IN THE STRUUGLLE AGAINST PAIN

Like salt on earthworms

Men

      Women

              Children

Rattling, coiling alive

Their screams,

…unheard in it hollering echoes

Dying in flaring fuel

Their voices,

Gulped in fiery gas

Different people of a same faith

Wailing tears to a thousand bleed

None survived, none arrived

Their frames flame in bubbling scars-

Spreading like gluttonous ocean’s billow

To conserve not even the finest scalp

Our good-bye kiss

Our last hug

Turns an effigy of toasty carrion sores

And this generation

Cannot begin scavenging the scenes

For traces of faceless littering carcasses

When history too is dead

We can only recover fear

In figures of uncountable despairs and deformities

In this struggle against pain

Yesterday refuses to give way.

 © Uche Uwadinachi

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WALLS OF UNENDING SCARS

I

I have seen
The four walls
Coated with gory hand-prints
Of criminals and suspects
In-scripting awkwardness
Pleading for a public presentation

I stared at slogans
Screaming….
“we die…innocent”
“i was here”
“and so what”
“are you the president?”
“dem go fire me”
“na today”
“…save us”

My heart tears my eyes
And the graffiti spawns
Ceaselessly…

My head smothers
As ravaging foul odour
Of urine and shit
Shutters me to worship
At the walls of unending scars
With my own “craze-words”.

II

Hell is cell!
The black bowl
Smiths into a black hole
Bloats for the unborn convict
Guilty – of life, wanting to survive
…raiding flames at night
…beaming red in flight
…yellow coal for ice
Collies for the burning
Of our already hurt hearts.

“Pollease”…police
Poll for faults
Lease of crimes
To catch and lock our lives
Into the bloating black hole
Of a cell.

And so
The walls persist
A writing cry of the weak
Dying…to die today
And died…. Tomorrow
WILL DIE NO MORE.

BY  UCHE UWADINACHI

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