When will he stop
Persecuting that guitar
His voice is hoarse
It hurts her
It digs a hole in her armour
Roughly
And scoops her out
Hoarsely
I wish I could remember him
In my dream tonight
When silence is wall
Enclosing me and she is gone
His voice is gruff
A street musician
Enjoying his moment on stage
Roughly.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Art in all its forms
Is the thief of time
Stealing from the past
Sharing with the present
And the future
Like Robin Hood
For time is wealthy in memory
And, like Shylock, reluctant to give.
An evening song will reawaken your life’s morning
A painting will view like déjà vu from lives unremembered
And a poem will whisper your life’s story back to you.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
She was a weightlifter
They found it unseemly
But she was a shape-shifter
Their disdain was a lighter burden to bear
Than her fate.
Slum lady. Carried mud and bricks
Bore stones and sticks
Firewood, rusted water in weeping baskets
The stretch marks of impatient thirsty men
Bunched up her muscles.
Owned by all, never owned a thing
The madams’ slaps, the masters’ secrets
Nothing was too heavy a load to carry
To snatch, to clean, to jerk off –
Each jerk. Very ordinary.
Today, when she steps out unto the mat
Under the lights, there you see
Sunset in one eye, sunrise in the other –
It’s not heavy weights she’s lifting
She’s carrying hope.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
I forgot
I know not what
Because I forgot
And so I wander
And I wonder
Trying to remember.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Do you remember how we met?
It was by chance, wasn’t it?
That is, if we were to begin now
To believe in chance…
The chance that came our way –
We took it…
Just one look at it
And we took it –
I remember many beginnings
I remember the start of
Many love stories
But our beginning was indeed special
Because it was simply so natural
And so unaffected
Just like all the poems it has given birth to.
That was our beginning
And that shall be our story
The natural and the unaffected
Missing you breaks my heart
Even already on the first day
Without us together
Nothing o nothing will ever be the same Again.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
How much of it is left?
How much of the mist
Still revisits my mornings
Before my thoughts come calling?
From afar, I
Mean from gazing
Across time, it
Is a wonder to hold in
Your heart a
Thing that never
Fades, never
Weakens, changes
Never, teaches you how
To know the
Things you really
Love. They are the
Ones you never
Forget.
This carry with you as you mature
Measure with this everything you nurture
The camera behind your mind
Will click and capture
A lifelong picture
Of the things that slipped through,
The people and places that got to the core of you.
It will continue to happen inside, an observant lake
Like another part of you.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Cumbrian Lines: Poems Inspired By The Lake District.
I touch my intuition
Every morning
And at night I remember it
Like a friend from long ago
Far away
On the riverbanks of dawn
I forget what I saw in the soft bright sunlight
Of nightly dreams
Sometimes during the day
It will beat
Like a weak heart
I barely hear, barely feel
Quietly inside
Between conversations of How are you?
How are the revenue figures doing?
Very poorly. Stop. And look into the water
And feel your life
Trying to flow back to you, in little ripples
Of intuitively perceived memory
Of the blue island.
Don’t shake your head
And tell me you don’t understand
I know you simply don’t remember…
But I remember you; dimly
Like a friend from long long ago
Far far away
On a blue island….
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
Awakening out of a deeper reality
A dream of music, philosophy, poetry
Still ringing on in me, but fading fast
Each new second retaining less than the last
The dream fades away like an improbable past –
A populous sea into which a porous net is cast
The intellect tries to find again words, details
From each finishing dream but maddeningly fails –
Words which I just wrote down, somewhere, somehow
In a dream I was having sometime just right now
Melodies I was humming, natural realities I saw
I feel them still in me, but see them no more
For the heavy cloak and mind of a small and rigid earth
Have imprisoned again my consciousness, like once at birth –
For as swiftly and surely as we once forgot the baby tongue
As we grew from baby to child, yet remained young
So do words, connections given to us in our dreams
Oft disappear during Awakening, magically it seems
The harder the Intellect tries to affect their remembering
The faster it hastens their forgetting –
Even while we are still lying, freshly awake, in the morning bed
Watching one thing fading, another taking over, inside our head
As one sun rises, another sun is setting gently –
The glass is unclear, twilight illuminates faintly
Dawn and Dusk together were breaking…
Wish I could remember who I really am, upon awakening.
Not acceptable, this unending sleep
Of an eternal consciousness in the Deep.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije
I can’t sleep
Nor can I weep
If sadness were a grey cloud
I am the bottomless lake from which it arose
I miss your laughter, your mirth
Like dawn misses a birdsong
On a cold concrete city street
Before it fades away
Each time I burn pain into you
I burn pain into me; but if I
Were to not bite and hurt you so deeply
How would you continue to think of me?
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
In the tears in his eyes I saw the question
What will happen to her
When I am gone?
There was a tenderness about the way
He looked at her, spoke to her
Touched her arm with every third word
And his eyes that looked into the distance
Were not gazing back at their past
Or wondering about his afterlife
They were looking into her future and marvelling
At the fact that life goes on
Even when you’re gone.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 