Spencer Platt
By
Fawole Immanuel Taiwo
IPOHUNRERE: LAMENT OF AN INTERNALLY DISPLACED LAD
From what edge shall I begin to number my misplacement
For a christening?
Or what bears the steam to erode from my heart
The permanently edified monument that will reign for aeons?
Even a solstical day will be weak to hold up my saga;
One caused me and likes by the valiant heralds of death—
The sanctimonious practitioners of their faith.
Like a theatrical issuance, it all sprang.
All Dick, Tom and Harry have decoded it as a come-and-go
Act of the brainwashed agents of massacre,
Knowledge-void of its come-to-stay.
How benignant it would have effected
To sever its tentacles from the scratch.
Now, I’m drifting; drifting in the cold breeze of petrifaction.
Where is the paternal scold?
Where has the maternal chastisement
Which restrains me from victualling on excreta with dogs
Made its hide out?
Hmm… the earth has preyed on them.
The brotherly and sisterly warmth I savour
Have exited, leaving me with indispensable heat.
My blood floods the subterranean reservoir.
Till what century shall nostalgia keep recurring?
Will my teary Nile ever know dryness?
Will Heavens in their frenzy ever vindicate me and ilks?
When will this desolate land ever know fruitfulness again?
Will my back ever feel the warmth of the satchel again?
Can assimilation even ever know my domain again?
Why must I be displaced?
From time of revel has distress been drawn.
The trepidation posed by weapon has startled my mind.
The incessant sounds of bombs and grenades
Have drained the man left in me.
Aaah… now that I needs must survive,
Where shall the pieces of my broken pitcher begin to be packed?
These little eyes of mine
Have discerned that which is older than them.
My hands I understand are immature,
But with them, cold-cum-stiff-cum-motionless
Entities have they felt.
My skull is full.
Even the earth is small to bear my knowledge-cum-experience;
A precocious me.
O fate,
Where art thou?
Manifest before me to name your deeds?
Why have you dispersed me amongst thorns?
Where have I chosen it wrongly?
Stay not mute.
Count for your act.
I am too tender to abide under your hegemony.
Heaven,
Is it not acclaimed that on your right side
Do children take solace?
Why must I live an exception?
Why do my counterparts in other terrains
Feel life with a contradictory sight of tranquility?
Fold not your arm to give my enquiry a feedback, Heaven.
I-will-be-your-father will never father the fatherless.
I-will-be-your-mother will never mother the motherless.
All strive to rip me off my worries are attempts.
All attempts to heal my wounds will only dredge it up.
Leave me to dance to the beat of life.
Let me vagabond this land till the end of time.
Let life provision me all it has to provision.
Drifting I will be till death comes knocking at my rickety door.
ABIYE
The meek and tender product of my strength,
Like the evergreen tree,
Begets me no teary eyes.
The meek and tender germination of my strength,
With iota of no weary has torrentially blossom
And make me out a shield;
Shield shielding peers with solace.
The proletariat birth of yesterday
Today makes the aristocratic gait.
As the magnet finds a match for its soul;
As the coffin embraces its love;
As cigarette is solaced in the hand of the White,
My magnet has found its metal—
A metal hell bent on cleaving to the magnet.
My attorney makes no meal of me;
My metals attorney makes no meal of our demagnetization.
The meek and tender birth of my conjugality
Has remained an Abiye, reigning for eon,
Unlike galore of conjugality crushed in divorce
Which has made Abiku a celebrated painting
From the crooked hands of the law-painters of disengagement.
Iscariot peregrinated with Jesus
But became an Abiku along the boulevard
And misplaced his soul and flesh
In Sheol and on the potter’s field.
Though a citizen of Heaven,
He becomes a persona non grata in his abode
And makes the august citizen of the restless oven.
Elisha, an Abiye;
Gehazi an Abiku.
I am the Abiye of the communion with God.
Like the diurnal and nocturnal flow of a living river,
Seducers have crossed my ethereal path;
The command-that-these-stones-be-made-bread—
Progenies of the king of Hades.
But as the Abiye I would reign to be,
I will not voyage the six feet of a fall.
The hungry hoes and shoves shall construct me no domain.
On the other realm of life is my craft.
Even a bird chanced to gaze at my allotment
Will sing of the life in my art.
A little splash from my craft when beheld
Could redeem the turbulent mind of the startled.
Life Pablo’s, my brush could speak of the future.
My art knows life.
Laud the Abiye of my field.
Success, success…
Success has made my craft an abode.
The Abiye of no diminishing returns.
All fulfilments get ignited by dreams.
Fulfilment that will experience no set back
Wants unalloyed dedication and determination.
Abiye in all spheres deserve incessant sow.
Take not Abiye as a privilege,
But in reverse,
A machine that needs must be fuelled with profuse sweat.
THE SLAVE
Think not of the slave
As one taken away out of choice
From the shores of his land
To work odd jobs in strange lands;
Think of the slave
As the prodigal son
Who departs his land to work odd jobs uninvited
On an estrange land.
Think not of the slave
As one whose sweat is dug
And exported to foreign lands
With ounce of no gain but pummelling;
Think of the slave
As the hand that feeds the mouth
But feeds not itself.
He’s a fool that sympathizes
The blood spilled off his shores
But substitutes the one at his door post for red carpet.
O my dear!
Think not of the slave
As one separated from his offsprings
Sequel to subjected heat from his taskmasters,
But rather,
Think of the slave
As one who funds the export of his offspring
To the battlefield of racism and discrimination.
O ye layman!
Think not of a slave
As one whose land is invaded
By unexpected locust of labour;
Think of the slave
As the Israelites that walked themselves to their taskmasters.
The slave is not one
Whose craft is styled inferior,
But one who jettisons his craft
And calls counterpart’s superior.
The slave is that one
That stimulates not his dexterity and craft
But lauds his slave driver’s crafty yield.
He barters his heritage; a cow for hen.
The slave’s modus operandi remains
Because he knows not that he is a slave.
The fetters and chains of the taskmasters
For long are ripped off the slave,
But the slave as a slave he loves to answer to
Wears himself the fetters and chains
Which weighs him down in the race of races
He is running.
Until the slave emancipates himself
From the self-worn fetters and chains,
The least remains his stance on the list.
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