Here they come
On their high horses
And white regalia
With the pretense to mourn
Long after we cried and wailed
For the blood that has stained our land
Long after we cried and wailed
For the blood that has stained our land
Drawn by the sword of their brethren
From the veins of our brethren

How deceptive...how audacious?
Their mockery of our pain
They never felt it
They only felt threatened
Because others came to give us succour
They didn’t come with balm for the wounded
And no bandages for the bleeding
They only came to see
How deep the wounds are?Are they deeper than the valley they seek to possess?

How deceptive...how audacious?
Their disdain of our sincere tears
They came with no tears
To shed for the buried dead
Neither did they come with handkerchief
To wipe away our tears
They came to see
If the graves are as they expected
And if not...how well to inflict more wounds
Even as we mourn
They are killing more

How deceptive...how audacious?
Their mockery of our sensitivity
Instead of sending the lion to roar
And chase the wolf away
They sent the cat to run
To where? I don’t know
The cat is been running
Yet the wolf is stilling killing
And the head of the pack
Is coming to see
How red the River Benue is

Edumoga is crying
Guma and Logo is still bleeding
Makurdi has not been spared from the flames
Nigeria is being deprived of herchildren daily
From Maiduguri to Adamawa
From Zamfara to Yobe
From Ekiti to Ogun
The Land is full of graves
From Southern Kaduna to Taraba
From Enugu to Delta
From Nasarawa to Benue
The land is bleeding red
And the stench of death is no longer offensive to perceive

When will this end?
When has the maiming of children?
And slaughtering of the pregnant
Become a culture of pride?
When has it become our culture?To protect the murderer
And accuse the victim?
The eyes that pretends not to see
When the vultures are plucking out its neighbours eyes
Should not forget that when they are done
They will come for his own.

Now what can I do?
I bear no guns
I carry no swords
But I still have my words
I will not cry only with my eyes
But I will cry with my pen
Until I **** this fear
This fear that wants to make me a slave
Until the peace be restored
Through the tears of a pen bearer.

If you want to make heaven
Marry from Enugu!
You want to be successful
Please marry from Anambra
If you want a complete package
Marry an Akwa Ibomite
They attended finishing school
Right under their mother's tutelage
If you want to raise Professors
Marry From Ekiti
If you want to build empires
Marry an Igbo girl
They push you to success
Do you want to maintain your culture?
Mary a Yoruba girl
If you want to be royalty
Marry a Hausa girl
If you don't ever want to cheat
Mary and Edo girl
If your relationship survived this year
Despite its economic realities
Please marry that one
If you desire a beauty Queen
Marry a Benue girl
If you love good romps
Marry a Calabar girl
Your life will never remain the same
And you will live happily ever after
If you want to be loved forever
Marry your friend and soulmate
Listen to me my friend
Don't go for looks
It will fade away
Don't go for money
Someday it will be exhausted
If you want a good partner  
Go down on your kneels
Then, watch and pray

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.

I will aways stay awake
Till I could no longer sleep
Till winds and earthquakes no longer blows
When young and old are  no longer old
Till market places turns musium
Even guns and weapons turns powder
River niger and benue refuse to come together
Teachers and student now read together

Believe it or not I will stay awake
Even on the worst of waters
When the sun kisses the moon
When palmwine refuses to tap
In the darkest corridor
I will stay AWAKE

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.

If Ondo is used for settlers
And Ogun is a river
Tell me about Oyo, an empire

You mispell Gwosh as Jos
Recognised Sokoto, a market
Far away from Osun, a river

Lakes is to Lagos
As Kogin is to Kogi
And Kebbi is synonymous to Ka'abba

Janzama, women power inspired Katsina
But Kano was a Blacksmith
While Kaduna means Crocodile

The people of the golden soils of Jigawa
To the river Imo Mmiri
They don't speak Gombe at all

Take me to the hills of "Enu Ugwu"
Following the hills in "Okiti"
Without navigating through Iduu

All Ebonyi are "Aboine"
Close the Delta that marries the atlantic
And Oyono, makes you Cross River

Don't say Benue, say "Binuwe"
Balga, Yelga, Salga formed Bayelsa
And I love Kasashen Bauchi

"Anyim Oma Mbala kwenu!"
But I love ladies from "Kwa Iboe"
Only legends understands this

Tell them I told you
Adamawa is a warrior
While Abia is a coinage

If I missed your state
Go back to the history books
This is just a drill...

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

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.