i.
We are all children of death, born at the cemetry
of doubts and hopeless future
that exists in the bald hearts of photo-copied pictures
and dreams that soared away long ago
on the wings of vultures,
On empty boxes of ballots of riots we sit
Waiting for the fufilment of lies
and the realization of mirrages
The marginalization of tragedy with tear-edy.
Our cheeks melt in our palms as they hold and behold
the death of comrades and the slaughter of men
like goats and rams of Ileya
“Stretch forth your neck and let us paint
with the crayons of Akiti the ghost”
Says the men of host.
These streets are death traps,
Men walk head down and legs up.
ii
Men spill their men’s blood and eat there liver
while power holders are struck and weak with fever,
thus, darkening these streets of diamond
with the darkness of coal and brimstone
making us loose our diadem
like in the days of Soddom cum Gomorrah.
Bumps of human burns cluster on these streets,
Cars jostling bumper to bumper on our high-wastes.
They were meant to walk on wheels
But they ride on their backs
leading to a conflagaration.
Burn spill!
Burns!
Barracks are reserved arsenals for lease
to blood sucking monsters that kill and destroy,
Their teeth and jawbones are metals,
They sway their heads as they walk,
Telling lies about the unborn saviour’s birth.
We sang a mirth
but love sings a dirge, we pledge.
iii
All hail the power of the gods of guns,
Those that kill the body with its soul,
Gods that grope in the darkness of time
heading towards the monster’s shrine,
with secrecy and hypocrisy lurked in their medulla
and flesh of foetuses tucked between their canine teeth.
They shall submit at our monster’s feet.
Canabis-smoking canibals stagger in stupor
on these streets that never saw sunshine.
Brackish waters flow in drainages
that irrigate our door-steps and foot-steps
splashing spattering spatter on our scattered shattered battered dignity.
Men of honour and horror that never stopped their terror
trailing and tracking the ants of their people –
People who submitted the staff of leadership
and the scepter of authority to them
in good will.
Men run amok in tatters and fetters in their own house
because there are ‘god-fetters’ in this place.
iv
Very soon, vultures will gather here
To pick up living cadavers that make cadences of deep snore.
They’d smile at the crimson coloured caffeine
dripping from the dark side of the Missouri, the Nile and the Niger.
When these zombies get high on rye,
Even dracula shall lose the last instinct to suck
And martians would descend through the degenerated ozone
To attack the white vanguards on these black streets
from their vantage points.
Till then, love sings a dirge
But let Peace be a spectator.
v
Fright and terror takes their seats on the throne of our heart
with a place of fire producing farenheits of heat
burning slowly our cold melting heat of wax
breakiong through auricles and ventricles
Blood-splash!
Horrible!
Blood spill on dark sheets of coaltar
that lay useless on our stark barren roads
those that leads to fruitless seaports
that never welcomed the ships of Tarshish
Men pile upon men as they breath their last prayers
they stay mute, awaiting a saviour
Boom! Boom! Went the assaulting sound again
None coul open ‘its’ eye to see it
nor measure the pitch of the next booms.
On these streets; men die the death of goats
and monsters live the life of men.
vi
Darkness looms upon the face of the saharan barreness
The land flowing with trick and felony
where the sun never set nor rise;
Weak soils hat swallow men in its sand of time.
A land where the moon is always red
drenched with the dye that bleeds from men’s neck,
from the navels of unborn babies
denied the grace of hearing a lullaby;
when they were pierced and jatted into pieces
in the belly of a zombie mother as she pleases.
From womb to tomb
From heav’n to grave
From hero to zero
like in the days of Nero
The earth is dark
but the heart is darker.
vii
Death lives in the heart of man
and in the blood of Adam is hell,
Trees no loger have stems
and sheep now do yell.
On these streets we travel
we hear of mothers in travail
cursing the day of their birth
and the whole of their progeny’s existence.
These streets are slippery,
For the Niger overflowed.
Crocodiles and monsters lay by
waiting for whom to devour.
The one that drained our land,
now drains our blood.
Our honourable monsters promised human rights,
forgetting its our property; on these streets.
viii
Lightening sparked! Thunder struck
Like the reverberation of a lion’s roar
The earth was scared and moved a step from its orbit
The arctic shook and the antarctic trembled
Like at the slaughter at Thermopylae
The heart of the earth skipped like the hills of Lebanon.
Gloomy smokes and flames erupted from the chimneys of heaven
Glowing fire with brimstone and sulphur
Rolling flames and throwing smokes
Descending the stairs of the windy airways
to assist the turning Tornado.
Bridges cut asunder like in a Tsunami
Homes crashing and crumbling to rubbles
Vehicles stumbled as weights of air dug cemetries
On which our streets are built
With dead bones resurrecting to tread these streets
And chagrined men struggling to walk with their four legs
Like furred animals, as our furred monsters taught us so
On the day that forgot our furred fathers – our fore-feathers
On whose wings we did fly.
The Clock strucks twelve
The gossip duck quacks till death.
ix
Under this dark shade of iroko i sat
Like one recollecting the episode of a lost love
Like a zombie flogged back to live by koboko
I staggered these streets of the living dead
The dead that died the death of the mind
In the blind heart of the deceit fed them
I saw a man in white
“Man in white, when shall i stop dreaming –
Of death and tombs and bombs?”
Of streets of gold in blood?”
The sky blew like wind
And blued down this naked soil
In my bed I laid saying a prayer
May this new dawn be a boom(b)less one
And a dagger in the heart of slayers.
x
these red carpets you see laying bare on our dark soil
are stained so by fluids from bleeding hearts
of innocent chicks choked by claws
of eagles and birds of prey
the lies of lying liars and clanging cymbals
.
beyond these streets you’ll behold
wailing wailers waiting to be vindicated
with Ikemefuna’s pot on their bald heads
and beards that grey the grayness of gravity
the heaviness of their sin’s consequences
.
if we have our way at last
we shall sing joyful mirth again
