Random quantum sugar
Sweet on my tongue
Fleetingly I savour your love
When it comes
Unexpectedly, like a suddenly remembered dream
You never knew you once dreamed
… when?
Random how it leaps
Madness joy how it keeps
My lonely heart, how it weeps
Tonight
Unhappy to have grown used to your
Absence.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
There was a girl
the fruit of her labour
Was the world
With a cry of pain and a shout of joy
She gave birth to the world
And primitive was the world
Harsh the lips that burned her nipples
Rough the tongue that broke her word
And we’re still here today
The earth is still not enough
Mother has become a stranger
The outcasts have grasped their destiny.
-Che Chidi Chukwumerije..
There are thoughts that define
And there are thoughts that defy…
There are hearts that deny
Hearts that desire
And hearts that never run dry –
And there are hearts
That run dry –
But I won’t cry.
There were thoughts that struck me
Thoughts that thunderstruck me
And left me dumbstruck –
These are the thoughts that stuck to me…
But if we say sometimes yes
Sometimes no
Sometimes…
Yes sometimes no sometimes yes.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
The entire I gave
While smallness was all
She ever wanted.
But the rest of me thirsts too.
When frivolity was laughing
At its own shadow
I warned
That my heart was dripping…
When superficiality was doing the maths
Around its own tunnel vision
I insisted
My heart is dripping out…
When cunning was blind to the metaphor
Of its own despair
I fell silent
And listened to the sound of bleeding feet
Walking away.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
A dog is barking higher up
On the mountain
A worried sounding woof
Every few seconds
I wonder if someone is missing again
Down in the valley there is a train
That rushes past. It sounds like
A river every few minutes
Carrying someone’s dreams into
Another person’s thoughts
I’m trying not to pay attention to the
Conversation taking place beside me
The emotions are strong
Father and daughter gently tying
Up the memories of years past
Just like I waited six days
To finish this poem
So they also waited all these years
To finally say, at the departure, I love you
Please forgive me.
– 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.
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.
5 minutes of midnight
5000 midnights of missing your moon
may your return be soon
you crawled like a gecko
all over my surface
and you kept on nodding and running
a crowd of summerlovers is heading south
the winter has beached north
airport is breath-short, what’s a goodbye worth?
wherever you go, think of me
like a plane that ever returns
like a bird, like a thought, like seasons and the night.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
When we love, we move…
When we move, we leave someone behind –
Whatever happens to those whom we leave behind?
I have often wondered
But I truly do not know
If I will recognise them
When I meet them again in a new time.
When we love, we move…
When we move, we leave someone behind –
Whatever happens to those whom we leave behind?
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
If the door from the front opens not
Look back
I am behind you.
After the first poem I broke loose
The walls disappeared
The green branches outside the window
Became the staircase
Upon which I stepped out of
The broken chains
I look at you with eyes which
However hard you try
You cannot read…
You are looking for a Lie
In my eyes
Whereas you ought be looking
In there
For the Truth
I will not return.
– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.
image: fanny4902/pixabay
Che Chidi Chukwumerije 