A day
Is a long way to travel
A truth
Is a deep lie to unravel
A kiss
Is a message of sorts
Friendship is a breaching
Of the law of torts
Intimacy is most intense
When you and your enemy
Break down each others’ defence.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
My friends are the improbable people
The ones you wouldn’t expect
Who never visit or party with me
Yet always show me respect
Who hide in the faceless crowd
And put in a good word for me
Who demand of me not company
But that I walk the path before me
Who even when we quarrel
Still never will betray me
Who tell me my failings to my face
But keep my secrets safely
Because I do the same for them
It is the way of friendship
The friends you rarely see me with
Are the ones you shouldn’t mess with.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
You have to take a position
You cannot be for all.
You have to have An Opinion
You must answer your Inner Call
You must stand for something
You must represent a Ring
That, visible or invisible, encloses One Thing –
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
I feel dawn
Like a song
I hear
Not with an outer ear
Like a light
Long before rosy twilight
Like an intuition
A budding perception
A forgetting
And a remembering
Like new birth
Upon the earth.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Wait, morning wind
Wait for my awakening
For I bring a sun
Today shall be another day
Of the same old depressing news
Of hatred, xenophobia, corruption and wars
If I didn’t have this sunlight
Rising daily in my soul
I would think the world were ending
Now my sun is risen
Now rise too, my morning wind
For the old world is ending.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Only a few days after
And already, that magical laughter
Like a wall-painting, hanging in time
Over there, at the back of my mind…
I turn around with thoughtful eyes:
Time stands still; ’tis the spirit that flies.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Alas! Treble now sounds
Like bass! Gold shines
Like brass! Who dulled
The taste of water?
Who turned sons into
Wailing daughters? Alas!
The wrappa moans
Look at me I am now
A pair of trousers, split in two!
Hush! Zip up your swollen lips
Cries the warrior’s breastplate!
Look at ME! I am now a Bra.
There is an owl howling
Melancholy in the night
A road has split in two
Causing confusion
Because the ground has
Disappeared.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Money markets
The feet are far from the heart
Don’t get me started
I’ll never stop abusing you
I just can’t get enough of you
Why am I crying, you say?
I’m crying because my heart is cold
I’m crying because I feel no pain
I’m crying because I’m dying
And I don’t care.
I just like having it, owning it
Taking it, but I’m crying.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
foot fault
pillar of salt –
halt! assualt
upon a moment of magic
timing almost tragic
never less expected
something so unexpected
the beauty of the game beckons on
through controversies in split seconds born
if time be a vault
into which the past retreats
then to it relegate the foot fault
and retake your seats
for the players play on
and the stayers stay on
and the logic of life, the magic game, beckons on.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
She named me River
Because I whet her lowlands
In the hour of her drought
– I saw a palm tree
Hotly pursued by a multitude
Waving palms
But I did not understand
The power from which they sprung
Forth – must I understand?
Which sane river stops to understand itself?
Waters may rise to clouds to fall back as rain
But what woman rises from her heart to her head
To peer back down into her heart from her head
To understand herself
Without losing the misty way back to the dawn?
For she is mysterious yes it is complicated
As simple as a riddle
The flowing is the being, picture-perfect
It is frozen
Faster! Faster! Faster!
Breathlessly I never tire
The day she catches me
Is the day
She will lose her desire for me. For
She calls me River.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 