She basks
Beneath my mind’s profundus
Her tentacles
Wrap around my sub-conscious
Like an insistent lover
Wittily gaining on my mind
Like a festering putrefaction
Twilight hours
As the sleepy sun reclines to the west
With a melodious falsetto
She coos my secret name
Sweet deceit sets my heart aflame
She bids me to gaze upon life’s flora
And acknowledge only its spiky thorns
Yet others gaze upon the same
And acknowledge the “Rose-ish” petals
In my world of living nightmare
She makes me stand astare,
Solely on one side of life’s bi-faced Coin
And all I see is the tail
With Lailophobia’s shawls about my loin
That I may stutter and fail
Then I gaze upon the night sky
For signs of better days to come
But she zooms in
On the darkest patches
And conceals the silver linings
Her philosophies
Remains implacable as winters
Shreds my faith into splinters
Confiscate my hidden hopes
And from a cliff’s precipice
They constantly are flung
Beyond the edge of sight
Our mutual abode keeps me constantly in the reins
As her sweetened venom now patrol my veins
Like emissaries of a malignant carcinoma
Sowing seeds of chaos in “metastasia”
But who is milady in red?
My Lover… ornate Mistress
Facially: impassively bloodless
As if she was sculpted from snow
Frigidly clammy and devoid of glow
She was birthed
By the ancient midwife: Fear
In the deepest forges
Of my labyrinthine mind
That little “cub” I brought to life
She suckled…
Upon Doubt’s aged breasts
The babe in my minds cradle
Has grown to be my arch-nemesis,
Enslaves my guts to shy away from obligations
To raise the white flag at the face of temptations
Her bloodshot eyes
They stare at me
From across the mirror
My bitter love song
Without a harmony
I sing it loud and long
In dread matrimony
As man and wife
To share one body,
With the greatest foe that has ever been,
The deadliest enemy that thrives within
*NOTE: This work is a purely fictional piece aimed at buttressing two main truths I’ve come to realise:
1. That the actual world a man lives in is not the palpable geographical mass that he thrives in, but the world that he creates for himself in the deepest part of his Mind
2. That our greatest foe is neither the Devil nor the people that wish us ill fate in life, but a critical component of who we truly are…it poses a greater threat to one’s God given purpose in life…like a distinct personality entwined with the REAL you, this threat I choose to call Milady In Red.
Written by: Okechukwu Elosiuba Rhema
Edited by: Kukogho Iruesiri Samson
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