(Holding fire and water together)

I don't know why the rain keeps writing the
name of Nigeria on the ground in every corner.
I don't know why we are this broken and
tortured like the fragments of the dust.
I don't know why the Dapchi girls returned yesterday while their chikbok friends are
still in captive.
I don't know why every street in Nigeria is
known with an imprint of good leaders.
I don't know why we cry yet point accusation. fingers back to ourselves, who is fooling who?
I don't know why the sun cry here with a
closed lips.
I don't know why we keep writing love stories
while our brothers and sisters perish in shame!
I don't just know why but I think you should know.
Are you not the one that collected a cup of rice, clean notes and Abrahamic lie from them?
I won't speak ill of this land again,  I won't!
I won't judge any one, no, I won't for  the
sake of my unborn children.
No, I won't for the sake of what happened to Dele Giwa and Saro Wiwa.
We poets are abnormal psychologically.
We paints abstraction from the abstracts creating fears that might hurt those true patriots.
My muse fell out from me yesterday night,
When my television opened to a scene of genocide.
Men on pants, women on trousers painting out the tears made for people inhabiting hell.
Their laughters and smiles were printed to be archived among themselves.
I won't speak ill  of this country, no, I won't!
Because of my unborn children,
I won't!
But I will tell just one tale for them to remember
Of how monkeys carted away with our monies!
Of how Snake swallowed our currency!
Of how good our leaders are, I think you know!
I have been holding these demons in me until last night they came out horribly in fierce protest to revisit this land again.
To tell of those girls ***** under the bridge,
To ask why boys like me are named after me,
To speak against shadows of death lurking here and there.
Nigeria is grey and black, red and violent,
Retrieving this oceans of mysteries from the hidden abyss of grave corruption is the passport tabled on the pyramid top to recreate a versatile muses of a lyrics calling for a right to write our rights.
Take a walk to memory lane pass your shadow,  that of your father,  mother & grandmas
You will see a Nigeria in another angle trying to free herself from the grip of corruption, then, revisit her tears and struggles you will know we are the cause of our own misfortunes.!

©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingFrustrations

what about the boys in Pakistan's war front?
what about those boys in Iran battlefield, those boys learning how to pull the trigger with a warning fingers on the crossroad of Iraq & Afghanistan?
what about those boys ***** in the street of Nigeria?
those boys in the act of loneliness in the army, what about them?
those boys lost in themselves in the thickest phase of life; what about them?
the boy soldiers with raw emotions & feelings & thoughts, who cares?
they lost the shadows of their fathers,
they lost the thought of their mothers,
they became a movie of suspense,
survivor's lines of remorse & yelling;
what about them?  
who cares if they are lost in forest like Kainene?
who cares about their lives like Okonkwo did to Ikemefuna?
who cares about their relationship like Inu Ego did with Oshia?
who cares...?
the ditches are wildly mouth opened,
and those boys in shell shall fall in there.
many are on the look out for a stone to hatch these shell boys 'cause they are said to be stronger.
what about the BOYCHILD?
I pray you reject sleep &think through this black pages of my tattered thoughts climaxed in horror.
what about the BoyChild endangered?


©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingFrustration

Tell the moon not to complain,
go to the sun and leave a note,
We are not a broken piece of poetry
campaigning for love and affections,
we are crystals, lest you forget!
clear rays penetrating into hearts and souls of humans that seek to make themselves gods into godhood.
we are not grasshoppers to be chopped by a lazy legs printing a falseful legacy.
We are the elephants of the forest of wealth.
Never slaughter the thought of our lives
We are the breath of humans & fire searching for what brewed within men.
We are poems inked with tears and sweat
But those tears are of our bravery, &sweat, a joyful noise made by the skin for celebration of our kind.
We ****** hope in the palms of children,
yet filled with love and its synonyms.
Our lives are the poets who rhymed & colour the sweet lyric they were made to be.
We are the boy children, the hope; least you forget.
The moon of tomorrow,
The sun on faces of a beaming girl
The stars carved on the smile of the sky,
We are boys whose shadows recreate
We are boys whose palms are route of greatness & roadtrip of principles.
praise singers in the slippery wet floor,
nightingales singing lullabies,
bread feeding all mouth to satisfaction
When heronic names are carved look and see ours rightly placed.
we are braver than earth
we can pull it up and down like a tree.


we are the reptiles that wriggle down the hill of success and roar like a beast in a beautiful pail palm of dreams.  
our fathers' tattered sins could not hold us down,
our mother's splitted fire guides our course of life!
We are the boys of tomorrow , the warriors of words hyping the hashtag of praises.
who has seen us has seen light,
He who behold us has nothing to fear.
We are mountains in praise of hope
we are oceans of mysteries and hidden treasures.
Have our words and actions in your words for we are time bomb against failure.
BOYCHILD, the sun that glows on every face that needs help.



©John Chizoba Vincent
From_ APenRefusing_Frustration.

i created another Jaja yesterday!
a braver Jaja unlike that timid feeble boy
Chimamanda gave life in Purple hibiscus.
i gave him a gun and a mightier heart.
i carved a pumpkin route for him to follow
i made him to have the mind of his own
then, I sent him to his father just like every
mother sends their sons to their father.
he gunned him down in his assaulted plights
he returned angrily to hunt me for this freedom
my experiments to pull him down failed
and I remembered mother also created boys
she abandoned to find freedom who later
came back to ****** her in their plights
Boys come in this formless shape creating imageries larger than them which returns to
Squeeze more juice out from their dark sides.


