases enabled these evil. A gay person has done no evil to us by virtue of being gay.  The gay person that we beat up today may be the only person with enough courage to stand up for us in the face of injustice. 

Remember (For Ezeamalukwuo)

Remember: True happiness cannot be bought, but can be borrowed from the subtle chortles of childhood and humble beginnings. Tears are potholes from which pain leaves our soul and healing comes, and know that even men also cries. Laughter can be lovely if you listen to the sounds of joy, and it comes from beauties mundane

THE WORDS OF MY MOTHER – A REVIEW

Chukwudi Okoye’s anthology of poems is steeply didactic. A greater portion of it is also retrospective, Eurocentric, and, in some lines, pantheistic; although, the breath of metaphor conjures up a panoply of imagery plumbing deep the African core. In his book, one finds the “Niger” and the “frogs”; the “broken bamboo” and “black columns of ants”; “flutes” that are “urged to speak”, and “palm fruits ripe with fear”; “divine secrets from stones”, “sorrowful psalms of birds”, and “the rustling anguish of falling leaves”.

RESCUING A LITTLE BIRD

Yesterday I saw a hopping bird wobbling in its bones -- a baby bird so to speak. It looked fragile as birds of those species look, with bones so soft that one could easily crush it with very little effort. It was hopping about my compound, unable to fly away...like one trapped within the confines of this imperfect world. Its mother lurked around the branches of a nearby tree urging its baby on, but its wings were small and weak, and could only lift it above a few centimetres before gravity pulled it again and again to the centre of the earth...and it fell and hopped, and hopped and fell....its occasional twitter filled my human heart with compassion.

LIFE IN MY NEW APARTMENT

Sometimes I wish that my life would be like my new apartment, needing only a couch and a centre table to be complete. Sometimes when I sweep the empty floors of my sitting room, my hands upon the broom , susceptible to every touch, I feel the emptiness of my own life - the golden egg empty of its albumen. I call out to someone - to anyone - and the room echoes back my loneliness.