LINES AND VERSES

(2) This room holds my deepest childhood secrets Sundry memories bounce off its firm old walls Teleporting me beyond two decades back in time My early teens Its tender love, boundless joy My early sins The dice of life were re-cast and the sixes failed to show This un-weathered wooden door closed on my first love Now a grey haired man squints and holds it wide open … We smile in mutual recognition Suddenly my great expectation is on par with futility So much for the young face I’d hoped to find again I remember the tears The truck saddled with our possessions The friendliest images recoiling from the side-view mirror The engine gunning for another home beyond the city of Kano I remember the heart rending fears The wishful thoughts, the regrets And now I’m grateful I left to grow … And found better ways to regret my regrets 2010 © J.Ifeme Visit http://straigtalk.blogspot.com

It was a long time since Coups and counter-coups fanned optimism – A long time since the Emir and his colorful royal Durban Made their yearly passage amidst thunderous applause – A long time since we were exuberant kids and owned this street! Those were times made of gold. When goal posts formed between electric poles And heaps of stone And football on road-sides made common sense When street teams sprouted like young plants on manure soil Our skies sparkled with Bollywood stars And we memorized Indian songs, remade their scripts With our plastic water-guns Feigned death, impersonated, and got each others drenched over False diamonds Made from smashed windscreens and motor head-lamps While this street cheerfully looked-on and let us grow This street shielded our innocence Scolded our misadventures Parents didn’t have to raise only their own Or bother about how the next person worshipped their god Our ignorance was our bliss Perhaps that I now miss Emir Road

Once again the world remembers Us We the good people Seen through a tainted Glass. We the good people Paying for the sins of a Few We hold hands across A nation battered and abused A land looted and confused – our blistered hands! Farouk… A finger has soiled the hands. December 2009 © J.Ifeme

I look into your eyes, I see my face - a lone reflection on your opaque pupils their rich blackness sparkling with the brightness of polished stones shinning forth is a soul-light probing not the way back but picking on my many faults and questioning my imperfections my heart beats against yours like a drum lost lost in itself lost in yours lost in this sensual universe made by our flitting warmth. I pull you even closer aware you’d already left – wishing I could make a trunk feel… refusing to hold back I soul-dive yet I can not find you and I fight to see you as I saw you… reminiscing the gullibility of yesteryears - the vainness of vanity reawakening, not dead guilt not pain not self pity but that first love that sweet-nothing now buried in spent-time like the world it once existed. I look into your eyes I see endless space where a cold world impervious to the sound of word and the beating o