©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingFrustration.

After Amadioha went into sweet nightmares,
he made us to breath through the chest of the sea. from the celestial bodies of the shrine,
We shone our forefather's smile with a mirage,
a little littered mirage spelling words in ellipsis.
these were the rose crumbs tailored in the sand castle of our glassful laughter, we're the Palmful morning in the eyes of our home in the abyss.

when a child cries, he forgets that the route to
his home is written on his body as a tattoo.
when a girl thinks of gathering firewood in the heart of the forest, she thinks of her thigh &
the bushes surrounding it, nature made it so.
We do not think of our skin as a poetic of agony,
We do not think of our eyes as poetry letters
but we draw lines and currents of imaginations describing how rituals made men insane.

We carried out those prilgrim for the boys,
our forebearers made us cracked our head up,
they carved pumpkins traces for this generation; for this humble journey mixed with fire & water.
Our souls, our dreams were the Shakespearean places you never had the chance to see physical.
they are the rituals of nature, a side Sithoulte,
a wonder land created like a paradise you don't stay often but in your dreams & imageries.

We are birthed here as debris & plump scars,
a tortured lips holding the past & the present.
We are the foundation of everything evil spirits,
We were born in the ritual of a grievous war.
to say a human is a benchmark of his own,
to say a man is a mango dropping without a choice of where and how to touch the sand,
to say a man is everything fretwork of agony;
to say a men are slaughtered memories...
but to this edges of rites & repeated steps,
We'll remain the gospel from every mouth.

Our ancestral hands shall still set a table,
to tell the girlchild how to sit in a public hall
to hand over the shrine to the  boychild
to tell man that he owns a woman as head.
to keep birthing good and ugly children.
our hope will always depict heavens glory
and, our darkest fears as the skin of hell.
And it must be passed down to the next
genes to tell the next & sand keep multiplying.
This is the ritual of mankind to remain alive.


©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingFrustrations.

create a golden route for a poet like me,
let the embodiment of song carved itself
in the palms of the world beyond till lyrics
of faith light to ease the thought of my mind.
If you die before me, tell papa not to cry.
the shrine he left in my hand is still well
planted in the imaginations of his generations.

tell Fela &Giwa that Nigeria is no better,
tell Chinua Achebe that the water in our
throat cries of dry ground they stepped on.
we may not be a better cinematographer
capturing the deeds of this land but your
still photos can crop some timelines to go
with you till I come along to join your trail.

if you die before me, send a word across.
let me know the existence of heaven & hell
if Shakespeare & Okigbo & Buchi are there
so I can change course to path my emotion,
the artistic photography of the tales of hell
are the codeine conscience of anxiety in us.
we die before the masquerade halt in the air.

Husky tears would I drop on your grave
to be taken to Mandela & Luther King.
there are roses I will take from the clay ***
Of my father to your graveyard to give to Ify
my hearted lover in the morning of miracles.
if you die before me, this tattered call would
I make to our ancestors for a perfect survival.

this land is a disco dance hall you must tell
Yar'du of Fate & tears crossing our eyes
in a patterned way to be christened life's joy.
this land is a feminist like Chimamanda A.N,
this country is a pun star you must tell Ken.
tell my cousin Ezekiel to wait for me longer,
I am coming. to join him in benedicted rein of
our country.

If you die before me, I'll be on your graveyard
for a life time cracking up the foundation of
the world to find death. I will ask him if the
other phase is  better than here before coming.
suffering is not meant to be dreamed twice,
Two week-ed weaknesses are the wink wires
connecting our lives in a radioed embryo .

this is my recap
a captured scene
Let's bake life and dreams
till death call us all to himself
then the world becomes empty
love finds love mingling in hands...
die before me & be my eyes beyond.


©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingfrustration.

Of those things that glamour for clarity
Of those roads that sipped dead calls
Of those shadows that retrieved retributions panache of the smoke that chased blunt images,
We are here for the death of our dead ones,
We are here to breeze out bodies from the ghost of our forefathers giving out beggars of spirits.
We are here for the sake of humanism and individualism found among the seasoned weather.
We are here to head home from the figures of fingers crossed in the blossoming crossroads.
We are just here for your sake &your future.
We are this spiced pumpkin skin driving impunity,
Driving the heavens of our lunatic fringe benefits.
When these spirits visited our forebearers,
We called them runners of evil in the night,
In the morning,  we called them cats of love,
But the white brought a foreign god to us
We sold our shrine of mystic miseries to them
Now,  they took our miseries to make names
And we transport their stupidity back to them
Thinking that they will accept it back from us.
This celestial aboundment is foregone fire
Forging the spirit of the world into our curriculum.
We are the timeless wrong that the villagers sing of along the Abiriba-Nkporo road.
Black Butler of generational curse we brought
Intentionally trying to visit the future vintages.
We are the cause of our own blood spilling through the thin walls of our shadows and spirits.


