I’m a child and not a bride, but
Last month you made me marry you.
You know it wasn’t love that made me say yes
But the fear of what shape my death could take
If I were to turn you down. Of course
I had no voice. I could only muse to myself
In the dark closet and imagine myself
A mother at thirteen: would it be awesome?
Would it be dreadful? Would it…? I died of anxiety.

Last month you made me marry you.
I had no time to discover me for myself:
Who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be;
I had no time to think before I had to say yes.
But it pains my bones to the marrow.
I am an unripe fruit for the eating.
I am a piece for the show-glass.

Last month you made me marry you.
I spent nights upon nights weeping over how you’ve
Broken me; how you’ve set my life ablaze
Like a forest in a wildfire;
And now the once-upon-a-time sweet sounding music
Of my soul is burnt into silence.
I have forgotten the dialect of my soul.
I hush. I hush. I hush. I hush. I hush.
You have beaten silence into me,
And now I have to prepare to moan and wail
Beneath your weight, while I watch you helplessly
As you bite into my innocence,
As you suckle the un-ripeness out of me,
As you dig into my childhood and pleasure yourself
In the childhood screams you hear from me.
But it isn’t the fun that makes me scream.
It is the bitter pain of knowing, of remembering
That my life ended at thirteen:

Broken like a fallen calabash
In the hands of a fifty-five year old man.

Here, now, is the world before me:
Women are struggling to make a living
And men struggling for beer.
The markets are full of drying-up warehouses
And market stalls pregnant with emptiness.

A woman comes in,
Calls the last goods on the shelf, indicating interest.
There are the dying smiles that echo no goodwill
Upon the naming of a price-below-purchasing;
There are the hungry laughters at the teeth of the buyer
Who seeks his own gains;
There are the welling-up tears that fill the eyes of the seller
Who needs the penny to live another day.

Poverty and want wears an ugly face
And gives hate a voice to echo its disdain.
Much displeasure fills the air but in business
The customer always wins.

Pain eats up my heart as I watch the transaction.
Here, survival matters- just as much as love,
But now even this is no more.
                                                      
                                                                                     Abacheke-Egbema, Imo State. January 2014

I walk the streets tonight
and the faces I see are full of stress
and an endless line of open guesses
drawn across their faces like rainbows in the sky,
spread-out like leaves in the sunlight
yet frozen with fear like water during the winter cold.

So the streets are dead.
The blasting music from the loud speakers
that used to be are replaced by hums
and signal-coughs and hisses
and I am forced to wonder what happened
to the kisses and moans and songs
that once rules the streets.

Now, here I am, under the moonlight.
The stars watch me with longing eyes,
but the first rays of sunlight in the morning
bring my dreams to book like a criminal of thought.
One question I cannot answer:

whatever happened to love?