THE WORLD WATCHED WHILE I DIE... (A TRIBUTE TO GEORGE FLOYD)

THE WORLD WAS WATCHING WHILE I DIE...




As he rose from his bed that day,

It was just another day for him

Another opportunity to stare at the blue sky,
Laugh at the sun and let his feet kiss the ground again
It was just another opportunity for him to smile at the world,
roll with his friends and embrace what the day brings.

What is life to him?
He'd heard it's like a diminishing shadow with waning lights that could fizzle out in seconds.

He loved his mama
And his papa knew he was his hero
And if there was a Mrs. Right, he is hers for life.

His life has been a whirlwind
In a part of the world where he believed he belonged
He's emptied his sweat here,
in dedicated service to his acclaimed motherland
If only he could earn his crumb
Shall he head home smiling to heaven.

Lying on his bed
He would stare out through the window
And watch a thousand stars dance round the moon.

He has seen beauty
Like those moonlit nights under a tree
Songs of the birds spicing the night
While the trees danced a romance.

He liked to watch the flower blossom
Watch the stream sail
Watch the cloud drop tears of raindrop
He liked the sound it made on the roof
And how it felt on his body
As he walked through the street by noon.

But that morning,
As he sat in his car
He felt a real pang of fright
He's always heard of a dead-end
Could this be it for him?

They called him a suspect
What does it mean in this part of the world?
He'd willingly hand himself over
if that means a chance to talk with mama again.

As they approached,
Four hefty man, armed to the teeth
Their face a mask of horror,
More fear crept into him
and left him whitewashed with hopelessness.

The sky turned black
And the singing of the birds evaded his eardrum
He's known pain but here's him pinned to the ground
Hands in locks,
Four foot on his back,
a foot on his neck sniffling dear life out of him.

'I can't breath'
But not even his cries is enough to arouse a tiny sympathy from these humans.

We are brothers aren't we?
He'd been told we all bleed red
Are of the same mother earth
Are one big family
But what brothers subject brothers to this kind of confusion, pain, tortour with an intention to send him to the great beyond?

His offense, what is it?
Even if there's one, is this how to pay for it?
Pinned to the ground by those who have sworn to protect you,
Humiliated before the glare of the world and your tears called a joke?

Tears you couldn't even shed anymore
Because your lungs has failed you and air has eluded you
You see your life leaving you-
dumping you to the brutal fate of painful death.

The sun that you loved so much,
Now a dark ball of gloom
Your eyes are gone
Like withered leaves of a tree
But before you die,
You want the world to know you can't breath
You want the world to know you're thirsty.

No! The world is not short of water,
but the humans he called brothers.
Have denied him this free gift of nature

Now you know why...
But you forgot that before you were born,
You were already guilty
Because you will come coloured BLACK!

And whatever happened,
The world watched till you died.

#JusticeforFloyd

THE PROMISE

I lit the cooker and sat the pot on the fire. I poured in the rice and set to do the dishes. I was battling with the dish and sink when my 7-year old niece rushed into the room.

“Your baby want to die!' She said breathlessly.

“What?” I asked.

“She want to die...” She threw in a cryptic reply and she was gone.

I darted out of the kitchen and went after her. We bustled out of the house with great alarm.

My name is Enwerem Chukwuka from Isuikwuato Abia State state. The place was Ikorodu Lagos and it was on February seventeenth, 2016. It was a day I still wish never came.

I’d just come to Lagos earlier the previous year. I met this baby whom belonged to one of our tenants. I nicknamed her ‘My Baby’ because I didn’t really know her name. Well, the name stuck.

She was two and as lively as a vegetable garden on a sunny March morning. A full fluffy cheek with two firm dimples graced her oval-shaped face. Her skin was as light complexioned as a well ripened paw paw while her hair cascaded down her shoulders like ripples. Her eyes were as dreamy as one of those Oresegun Olumide’s artworks. Her skin glowed with a touch of glass undertones- glassy not fragile and her laughter was like a string of romance heard under the udara tree on a moonlit night.

It was as if our meeting was written in the sky so clear that everything just balanced right between us with little or no effort. Within a short time, we were strolling hand in hand touring round the neighborhood under refreshing evenings, savouring the gently, caressing air of Ikorodu. Ikorodu smelled of nature, of freshness and life. A break fr the real madness Lagos represent.

She was like the beautiful rose that perfected my garden whose innocent smile sat engraved in my mind, helping me bear any misfortune. An angel among human whose mere thought of made my every night short.

She’d wake up every morning and race straight to our apartment. She’d bang on our door in greetings. She had nothing to say, but to let me know she’s up and running for the day. Once I was free for the day, we’d have all the time in the world to spend together.
She was a fun fellow whom you wake up every day hoping to hear her laugh, see her smiles and watch her grace the neighborhood with her lively charisma.