©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingfrustrations

No Fela and son could tell of
this present roaring Government.
We would soon forget this forgery pain
upon the odours the land created.
Empty bellies shall revive casualties
to beckon the spring of spiritualism
&the bed shall not talk of absence of
bodies on the feet of her tender care.
Our today has queued into the past
as our yesterday moved cautiously
like a troubled legs walking into exile.
Beware of Dogs!
Beware of those who came as saints
to rule you into heaven & paradise.
One was accused yesterday & today
He that accused him presented him,
the other fell on countless occasions
yet, you mounted his bills all over town.
I searched your eyes & I found nothing,
It moves like the eyes watching a
toddler step, coated with innocence.
I see the nakedness of my heart in the
Scars of my people yet, they've astrayed.
Do not hold a demon-smile between
your dark teeth!
& in your eyes, memories of lights...
Do not upset the snoring ritual of the dead.
Go home, help the living live better.


©John Chizoba Vincent
#TheSage.

We opened a book that started with the name
of our country.
The right side was numbered corruptions  and the other side was numbered greed & bad leaders.
We burnt the stride of our bodies into aches and dreams waving away fire and foliage of silence.
Women learnt to carry portrait of bodies of their dead children on their shoulders, beautiful corpse.
It reminded us of the civil war in front of our Father's betrayed house.
It reminded us of lyrics written on the walls of our Hut with a framed keys of memories.
Love that taught us to look back into our heart and draw current of men in their ignorance in search
of a better home than those bridges we burnt.
Things like the pains in the eyes of a boy,
Things like the tale on the lips of a girl,
Things like sadness in the soul of a mother painting the images of her lost children in prayers.
Those strange tears stranded between chapters of the smoke as they travelled to the lonely cloud,
With the echoes of our forefathers last libation
Like the voices trailing from a boy's name for the lost of his prestige.
There are things that we may not know that leave our footprints to our heart through the opening in our nostrils and ears.
In our land was where a boy once stood on the face of the sun, his shadow reflected on a mirror.
He saw his future carted away by his fears.
Lost girls found in his assaulted plights
Trying to find home in a shark's mouth.
They hold water from the oceans together basking their hope on the traffic of women holding their bodies and leaving their dead for survival.
We do not live in the moon!
We do not whisper to the wind of the song we
heard him sing every day!
Of things that come in white and black are
like our straying country weeping with the
images of the masses.
Like those corpses brought back to BENUE.
Those images are the images of darkness projected by a big screen of the sky to our eyes.
Our names burnt into different rivers holding different tribes that seek for freedom.
We wrecked our testimonies to bleed blood with flames to suffocating cities surrounded with pity.
Those things on white are  the way we were built but the black demons corrupted us all leaving memories to sneak our hearts into dark places where mischievousness can take over us.


©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingFrustrations.

My sister would always wait until the time
lose concentration in the dead evening.
She would tell mother it was time for vigil.
Her racial church always has one every Friday.
Mother won't complain cos she thought her
to be a good girl & we were the bad eggs.
I became sick of watching her go to this vigil.
I followed her trail one **** Friday evening
When she entered into the dumb house
The room went blind and I heard her moan
Mother is yet to recover from the shock.

When every searching eyes has gone astray,
Nneka would always learn to pleasure herself.
She would trace the hole in her thigh pleasantly
then, groan in an unknown tone in the dark.
Her voice searching for what is missing in her,
She would chase the calm darkness into chaos.
Our bodies would protest as we watch curiously.
Our skins would gather heated sweat into boiling water.We learnt to urinate more often as the groaning circulated in our disturbed eardrums.
Till now, we never learn what that is called.

In the village square before the new year,
Girls learnt to giggle watching boys dance.
they always have stories on their lips to tell
their parents.The village bushes were their home. a home for them and the other Boys.
they prefer the rough guys to the calm boys.
they prefer the ugly men to the fine boys.
as long as you could dance to their tone,
Your artistic performance will take them home.
then, they talk about you behind close doors.
how weak you were under their prowess.

In their closet they talk about boy's weakness,
The Perfume their men wear to please nose.
How the lips of their men taste in the dark
How broad the shoulder of their men look
How intelligent they are found in the night.
Women and their familiar need on men
Girls and their nagging lips against nature,
These are the nemesis songs among feminists.
Father told us about these snout skimpy girls
their preys are men of goodwill in light...
These are things girls do behind closed doors.


©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingFrustration.

Out-li-er /-, li(-e)r/ noun

this dance was dying of old age.
until I learnt to move a toe.
a dance of old woman trying to see
the sun rise from the sole of her feet. 
her survival outlived a snoring nose.
these holes were carved out from the
thigh of a ******* learning how
to lay on bed. Is this life so sweet to you? 
then, live it without answering a call
to the whispers of the wind to your ears. 

let's visit blank pages. 
of heroes unsung from our historical mouth. 
of those things or people situated away 
from or classed differently from our farms
or a related body translated from the hood.
let's see this images from the eyes of my father trying to be a man before his children.

yesterday,  my father made us to learn
from the school of the African heroes.
he taught us how to be special among all.
how to name extraordinary a friend...
through bridges built in a hardknock.
a lust day. a littered day. a little more griavience.
a little caution is not enough for the craving eyes

maybe. 
maybe not. 
that we survive in this planet.. 

we'll come by in the evening of November.
we'll try to ease out our thoughts.
Maybe you will understand where the
pains started. our legs. our feet. or history.

maybe.
maybe not.
that we survive this gory miseries.

this pains were carved from the tree. 
where the ghost of our ancestors danced. 
they created this basketful paths.
they are the outliers. the geniuses.

maybe.
maybe not.
that we survive after the apollo' creed. 

that we journeyed through this forest. 
the forest cultivated by their ancestral hands. 
until we learn to be like them.
carving history from stones.
Making the sky brighter.
We'll not survive through this modern dance.


