MEMORABILIA
Paper clubs interspersed between red shimmering tapes
An entropic decorum of giant wheels and colourful pageantry
A red letter day indeed
Memorabilia –
Of letters from the good news emissary
Drifting in the sky among the galaxies
Memorabilia –
Of alchemists in priestly ephod
Preaching unctuous words of how the fortunate few we were
And how our buccal exoskeleton flared like burning splinters
Of camera lights blipping
And the world said ‘indeed these ones are lucky’
And like the insatiable pleasure of a larva
Our bellies churning from the sweetness of a honeycomb in the horizon
We looked forward to a revolution of bad tradition
To place our fatherland’s land on the spinning map of the world
And just not for its mocking population density
To resurrect bow heads and stamp pips on the nation’s flag
Memorabilia –
As we clawed our way through the oceans of books and term papers
Running callused fingers through a constellation of black stagnant waters
Even when our innards churn with the voice of penury
And the lean days Joseph dreamt about
In the pathetic pockmarked raft we drifted against
Currents and the odds of making in one piece for the graduation
A thousand times we were capsized
But we stood high with our purple hearts like soldiers
Yet five Harmattan have blown passed
Over me and my highly esteemed certifications
As fine dust of dissipation settles heavy on my shoulder
Running from pillar to post
From air conditioned offices to security posts
From vacancies to egunje
On life’s broad way to waywardness
Restlessness likes a tornado; I find
Intellectual lay-about they we are
We had to survive
In torn jeans and gaped boots
Promenading the streets in search of anything
A job on site
In sight we troll like bumblebees for the pinch of the national cake…
‘Where are we now?’ we ask
We were schooled to strike our impact
In a Terra custom so recalcitrant to crack
With the force of Oranmiyan staff
And when we spoke
Lightning bolt illuminates
splits the darkness of the dark ages of the fatherland
Corruption and human domination
Yet it seemed as though from the rite of matriculation down through the corridors of battery of the senses in the hands of our priestly alchemists
We did ourselves the greatest disservice
Sold our offing for a prophecy of misery and doom
A self-mortification
From when we sailed through the wrought campus portal
Life was a journey of no return and so
We’re chained in the mouth so we could not speak
In the brain so that we are depressed and discouraged
In the eye so that we are blindfolded by the radioactive lies we are exposed too
Deaf to the foreboding of the times we live in
In the feet and bound to our present predicament
As the ailing man at the pool of Bethesda
We are manacled to the broad beams of unemployment whose roots
Run down deeper through the confederation of states
Whose nourishment is the ink of thoughtless policies and
A formula of wobbly school curriculum trickling down
Ignoramus and idiots who don’t really care whether we perish
Godless people and their hypocritical campaign promises…
Memorabilia –
Another five Harmattan cycles have begun
Maybe our dreams would come true
And there will emerge suddenly a light at the end of the growing dark tunnel
Midlife crisis looming even nearer
Maybe –
We should have sensed it
With our ears, our eyes and nostrils
That all the duffed hats and gleaming red ribbons
Were ‘all that glitter is not gold’
Yet we were so foolhardy to the signs to the times
Unwilling to break out of the mystery we saw
When uncles cum street thugs
Aunties cum trafficked Barbie dolls
If only we could go back to the future
A fisherman, a farmer, a smith or even a poet
When life wasn’t so complicated.
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