One of my favourite memory of her was watching her join everybody else and try to correctly pronounce ‘uncle Henry’ I waited patiently for the day she would be able to say it correctly.

I knew she had a lot to tell me. I knew she had a lot to ask me. I knew there was much more we had in stock for the future and I waited eagerly on that future with the minutest excitement. Until that fateful February 17th…

As I and my niece arrived at their apartment, I was greeted with one of the most overpowering sights ever; my baby lying helplessly in her grandmother’s arms. In those excruciating minutes, I knew pain. I’ve never felt so helpless in my life that I was ready to scale any mountain to make her survive. But it was hopeless. I prayed to God to restore her health and wondered where my prayers went.

I could see it in her eyes, the last-minute blinks that would close a gate to a once lively soul.
The last gaze she gave me, a weary tired look that carried so much promise and regret with it was a sight I could never forget. In her pain, she was still trying to pronounce ‘uncle Henry’ correctly. And I knew if she could, she’d have done anything to live. I refuse to watch her breath her last so l left. I Left with all the good memories of her. With the new pain swelling within me and raging with helpless abandon.

Sleeping became a big deal with her face rippling before me with each shut of an eye and blink of the eyelids. I saw her smile, the last pain she bored on her face and the melodious cracker of her tiny voice reverberating in my head. It was a mixture of torture and sweet sweet memories.

The regret of my inability to lift a finger of help to her while she was alive and the guilt of having to live through more phase of life without her was overpoweringly weighty.

“She died,” her mother told me later with her eyes soaked in hot tears, “your baby is dead."
I sought for the best words of consolation for this young mother who had lost more than me, but I found none. But even if I had found the right words, I couldn’t have trusted my ability to say them for my strength too had failed me.
All I remember telling her was, “let me know when she returns." She didn’t ask questions and shortly afterward they moved out.

February 2017 I was in the kitchen again when my niece now aged eight rushed in to announce that my baby’s mother was back. I stepped out to see her carrying a two-month-old baby. When the baby saw me, she opened her arms invitingly and gave me that peculiar look of trust. She was my baby’s carbon copy alright and the way she held to my finger came with the old touch.
I had no question, I had no doubt. All that mattered to me was that my baby is back. I could feel it and she was there staring right at me. I knew my baby’s promise has been kept and I knew she had returned. This time, healthier and more determined to live. Like a dream come true, a promise fulfilled.

RELIGION AND THE HEAVY LOAD ON THE NECK OF AFRICA

In China, ten-year-old are already talking technology.
In USA, they can already find their way through the internet with computers.
In UK, they're already potential intellectuals with great political knowledge.
They're already learning self defense in Isreal while in Canada, they already have a good academic root.
You'd be shocked to know fifteen-year old Germans have become well versed in automobiles meanwhile in Afrika as a whole, we wake up talking religion and go to bed hugging religion like some moronic homo sapiens.

Exactly as I am doing. Right, exactly as we are doing and this malady progress, well, to old ages. From generation to generation in an endless circle like a decay in a bone marrow, clutching us in our balls and dragging us down to the ground in a never ending battle.

The brazen devotion and idiocy with which we practice this imported malady called religion is nauseating to a fault and calls for general concern because it's really one if not Afrika's biggest undoing.

I am asked here and there what religion should be replaced with in its absence because Afrika and Afrikans are so used to it that its absence isn't pleasant to imagine. Then I am forced to ask why we are not keen on replacing cured deadly ailments with other ailments?

Why rejoice you're free of cancer when you should be debating what your now dead cancer should be replaced with? Who wants a replacement for deadly viruses like AIDS and Ebola? Doesn't it feel good having them disappear and disappear for good?

This ludicrously ridiculous concept of religion is dragging us on the floor while hindering the progress of Afrika. Just the other day, I was denied a job I merited simply because I lacked the balls to pretend or lay allegiance to a certain religion sect.
When appointments are based on belief and direct sentiments rather than merit, we can only have the Afrika we have.

I've an online USA family friend we'd known for five years and counting who to date, have never bothered to care what religion I am of. However, they rather find the idea of Afrika and original Afrikan culture fascinating.
On the flip side, what mattered to them is that I am humane.

Yet the neighbors I met yesterday are so keen on having me join their religion bandwagon. They're so eager to see me wear those spiritual chain again and see me in that highly despised mental prison. To what end? To satisfy an ideology which originality have no true bearing with us.

The amazing thing is that once an Afrikan changes abode, their thinking changes. Yet, a Nigerian friend I'd known for some years who lives and studies abroad- has never queried me with religion. In fact it has never been part of any of our discussion for about five years.