©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingFrustration.

My eyes pierced into her thigh
Into the upper room of a hole
Connecting hell and heaven
I was introduced to infatuations
Hanging my thoughts and prayers
Through the imagination of her pride
I saw her nakedness through her look
Love spoke but lust became louder
I erected my body like a ghost tree
against a weak foundations, I fell
Not into love but into first sighting,
Into hedges of her fragrances,
My heart became plural of everything
heaven endowed her with.
My mind built her body systematically
I saw portrait of her ******* carved In
my mind eyes depicting song of adultery.
How she react to love making appeared
How she moan in pains as I tickled up &
down on her imaginative groaning body
My eyes drew in my pocket of thought.
I was lost in thought watching her move
Swiftly betraying my night embraces.
The shape of herself disappeared craftily
as I regained the ground of my posture
******* the tale of my eyes lost in lust.

©John Chizoba Vincent

(for chikbok girls four years after elegies of lost)

And we opened the book of remembrance again
Tickling all ears that are designed to be deadly.
We filled the cups & buckets with tears of blood,
****** tears as the cloud rises from dark night
& the horizon of our lives radio out our prayers
in pleasure & pleas recording poetry into broken
Rhythms of the kings bird' songs singing elegies untold. We recoiled this pages of cries into folded arms. Lost is our liberty ephemeral into chaos.
This light of darkness are now printed in our
palms of history tormenting our own feelings.

they left home through the corruption of their father's land. You know, their lies ferried them
into Sambisa to go & tell a tale of their crimes.
the chromosomes of their pigments lacked the bravery within the wrinkled nose of their cheeks.
Lives are buttered fireflies &worms of mediocre...
We may not know how pains taste until untitled chapters of sorrow unfold in our lives to seek revengeful voyage of our sins towards our home.
We televised their lies on the national televisions,
tilted the head of our cocked brain into gadgets
in a ballroom of miscreants clothing our beliefs.

I opened this book of remembrance again,
For my lazy sisters that struggles effortlessly amidst leaves and shrubs of looting leaders.
for their tears composed a musical notes,
for their fight created astraying street steer
I held upto these fallin' memories in a graveyard
into the abstract demon of my noble moralities,
into black races, into an abstract journeys.
brittle of the papers written in absence of our
ourselves, in the pictures of our lost self issues.
we will gather these soothsayers to the cloud
to sooth out those prilgrim girls in the moon.

till then, let this dance be of survival &revival,
of those deaf & dumb girls kept in the ***** of emptiness. they made them voiceless like the pages of a blank books but we know all their magic tricks in the closet of their ignorance.
No chikbok, no Dapchi girls but looting politics,
Politics that has strange mouth & shadows.
Until this madness is cleansed from our souls
Point towards your chambers & crack your mind
We are mocked movies trying to be seen by all,
a documented fairy tale in the heart of all.


©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingfrustration

We snapped memories into photobook
Watching the edges of songful hedges
Draw  a hopeful singlet of grace of
Testimonies conquered in neglected verses.
We played from the check of honoured
Dimples crossing routes of perfections.
Here are tunes playing from the photoshop
Of our hearts designing graphics cards
Filled with affections &bubbles of love.

Portrait of tomorrow carved an amazing
hours in the street decorated with colours.
these are colours depicting greatness
freshness &braveness of the voiceful heart
Kitchened through the celestial laughter
Of a slighting mother to her joyfulness.
We are similar, singular and opposite,
We are plural of everything humanity,
Sweetness of every singing lyrics & verses.

Let's this fondleness remain captivating
boys. Sweet. Bitter. Acidic. Sour. Raw.
Reflection of the World Series of smiles
Printing names on carved pumpkins leafs
Boys carrying themselves in their shadows
Carrying themselves in memories of their
Parents' pastoral culture and languages.
Boys spinning into crispy treats of white
dreams written on the stream of the skies.

We are fascinated about the rare cloud
journeying towards the stars of our souls
Harbouring our names in a bag of colours
Imagination are doubtful unperturbed pictures
Painted in the innocent face of boys of tomorrow
After the sun bent the tremour of our rushes
The rain came like a troubadour warrior
Between veteran lips of boys who went &never
returned memories of their family portraits.

We are boys carrying our family's loss
We are boys carrying our Father's legacy
Bearing the pursuit of our fathers yesterday
Look into our eyes & see our imaginations
those imaginations created by our ancestral
ancestors for tomorrow to hold our peace.
We may not know that these sands are made
of ridges of boys like us who went carrying
Pictures of dreams that we could not retrieve.


