A Story of guilt.
Not for him, for us.
Vincent.

Strokes and flicks,
Glides of guilded golds
Hushed in the Blues,
Innocence in the Greens;
Boldly infused oils
Spilling out on a canvas;
A legacy built on
Sorrow. Toil. Turmoil.
Who with dark indents on a page shaded in
Shadows showed
Work. Work, work,
Constant work.
A Starry Night’s muse.
All the while cowards saying they always
Knew,
Always loved,
Always loving
Vincent.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Sometimes people don't want to let go,
Sometimes they beg to stay,
Sometimes they want to be on earth,
Their death makes them sad, but there is no other way,
And no matter where they go, heaven or hell,
Their sorrow follows their souls, even on a bright new day,
And when their sobbing specters arrive at eternity's gate,
Their hearts are still and emptier still,
And with their emptiness they must wait.