That's just the case with lot of Afrikans in diaspora and we're still looking for a chalk-coured eye dibia to tell us what our ill is.

The god (God) and religion concept should be a personal experience and nothing to throw into the fulcrum of a society. Especially a wonky one like Afrika looking to stand up.

We should really go back to being humans. Really try and bundle religion back to the owners who unfortunately need it no more because it's as cancerous as it is.

THE MAD MAN CALLED 'A WRITER'

If he is fortunate enough, he has a crappy room to himself.

The room is stashed with books and papers; from the floor to the bed, to the cardboard and down to the top of his glass of drinking water.

Most of the books are opened to page 20, 100-80 and so, placed face-down waiting to be picked again.

Sometimes, he'd sleep with a pen in hand. Other times, he'd sleep with a blank page beside him and wake up with a bomb five-line poetry on it. He'd watch paint dry and call it art, watch a woman walk barefooted at the beach and call it novel.

His computer and phone is full of what could be junks to the average human being. They're full of information and files that only him could read meanings into.

Within a short time, his phone and computer storage space is filled up with his large accumulated junks.

On average, he has very few friends. He Has a strange perception of people he call friends. It might be that bloke wondering what he's doing in his life.
And those people who call him friends, to him may not be seen so.

Thanks to the internet, he has his own audience and some serious online like minds whom when he isn't in his rooms overworking his brains, he chats away time with. Here, he fare better than his predecessors who spoke to the walls and listened to the trees.

He's a chronic thinker. He never stops because he can't. His brain is always busy. And for a fee of I million Dollar, he can't get his head to rest.

More often than not, He's filled a thousand books with writing. Most of which will never see the light of the day. Most of which he'd be too embarrassed to look at tomorrow. He sees everything as story and everyone as a character.

In his head, a thousand stories line up unfinished. he have a big black board in his head where he records everything intellectual to the detriment of little details that could no longer fit in.

His head is so messed up he'd probably forget his birthday. His father's birthday, his mother's maiden name and the name of the lady he's crushing on.

He's got hundreds of contacts on his phone and when he scrolls through it, he's asking himself 'who is this?' and 'who is that?'
He'd ask you your name today, tomorrow, the next and the next. You could have a lunch with him today and tomorrow he's forgotten your face but he has the content of the book he read five years ago imbibed in his mind, word for word. He's that strange.

He finds himself in a crowd and he'll always manage to be alone. He didn't even know how but he always manages to find himself alone. He could stay locked up in his room all day and think it some kind of fun. He'd stare at the flowers all day and prefer the chirp of the birds to any other music.

He's going to somewhere, he lost way, the average normal human being would be panicky but not this one.

He's smiling. He's looking around and he's reading signs. He's picking up details and storing it out in his head. Before he know it, he's in another street and already given up on his original destination.

If he could, he'd even book a room and lodge for the night. He'll visit the reception at night and watch people living the life. He's grinning and laughing out the moment then the next minute, he isn't there anymore; his head has wandered out again.

It could be to the past, it could be an impossible future but then that's it. He passes the night and sets off the next day.

There's an accident on the road, people are shuddering and waiting but he is watching- he's taking mental notes; how disfigured was the car? What colour?

He's hardly sane. A woman is crying but he saw 'A hopeless looking woman whose left cheek was plastered by blood that trimmed down the little cut on her forehead. She was seated on her bag dumped by the roadside, a little further away from the crashed car, clad in half thorn gown, ripped down from her waist revealing a red satin undies which she didn't mind. Clasped between her hands was a breathless 3-year old whose eyes were shut and limbs lifeless, jaw knocked open through where red mass of shattered gums stared at the world...'

He's an idiot you know? He isn't even cringing. He's thrown his gaze into the bus, there's a sticker pasted on the windshield. He's reading the inscription on it, he's looking at the ghostly driver and he's calculating how many more seconds before the police car blaring its siren will arrive.

He has a very odd schedule; you could see him sleeping by 10 Am and eating at 4 Am.

You wake up by 3 AM to use the bathroom and there he is either seated and staring at his computer or his phone screen smiling foolishly at a joke you don't get.

Basically he lives in his own world. And he's created a thousand other words in his head which he always put down in writing.

When he finally present his works to the world, if he was lucky, the world would accept the strange worlds he created, the story, everything- otherwise they'd brand him the mad man he always is.

The truth is, he's not normal. Never was and probably never will. He's hardly sane and in some extreme cases could pass on for a mentally deranged.

He's talking to himself; it's a meeting, a conference and what have you. He's being the characters he created- the sane and the insane, speaking for them and sounding as stupid as you can imagine.

But don't worry, he's probably not totally mad but he's mad anyway.