©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingFrustration

Remember the street is a dryeR
Easing out fears into a flat pastE
Memories may be seen as an imaM
Entering into convenant with hastE
Minding the time he coiled on kiliM
Beauties of the street are folded like bulb
Entertaining the earth like lonely artistE
Remember the street made you a fatheR
Thinking for yourself  & it's tough distincT
House yourself in it bossom like tooth in MoutH
Even if stumbling stones retaliatE
Stand to those fragments of those beliefS
Tilting down your muse towards prominenT
Remember where you started to roaR
Elaborating your strength to keep calm voicE
Eagerness is a blood dripping into languagE
Through which the ghetto name a streeT.


Yours Poetically,
©John Chizoba Vincent

See yourself in John 3:16
I hope you will not get lost in John 11:3,
mysteries are the soup of poetry.
Imageries taught us how to hold our hands like gun then fire without a target or something.
Mytic found favour in your eyes,
Divinity crossed path with spiritualism &
Oblivion was birthed in an illusion of freewill.
Do you know Devil is not a thief or a liar?
Do you know he was a prince of light?
Ask Michael who fought him at dusk
I think he has a tale in his mouth.
Long have I carved this figurine waiting
for the mouth of the grave to open.
Now you search your heart for truth,
Isn't it?
Tell me:
Who made you?
Open to the book of Revelation
What did you form in your soul there?
I found you a broken tattered mysterious
mystery  that you hold dearly;
Your dead mother's photograph,
She awaits you on the judgement day.
Your father's most cherished bangle,
He said he would be coming for it on the
last day.
A flower for your sister, drop it on her grave.
Remember, forever is your last breath.
I know Allah's promises even If I have not opened the Holy Koran.
When my spirit went into lost in the darkness,
18 virgins came between my thighs.
They held my ***** girth to submission,
Joseph's mythology grabbed me in favour.
I don't know why you have a Splinded spiritual problem...
Look straight into your eyes to see it.
I think you should allow the wind breathes through the trees &allow the mirror to fog up.
A boy told me candle flame is always in his
eyes when it is blown off.
This is the spiritual collation in  connection.
Let's recite the apostles creed when morning comes to you in hundred fold of dreams.


©John Chizoba Vincent
TheBoyHero.

I don't know why a story should start with a boy hanging himself cause he was giving freedom to see life & have a kiss with his lips!
Then, the pages moved on and on until their shadows recreated another smothering duplicates of them trying to survive in this forest called life.
I don't know why every morning wakes up to see boys scattered like grains of sand on ground.
I don't know why every chapter of a story would have boys trying to suffocate themselves in the thickest quest to be a man when they can just remain children.
I don't know why each page of the same book will show boys with guns on their left hands & holy books on their rights, killing the dreams of others.
They are portraits in a graveyard called jungle &survival.
Portraits under the palms of the cruel sun
loving miscreants.
They found this soft solace of wildfire splitting between their lives,
Finding a street that will make them scream out loud like a cockerel.
They created themselves in themselves trying to imitate nature in its entirety of manslaughter.
I don't know the genesis of creation, if I could regenerate the genesis of my boys, our boys; I could have ask nature why boys like me suffered in the womb before they were born.
They leant to drive the birds to confusion before
Concluding the squeezeness of pressure
They squeezed dreams into nightmares
Cherish every nostril that flapped wings of lured lost into the cathedral of abyss.
Some boys learn to fall into the shape of their mothers
Some have the fragments of their fathers shadows & images as sharp as the streams of their thoughts.

We opened the jungle gate for them...
Missile becomes toy in the hand
Anger an issue with a patterned crystal lines,
A never ending story of circling class of time.
Employment lost in their favour then politicians came in play converting them to beast of thugs.
They became undertakers of aborted foetus.
Undertakers of dreams among children.
Each story started with their amonition & anger
Firing and slaughtering in the darkness.
These pages made them so cause the story started with their albums of sorrow and agony trying to survive in a particular senero of jungles for boys.



©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingFrustration.

let's dive into the thought of that Benue woman.
let's see through her sorrow carved separately,
how many children are born to die before noon?
1966 saw this on the tail of her skins proudly,
till 1977, pogom of lunatic fringed our thoughts,
We enslaved our reasonings to the ashes of right, everything without a comma seems right
to us & we failed to allow the oceans break in the cities on our cheeks without killing them.
these memories are the genocide &mythical histories that keep fading faster to hurt us.

It was a happy day on the face of the sun,
Erinma went to farm &never returned home.
We searched all the delivered forest but
could not have a trace of her glitched doom.
It was a sunny day, a bleeding white day,
Ayola went to the stream and never came back.
We only saw his blood spoke of herdsmen,
His spirit ran towards Enugu wet shrines.
All we saw was his pains assaulted fairly along the confluence border of River Benue & kogi.
Our thoughts are no longer golden to hearts.

It was a fateful baked day of excitement,
Ene went to school & never came back for her
mother to pick the gaze of the smile in her
pride, she was never seen but her shadows
left traces like voicemail to the road to Sambisa.
Still, strength formed like cascading sweat on
the faces of our trembling lips, no one spoke,
No one spoke of this evening even their Aso could not come to fight for what has become
of us in these two cities where boys are enemies to girls breaking the route which the wind blew.

