I held my head today
With compassionate hands that pulled forth tears
I held my aching head
Filled with thoughts and images I’ve kept
In distant recesses
Breaking free, boiling up to forefronts
With rage and sorrow
Like bodies long forgotten out to sea
Washing ashore to shock new eyes
With bloated horror

Thank you, distant ****** ancestors
For compassionate hands

CONSCRIPTS: CHILDREN OF WAR

Conscripts, Innocent children robbed for war
From Congo, Chad, Central Africa Republic, Mali….
From Uganda to Sudan and South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Senegal…..
They are the forefronts young fatal fighters
From Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, Lord Resistance Army…..
They are these merciless Militias mouths-youths
From Biafra-Nigeria, Bujumbura, Asmara to Abidjan Civil Wars
They are their battalions’ fertile feeding grounds
They are Kony, Riek Machar and Ruthless Rebels’ mercenaries
They are Ouattara, Nkurunziza, Salva Kiir…..youthful foot soldiers  
They are Resistance Armies and Liberation army’s guerillas  

They raided a village
They foraged the villages
For innocent, forced conscripts
At dawn-at dusk, daytime-nighttime  
At noontime-at eventide-every time

And she begged
These satans that came
At the mask of dark nights
Slithering silent as serpents
For her last left and living!

She mourned and bemoaned
Helpless and hopeless
Her, grief-stricken hapless
But under those ****** shot eyes
Those coals-hot red coloured irises
That pity or its empathy knows not
It was all in vain-to no avail!

Determined, resolute, uncaring, ruthlessly  
Him tucked on her compassionate chest
Him still tagged on her hopeless breast
Its cheeks struggling to suckle any fluid
From these sagged sacks of balloons
Him they riotously robbed

And those that can’t they ripped
To those that can’t they opened
Those that can’t they roped
To those that can’t odd happened
Those that can’t they *****
To those that can’t they dampened

Those able fingerings wrapped
On frontiers as fighters they lined
With no war experience
With no ammunitions intelligence
No boots-barefoot, no shirts-bare chests
As shields shivering, roughly ripped
By advanced military and militias

Never to know home again
Never to know its warmth again
Never to know fears again
Never to know pains again
Never to know happiness ever again
Never to know the sweet tastes again
Of what Mama’s milk-nourishing colostrums contain

Somewhere in tough terrains
Somewhere in jagged plains
Somewhere in rugged mountains
Somewhere in thicketed montanes
Somewhere in brutal bushes
Somewhere in shriveling shrubs
Shallow graves of their immature bones
Their carrions lay leaked white by scavengers or time

Lucky him that deaths avoids
Lucky him that deaths mercy observes
Lucky him that deaths shyly eludes
Fortunate him it sympathetically spares
Lives in agony of pain and guilt
Lives in fears of loyalty and liberty
Lonely eyes, hollow sorrow, mourning souls,
Empty heart, mad tampered mind, tempered looks….
Him, innocent Conscripts, Children of War!

© Kìùra Kabiri. All rights reserved.

My heart has a mind of it's own
When it thinks of you the palpitations control my bones
For lack of better words my veins are smitten with the thought of your fingertips cascading down my arms
Effortlessly you infiltrated my mind
I'm not talking about the thought of you,
I'm talking about your undeniable essence
It's like an unforgettable scent
I can feel you when you're not here with me and that terrifies me
This is not a ballad about my gushy love affair
This is a poem about how I found love when I needed it most
I found love in the deepest corners of my mind the widest depths of my soul and on every inch of my body.
Inside and out, you make my skin crawl in a way that begs to be silenced by the reassurance of how magical your touch may be
For one effortless month my mind has been condoned to wonder what it would be like to hold you
What it would be like for you to whisper I love you in my ear
What it would be like for my eyes to beg you to kiss me
It's the tension that will eventually set us free
You are the love song in forefronts of my mind that never stops playing
You are hopeful wishes and butterfly kisses and 3 AM dancing in the rain
With you I want to commit all the cliches
I wouldn't mind getting arrested if we could share the same chains
I wanna feel your breath on my neck while we're driving in my jeep
And when my eyes get wide and we find ourselves barrelling down the interstate at 82 miles per hour
Put your hand on my thigh and squeeze accordingly
Tell me to ease off the gas
Say that there is no rush
This isn't a race
Tell me you love the way I hold the steering wheel
Then kiss me on the cheek
Leave no room for doubt
We can take this slow if you want to.
But baby I'm afraid I won't want to
My heart's predisposition to dive out of my chest headfirst into your hands has my stomach in a bind with butterflies.
Point is
I have no idea where this road map of life is gonna take us,
But I sure as hell need you to be my copilot.

First pleas
Unsaid
Red eyes
Dry riverbeds
Here lies
Happiness
Buried six feet deep in regrets

Seconds pass
Out of time
Speak now
I’ve tried
Spelled out
Words repeat
Words first said as you fade to sleep

Dreamer
I call to you
Thrice more
Beyond veiled view
Same hour
Twelfth night
When fate took you from my life

Questions
Madness drives
To forefronts
Darkness arrives
Forever more
Your deathly dance
Unchained from mortal coil and my hands

Dark night
Fifth on same day
Answer me
In my dismay
Where she
Still alive
Would she stand to be my wife?

Sycophant
To demons now
Here I plead
Hear my vow
Disaster struck
Her voice I know
This pain in me only grows

Heaven now
At my back
Seventh cry
Into the black
Driving words
In my mind
Wond’ring how she left me behind

8:00
On the hour
When hands turned cold
When life turned sour
Thoughts careen
Into the fade
Twelfth night bereft of the day

Knees, you bleed
Heart is torn
My love, a corpse
With child, unborn
Words I read
Pure sacrilege
In hopes to breed words from the dead

Both hands dig in
Fingers trembling still
Hear my plea
Unsacred will
If she would speak
These words to me
Maybe I could finally sleep

All attempts failed
No price to much
Gouge out these eyes
Hands go untouched
One this wicked month
Short of a dozen years
I drive myself to bring you here

Oh Twelfth Night
What terror you bring
As words arise
From Hell’s opening
The inferno rains
Words burned in my head
“With this wedding ring, I thee wed”

Her voice reverberates to the deepest parts
of my mind, returning back the forefronts of perfection.

She played my heartstrings like a silent guitar.

Springboarded into the future,
and now I can finally afford a decent piece of furniture.

But the disassembled futon in the unused bedroom looks as if it's been manipulated by some angry spirit whose soul doesn't know any better than to linger.

My oldest friend and first girlfriend gave me a tarot card reading while I stayed at her place when I was midway towards my new life in this strange state.

It was vaguely upsetting.

But I can't remember the trappings of a mind that I've taken every endeavor to leave behind.

The thing about a banana bar is that it's really just banana bread with frosting; banana cake, really, is what it ought to be called.

Banana fish can only be caught on a perfectly banal day, but it's the kind of thing one shouldn't wish for, ever.

Rewound into the past,
and for just one moment I can finally relax.
Stretch out the tightly woven brain matter and let it splat into ink blots that sort of remind me of that one time that we had a great time while expounding on our little personal explorations into emotional forefronts where all judgement was either suspended and/or explained in such a way as to not affect us at all.

Pioneers of living a life without societal fears where we were free to steer the wheel of progress in any direction we saw fit . . .

Aw ****, I have to work tomorrow.