Chronicles Of A Broken World
WHAT YOUR WORLD KNOWS
I know your world is no fertile soil
for the seed of tranquillity to germinate,
rather its lands are widely sprouted
by the weed of iniquity.
I know your world is no place for peace,
rather a reservoir of violence,
where chaos is deposited in its abundance
like that of air and nitrogen gas.
I know your world is that place
where men wake up in folly,
only to drink burning liquors
and smoke out their last days.
I know your world is devoid of the lingual ‘sanity’
rather its people are bathed in the river of insanity.
No wonder madness became their reality!
A world where lunatics seem the upright.
Your heart craves change
yet your soul yearns for a break.
your mind longs for transformation,
yet your spirit is long gone in a distance.
You bid them farewell…
but as though you mean to cut ties with them.
ABSURD WORLD
Is this what you call a sane world?
where two brothers walk up to their father’s house,
only to swallow a pill of toxins,
that rip off their last breath
in the presence of their grey–haired man?
Is this what you mean by a serene world?
where Delight’s mother screams out of her slumber,
reciting again, her favourite quarterly psalm;
“Keep me, O Lord, from the hands of the Wicked”
because of her nightmare of Death
putting off the lamp she has been fueling overnight?
How can you still call it a tranquil world?
when WINNER himself is losing,
in a life-and-death battle.
And SUCCESS herself failing
in an examination, she burnt all night candles.
Is it, not an absurd world?
when darkness assails the sky,
and death harvesting the soul
of an innocent young mind,
who don’t know where things fall apart.
Pyramid of carcasses, aquarium of tears,
anthologies of dark days,
encyclopedias of sadness,
are what indent in me,
the feeling of what it means,
to live in an absurd world.
US AGAINST THE WORLD
A girl took a hike to the mountain,
leaving behind a departure message
for her beloved, like words on the bathroom wall.
But a rooster crows at twilight,
because a rope descending a tree,
whirls around the neck of a bewildered girl,
like an adorned golden necklace,
with her carcass oscillating in the air,
like a swinging pendulum.
Did you see how this is a metaphor for suicide?
The land we threaded for so long,
now becomes the desolate ground of massacre,
where dreams are brutally detached from the dreamers.
Leaving behind a husk of despair.
The water we drank hitherto,
now taste like an elixir of poison,
the one that intoxicates,
those tactful ambitions we conceive within.
The friend we shook hands with at dusk,
overnight turned into a ferocious beast,
that no man dread have an encounter,
else he bids the world goodnight,
even when his daytime sun still shines.
Is this not US against the WORLD?
Or the WORLD against US?
Again a boy scream out of his slumber,
under the roof of his father’s house.
Because he is tormented by his nightmare,
of death slitting the throat of his lovely brethren,
who are set to embark on the journey
to their honey paradise.
I’m just tired of this system,
the one that makes being human,
an un-revokable limitation to longing for immortality.
I’m just languid of this system,
the one that makes being alive,
feels like walking on burning coals unshod.
A system where it’s always this is that,
A world of tit for tat.
Adegoke Oluwafemi is a 100-level student at the University Of Port Harcourt, a young Nigerian youth who fell in love with poetry as a means to communicate some unspoken words that reside within. Adegoke is also into nature mobile photography, graphics design and digital marketing.
Country Of Origin: Nigeria
Social media handle: (Instagram; @the_weird_pen