We learnt to hide cocroaches in every cupboard,
&our leaders taught us this & how suffering could be beneficiary to our hearts like tonic.
Genocide taught us how to deny our own the right to live & live life like the living ought to
live. they made knives part oceans of water,
They made us a guest in our own home!
a house won't be a home anymore when our young ones are killed in a traumatic chaos.  
where we eat are the places of mortals bodies
a deafening silence hung on every spirit here.

Defining gels of life gathered like firrwood,
On the pupils of our eyes, skulls are draw to drown us in the drawings life came up with.
We are treasure of genocid messes like *****
Of ballardic poems written with a sad pen.
Let's develop this film today & tomorrow,
If you renew your license of mind to fit in
then, the blood of those killed will bear us
Witness to the craving wind looking forward
to hearing a word from what we made here to be.
A land of blood and cracked sorrows.

NKPORO II

In proportion to the gospel of man about creation

& evolution & sand of time,

living  in Nigeria  is to **** like  Osama Bin Laden without origin of profile,

& give your heart to crulty. Man down,

Father  picked up the apple for me his good--for-nothing-child; a living dead.

non-living son.

What do we do with this land of ours,  Nkporo?  I asked my brethren!

I believe you have me, Nkporo.

I believe in dying & leaving a clean footprint.
make life a garden or a glorious victories

& harvest  the good thereof in the hands of your grace.
You're magical, Nkporo...

I don't  believe in living to die today but dying to live again,
I believe in the depth of nothing; an empty house full of dreams.

And she told me no place like home!

©John Chizoba Vincent
#TheSage

And this song fell out from my father's lips:
Of boys learning to drop the corpse of their
parents' bodies on the high mountain of Jos,
Of  girls who came home learning to place fingers on the holes that evil men dug;
Of children learning to empty themselves
With lies & truths about what happened now, about what happened in Benue and pleateu,
Of those stories that escaped through our mother's nostrils as she became past tense.

And this wants to make you leave your body
to a place where lost is freedom to enjoy.
yesterday When teeth fell from our mouth,
We threw them to the zinc for tomorrow.
We never knew they became dancers in
a battle field, making glittering white war.
We wired our way into abstract destructions
We bottled our knowledge to the river bank.
I am not alone in this nightmare of want
When my country men became object of
ridicule, I was never among them to core.
treasure this thawn into dirge of goodness.


Help me knit this morning with a song,
trace Adkins into Wooten of silence
We archived our routes to another smothering
Snow in red places before dawn.
Help me gather the laughters of those girls
Help me tell mother that sin is not a reproach
Tell father that Satan was an angel of light
Not a mystical mysteries as told by all.
If Allah allows the vehicles of my thought
To decamp from the camp of Moses.

When you get to Lagos, don't allow a bus to
carry you pass those graveyard called bridge.
a trailer fell from one of them at Ojuelegba
and another one fell in Ibadan without the express.  There we saw a boy' tale told in
Fe-Buhari in pains & gory and eel mystery.
He carried a song on his shoulder to crying
Forgetting there on the express way has his father's last prayer points & footprints...
There he died also hoping to pick his
father's dust groaning without a comforter.

I whispered these words in secret
Tell nobody that somebody told you the body
of the storyline before the ****** erupted.
Till everything becomes breeze, I am not
still a poet but a messenger of the gods.


©John Chizoba Vincent
TheBoyHero

Where dreams are gold of thought
Where cloud are silvers of hope
Where future husband the street
Where ghost don't crack bones of human.
This colour of African night depict water
A formless form of laughter tickling home
If this history be made of Kinta Kunte,
I will lit this weekend with a strange tune
Which will end up holding the image of forever.


May we meet again where **** are debris
of footsteps on the oceans of mysteries.
We might giggle with a different tale on
We may pitch our voices to the cold hands
of daring heart of  thunderous elipsis...
We may trace home giants of illusions
We may not see the darkness in eve hush
noise, not through this armpit zipper of
services rendered in a torn lips of lost humanity.

May we meet again where we make muse
a knight with a name & face & identity
We'll send forth our song to many places
where our mind have raced without a print
May we meet again where love crossed path
and time lose concentrations in the camp of
attraction of what we have finally become
May we might again as a pilgrims in prayer,
Our hands a home bringing  tomorrow' peace.


May we meet  again and embrace wetness
Wetness of love and hope for another' emotion
At the sight of the emptiness in the hallway,
We will stand to erase every ooze of doubt
Hold on between us death and life to conquer
this deafening silence may echo beyond shrunk
Nights of our skins before the sun unmask
May we meet again and again and again
Where we part no more  with legs of departure.


©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingfrustrations.

