To be vulnerable is to be honest. To be honest is to be vulnerable. To be different is to be vulnerable to be honest. To be different is to be honest to be vulnerable. It is a strange place to be everytime No matter how many times you go there. Each time it feels different. It requires bravery everytime. Even when you‘re familiar with it Still you never get used to it. Because it is different. Everytime. Che Chidi Chukwumerije
brave
AGAIN
The punishment for being brave
Is having nothing to do
But be brave –
A tidal wave is rising in my soul.
The reward for being brave
Is having to do nothing
But be brave –
A tidal wave is crashing in my soul.
She warmed her cold tongue with
The flaming words of a passionate poet and
Lashed a gutter of decadent lava on
My soul.
Yet I told her still the truth
Again and again and again
And again and again, again
And again.
– che chidi chukwumerije
EASY NOW
I see only nothing –
Emptiness has suffocated the world.
Hollowness on the inside…
Bring yourself to the fore
And stop hiding like a scared animal
In the darkness of your fear of societal assumptions.
Stop being a learned act on the stage of life –
Stop being a masquerade in the market-place of shared dreams…
Be yourself!
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
BRAVE ONE
Your secrets
Give them power over you
When you lose your fear of your secrets
They lose their power over you
No-one is feared more
Than one who says yes I did it, so what?
You can break a warrior’s shell
But you cannot make the warrior fear you as well.
Breathe out, brave one, and live some more
Your weaknesses and your strengths are all you’ve got.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
THE VOICELESS DARK
Don’t allow them to reduce you
To the picture they have of you
In the picture they have of themselves
Be proud of who you are
What you are, how you are
It is what the world needs
Stay. In your element, stay.
Be proud of who you are
But define it for yourself by yourself
Don’t be the canvas on whose back
They paint and admire themselves
And cover you up in the voiceless dark.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
FAINTHEARTEDNESS
There is a time, a moment
To say yes –
You feel it, you know it, you just
Have to say it
Yet you drown it in conversation
Puncture it with rhetoric
Hang a cloud of Why over it
Betray it with a question mark, and then fall silent
There is a time, a moment to
Say yes – only the brave
Will grasp it. The fainthearted
Will run away into a familiar point of view
Every meeting is a thing of beauty
Everything that confuses you and
Throws you off-balance is a gift from life
Knocking on the door of a greater you.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 