Stony faces
Weak arms
Biggest Guns
Emptiness.
God has turned His Face Away!
Man at Mercy of the dark
Which virgins have oiled
Their lamps?
Empty streets – stoned
Cold overnight
Sleep of death
Who is beating my heart?
Technology will cure nothing!
E-speed all the faster to communicate
Emptiness and loneliness
From me to you, you to me.
– che chidi chukwumerije.
The things we know in the morning
The moment we awaken
And from somewhere else are returning
But not yet quite retaken
By the world of thoughts that ever crowd around us
During the hours while we are fully day-conscious
Those things we know as sleep departs
Are as true as true can be
The Hour of Awakening to us imparts
The starkest clarity
It may be painful, may be pleasant
It may be quite surprising
But it is always true and doesn’t
Require verifying
Because if you did awake aright into this certainty
Events themselves will prove to you their authenticity
My thoughts are clear as sleep departs
And I see without guile
Displayed before me all those hearts
With whom I frown or smile.
————–
che chidi chukwumerije
————–
In the skyline grey
Memory hung
The future gone astray
Emptiness stung
Hung with reality in the greying city
The dying trees, the loveless pity
Duplicity and winding and twisting, reflecting
The beast in the best of the robots erecting
Their concrete phalli, their bull’s I’s, to scratch the sky
The insatiable itch, impotent ambition, try and try
And try as you might, your might is the limp cloud
The wilted grass, the lonely office, the empty crowd
The quiet madness, the gory glory
The daily trainride into another same story
The casual business of getting by
Between yesterday and tomorrow
A moment of reflection, gone, a sigh
Of something neither joy nor sorrow.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Jokes are the barrier
People let down between themselves
A spoken word can wash away years of building
Leave in its wake a ruptured earth
Worse than as if life never happened.
Watch that joke, it’s no joke
The damage will outlive the laughter
Long long after
The careless word you spoke.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
When I started to interact with you
Little did I understand
That true friendship is an addiction
Too hurtful for lonely people
Metamorphosis from yesterday’s amnesia
To today’s cage of painful memories
Was like dawn that swiftly recedes
Unobserved.
The numbing melody of a thousand shards
Crashing to the splintered ground
Is a sad song
Yet I must dance alone.
Life has petalled pain
With the scent of a red rose
A caged rainbow beats in my chest
Like Harmattan waving goodbye to the rains.
-Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
The words will still be the one
The one to articulate Silence
When we sing the praises of Silence
We do so with words
The strange bird will still be the one
The one to carry your story forward
Even though you ostracized him
He will preserve your story
When strangers rule the world.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
The worst pain I ever felt
Was once when I embraced someone
And my embrace, she said,
Made her think of someone else.
Some things you should keep to yourself,
Yet it’s better when they’re spoken out
And it’s best of all when they hurt like hell.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
There is comfort in pain
Like these tears that spill my eyes
Mine heart shallt drink
When I am alone
They all left me, one bye one
But I shall not break
Like the palm tree, bent under
My laugh will be straight again
A lane travels through the woods alone
Asking for no company
Neither loving nor hating those that
Walk on him and leave him behind.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Through this last stretch
Of lonely days
This last patch of watered fields
Although the mountains be now in sight
Need I some company
To make easier the journeying
And ease a bit my lonesome sorrow
That I by pain be not too distracted
From that alertness
That be my sworded shield…
So keep me company
Dear Muse
From here to Kingdom Come.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Your disgrace
Reflected on my bottom
Wiped with tears across your lost face
Mirrored in anguish ambushed –
Be of good cheer –
The dew
Washes the exposed leaf clean each time
The cock crows again.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 