This land belongs to Buhari,
he has the financial keys to every land here!
You must not urinate here unless you
are a cow, beware of  military' Dogs,
they're watching.
You must not answer nature's call here,
this region is for grazing of the first citizens,
do you expect them to perceive your *****?
Go home to your mother's other room,
there's another room for you to wee-wee
& there's room for you to communicate with nature.
your father has warned you not to see
the sun in darkness,
Your mother said you should learn to
respect every house that has politicians
that chopped your smiles into gloom of lurking bodies.
Why Urinate behind Aso rock Villa & you called yourself a patriotic civilian?
Don't you know that our leaders are dinning
there in bits of luminious laughter?
They are planning on how to give one square meal per day to already satisfied children.
They are arranging the ten thousand to be shared in the market tomorrow.
The sound of your patapata could be a distraction!
I have not find the right hand to parcel my anger on you!
you have made the foams thereof to meet at the confluence of mirage,
what do you expect Obasanjo to say of this?
I know each call is a torment and misery
painting a portrait of how gullible our land is!
Do not urinate here unless you're a politician!
Unless you've learnt the act of deceiving people,
unless you have fought in the National Assembly & jumped from one party to another,  
unless your hands are stained with blood;
do not urinate here, zip up, hoodie...
Let's remind ourselves of next levels connecting the air with the silk memories with which the world hold each other in arms.
Remember, the fine is your head if you
ever pour out your proud liquid here!


©John Chizoba Vincent
#TheSage

There are those things that left our bodies when we were younger flying innocently...
Those bridges of pretentious smile that we took to our mother's  dimples to collect glories.
Those magic tears that once sliced loneliness off our shouldering lips,
Those bite and bite of unwanted hunger that beat us in the presence of our parents...
There are masquerade of innocent thoughts
Masquerade of shattered dreams at dusk,
Masquerade of fears that tortured us at dawn!
Those desks of forgotten hope in you.
We tried to gather ourselves together to bring the sun home to our flammable insight.
We tried to build the jungle on the palms of our forefathers...
We told our friends that our parents possess a lion at home,
We scared our enemies with the legging empire of our scattered home.
Those were the phases we left drifting into adulthood in pains.
We forgot our tattered thoughts climaxing into an orbiting wants and needs.
We papered the drive to become a better person.
We took our hand bags and put them in the air like  nothing would pull it down.
Under the rain,  we sang of Africa and the world
We demonstrated the right of humanity and love.
Those bridges burnt down gradually as we traveled
From childhood to adulthood.
As we journey with a thinking umbrella  that will protect us from the sun tomorrow.
Those are the things I keep remembering now.
The song we sang under the rain...
The snails we picked in the night with a strange lamp we stole from a neighbour.
The girls we touched their ******* and killed them with shyness.
The boys we sent away from home that never returned!
The fishes we trapped under the small water we made their home.
The blind village beggars we stole their money in the dark...
They are those things we left behind as we walked into adulthood with laughter of hyenas pains.!



©John Chizoba Vincent
FromAPenRefusingfrustration

Silent!
Open your Bible to Saint John 11:35
Somewhere at the junction of fate and survival let's see the guiltless tears quaking this messed land!
Old sweat of the saints gathered
Ancient blood of the cross stood
And the curtain broke into two
Cracking the raven of the blind side of a land pouring an old wine into a new bottle.
If there is a God, it is obvious he's weeping
for my country home.
Karma is home again &oblivion of its glories
Shall tame this burning flames of Christ tears.
Are the Saints still crying of their betrayed shadows?
Nigeria left us a sad song to be swallowed into our mouth like the body of Christ.
How do we spell genocide?
How do we write jungle justice on a paper?
Are the Chibokgirls back from Sambisa forest?
I never knew tears have voices too until
they are adapted in the chronicle of emptiness.
When we started from genesis,
We sighted those broken bridges in exodus
Parting the morals to see death multiplying.
And Jesus wept,  not for sin but for a home like ours.
Yet, every night we burn incenses before sleep
Hoping that each dawn we'll see through those illusion in the tears my home brings.
Yet,  Jesus still weeps for a land my leaders made a public forest of pleasure.
My home: your face is now walking behind a black sun!
We'll cease to make ourselves pillars of death.


©John Chizoba Vincent

THIS HOUSE IS NOT FOR SALE

This house is not for sale-
beware of my kitchened wife,
beware of Emeka, my son
& Tobi, my Son-in-law;
even Musa, my gate man.
Everyone is a thief in his room,
everyone  is a saint outside his room-
Trespassers will be persecuted.
Behind the closed doors are unscripted scenes of scenery stones of miscreants
hanging their tainted memories on the
eyes of souls to take away their vineyard.
This land is not for sale,
Politicians are here;
*** bellied looters are here holding selfishness as the right hand of God.
Yesterday,
100 soldiers died laughing out their skulls-
the politicians keep mute hoping to see
the spirits of the soldiers  return home
to defend the country from buyers.
We are not selling this country to get paid, beware of 419-
This is military Zone,  keep off.
We are preserving  it in the stomach
of the Leaders.
How long do you hold your house in your body?
How long do you have to sell to make that profit that never existed?
From the fireflies of the boundless rainbows,
We would hold resistance of greed into being tying itself like the dog of wisdom.
This house is not for sale, buyers,  beware,
The C of O is with the righteous politicians,
God has learnt to save their tainted freewill  on his palms.
He could not find a way to punish them in hell anymore.
Do not allow other lips to hold onto this saying.
the road on the tongue of this house
has led me to places:
to be a politician & extort from the poor masses
& to lead them astray into oblivion of darkness.
Days are gone when we see moon in
the smile of the sun that peeps through
the window of this house...
Do not come home to this house anymore,
Its no longer has your loved ones in it.

©John Chizoba Vincent
#LiquidPoetry.

Mother won't bleed--
Mother won't bleed again to the breaking song
according to the gospel of insanity of man:
She says life is in the hands of a madman,
she says Sunday is not enough to bless the
memories of her son who lost in the hands of astraying bullets.We'll hold down Borno;
Mother won't bleed--

Mother won't bleed again in that house on
the other side of the street holding this tale
of her daughter with the etagere before she
took her last picture from the universe.
And the pastor said to her ghost
"dust & unto dust you shall return"
It was ash Wednesday & the frond hasn't
been burnt to ashes, would mother bleed again?

The leather missal is no more & Mary
could not attest to it provocative missing...
When we saw tears in the eyes of God,
We knew this house on the other side of
the street started this--the madness in us all.
We could not see also the body of the missing Christ.the figurine. the chaplet.the rosary.

Mother won't bleed again to this course...
But her memories did not start in Benue
Where she beheld laughing  ghost of humans
celebrating how her homeland tortured them,
It started here in that house on the other side
of the street where her two children died in fear. anxiety. depression. tears. forgotten.

& she taught us how to dry our eyes before Sunday service.

©John Chizoba Vincent
#TheSage.

(after Amadioha went to a wet sleep)
.
.
For the Men who went during praises
Let your tears be of cheerful dreams
You are not forgotten in abyss
The glory of death shall be re-shadowed when the storm is over

This is the gullible of the vision-less attribute
For those women who cried Ozubulu! Ozubulu!! Ozubulu!!! before death
I have seen your agony wailing in the street
if this is the sand that unite us
Amadioha was insane when it all happened in his sleep....
Our shadows shall always cry
Our nose shall always smell your aroma in the darkness.
this is the cruelty of men of our land
those who didn't **** their mother's breast nine months
those whose father's names are cursed
those whose names bring shame
those whose mother's names are of sin.
we cry also, we weep all alone
go in peace women! go in peace men!
Ozubulu children,  Ozubulu wind & sun
are your traveling map hanging on the
fragments of the dusty lonely cloud!
For this journey is of shame and sorrow...
Our ashes & palmfrond shall remain with us
and your names shall not be forgotten.
.
.

©John Chizoba Vincent
FromARefusing_frustration.

He was either looking for a home in his mother' thought;
A place where lost freedom is found to be a lurking land.
He was either searching for the colour of a new song,
a song of colour and crystal ray from the shadow of her heart.
We define threnody with a moonful of sadness written all over the stake of our eyes.  
Now, I'm not the only soul captured with blazing lies.
I'm not the only soul that went that route planted by our leaders.
Culture defined each of our eyes searching home.
It wasn't the lanes that drum the beat we dance to we followed...
No,  it wasn't here that fear to feed our fears when a new bottle of wine made us miserable.
It wasn't from here that a tale was told of graves with mouths.
Leaving was another way to say goodbye
without having to loose yourself to tears.
You researched into you:
A dream of loneliness
the joy of solitude.
a mournful of confirment committed
thousand poems birthed bravely in the process of telling a story that never existed, is the expressway of making a salty savage into life.


In the future of our past, we remain dormat
a boy left through the eyes of his mother
carrying the identity of his father's name
carved on a frame of tears.
He jumped many rivers to pay prayerful
homage to those things he learnt at his
father's feet.
custom taught us how to sew our laughter
with our mother's smile.
We leave to live again on the soil left for
us to walk on.
We are what tradition labelled us to be
Knitting our needs to become spirits and souls
& ellipses of trauma housing those things we won't let go sometimes.
We battle to come to the bossom of our
mother to learn where shadows travel to
when the light goes off.


If you are looking for me in this poem,
you won't see me but; between the paces
of the boy who left town in search of his
identity through his mother's eyes.



©John Chizoba Vincent

In a cemetery,
a boy is holding a lurking flower
he carved his father's face on his palm.
He waited for the mouth of the grave to open
so he could use a basket to gather his tears.
He crossed many oceans to get there where
his father was buried after the bullets from
the Haram penetrated into him.
Home seek you boy!
the grave seek your absence boy!
holding rivers between your fingers is the passport to explore into darkness.
your mother seek your smile...
Do you know home escaped through the
side of your mouth?
We received the fold of asylumic rain in realms
retracing images in the street of pains.
Holding on is a golden corral commitment
It is not easy to be between two worlds
a heaven and hell daring in one firmament.
the symphonic drumbeats of the sea’s  interminable fury,
Stamping the inevitable apocalypse of time
Whistling waters, whirling rivers, a
skeletal of the oasis of pannacles.
Do not ride headless horseman of the
arouse night!
Do not upset the snoring rituals of the dead..
The shore of this land is motherless
Help swindle a wealth walk of thought home,
A torrents of an asylum thoughts wailing west,
do not be a patriot-pirate holding grudges.
thump your pulsing eardrums back home,
Don't allow this madness rise tide pods in stockades.
In this watery slumbers below us,
roll up your mat, the sun has set for freedom,
Father tattered house breeds no evil again.


©John Chizoba Vincent
# TheBoyHero