There are complaints rolling
There are agitations running
Mouths are ceaselessly speaking
But a deep thought is wanting

Some say "They just wanted to be on top
To show the world their gift of flop
To remove the nation from the up
To  make all drink without a cup"

The problem is not with them that rules us
Rather with all that make up the course
The course Nigeria which none care about the contours
Of which the flag is due to change colours

Let all change but first with you
Let all arise but not a few
So that all may transform with the milieu
So that at night and day comes the vital dew

At this juncture let us chorus we can
At this time, let us not weaken our van
Let us transform ourselves to that man
Whom God in his image made his own

Nigeria the milky land of resources
A part of Africa the mother of sources
The giant of Africa where talent gushes
Castigated but with ceaseless rushes.

© Darlington

Ask by the foot of Langbodo
In the sheds of eerie bushbaby
Where the mosquitoe twitches
Haphazardly it's legs at the sound of the bembe

Ask of Akara-Ogun, the compound of shells
Nd they will tell you of a thousand powdered
Gourdlets, six hundred amulet , sixty incubi
And the legends of the forest of a thousand daemons

Sit by the entrance of Oyo-ile
Ask of the tales of Olurombi
The young maidens will tell you of "Aponbepore"
Who went and never was never seen

Call the sons of "Ayangalu"
Let them pick the "Iya-ilu"
Let the "Iya-ilu" sing of Moremi Ajasoro
Ile-ife would surely revere at her Savior's call

Call "Alakowe" let him read from his books
the chronicles of "Adigbonranku" the son of "Agbako"
The one we gave a white flowing "Agbada" But
chooses to sweep our joy with the blade of his "Agbada"

He will tell you of how the "Akuko" failed to crow
at the sun's rise: how the rat spoke the language of birds
He will tell of how we had filled our "sokoto" with stones
Waiting for him in the market place but alas the stones
were too heavy For our malnourished hands.

©Scarredpoet

God forces no man
For your are who you want to be
Your desires may melt away as ice
Your dreams may grow gray before your eyes

Don’t look down on yourself
For while you live has a reason
A reason bigger than you may think
Never bring thyself to halt.

If life doesn’t give you, then give life
Don’t be worried about what you don’t have
Many worries are kept for those who are never satisfied
Never be sad or be cowed .

© Felix Joy

Because the Baby was a Girl

She stopped frequenting the stream of her youth
On market days
Her space was vacant among women
At noon, she took cover from hot sun
An imbecile spirit might be lurking the street
Her protruding belly is her burden to bear alone

Alani, her husband
Kept boasting to his drunk friends
“My son is on his way into this world”

One night the sky roared with rain
She laid on a mat
Gasping between life and death
Blood flooded, tears flowed
Anguishing pain pounded her
Then with one fainting sigh
A healthy child was born

No one touched the little thing
Disappointment shone on all expecting faces
When Alani asked what sex it was
"A girl again" came the answer
He hurried out of the room angry and brokenhearted

Exhausted, she pulled her untended baby closer
Both unwashed in maternity blood
Whispered without any strength
"Live my child, live well"
Dropping her baby in silence
She pull back her head towards the mat
And breathed her last

© Olatuja Oloyede

I stand here by your grave without tears
Though my  heavy heart is a shattered debris
I have no flowers to place over your eternal bed
No will to sing those songs that died when you died
I am here only to remind you

Dunga! Dunga!! Dunga!!!
Son of Atandi
Thrice I call you
Turn awhile from your dance of immortality
Stare at humanity from your cloudy palace

Do not roam the parches of the elusive realm
You don't belong there
Your mother sits by her hearth every morning
Old, broken and childless
Her sagging head bowed in defeat

Atandi, your father longs to be with his father too
For no man has suffered a greater woe
Than a man who knows the grave of his children

So join not in the frenzy dance of the dead
Do not sing in the solemn assembly of the ghost yet

Come back to the tears of your parents
Of your friends and loved ones
Bring justice to the pains of our troubles
Avenge your death
O Dunga!
Son of Atandi

© find part two

Thighs

(Soul Poet)

When weight of life
Bruises & Colds my heart

I ran to you
Like a troubled chick runs
To mother  hen.

On your thighs,
I found warmth and panacea.
_niyeric9518

Thighs of a damsel heals more than a pill and alcohol

Aunty Mimo.      Scarredpoet _

Aunty Mimo! Divine' unsung mother
Last bender of mortal's morality
Chief custodian of earthly ethics
Holiness commander of the highest order

Songs of mimo! Mimo! Mimo!
We lay at thy tender feet
Remover of the specked eyes
While a log lays seige in hers

Seller of the Divine's chosen Aso Ebi
The Heavenly fabrics fabricator
Aunty! Can we get you the divine's omo?
For a map of oil graces your Aso Ebi

Aunty Mimo- Mimo implies holiness
Aso Ebi- A group cloth worn to celebrate
       special occasions
Omo-  A local detergent

New Eve {sex doll🙎🏽}
.
Years have begotten ages
And ages baby-showered strangely beautiful civilization
In the garden of Eden men parked the vehicle of their sanity
To ride the bicycle of wonderous insanity
On the road built with hocus-pocus animalistic civilization
.
Years have begotten ages
And these ages breed beautiful animalization
That enslaves men with purgation of strange civilization
.
Alas! It's a new leaf with a new Eve
Adeiu to you labake,
Ashake! Let it ring in your father's hears
Your paid pride price I want
To  pay electricity bills.
.
~Footnotes
Ashake, labake =yoruba names
*Balogun David Tolulope

STOP ABUSING POETRY
(Shakespeare cries)

Each time we meet
I could feel the spill
The sound of gushing
Blood from his core, rushing

Shakespeare looked away steadily
As his room turns higgledy-piggledy
As proclaimed poet cheats us clearly
They abuse poetry willy-nilly

Are you stupid?
Of course you're
Desist, before I pour you acid
You ain't a poet don't be high

You just match rhymes
And tag it poetry
Do you even know about rhymes
Internal and end rhymes in poetry

The preface is the AABB you know
But where is the sweetness, the likes of assonance and Co
It's not that I want to show
Just to cob your acts little bo.

You only know the AABB
And that's all you know
You don't even know this piece is ABAB
Yet you claim you know

Don't mistake rhymes for poetry
For it's not
It's only a part of poetry
So, desist, stop being a thief and a slot

You had better be a rap artist
Than abusing poetry
How can you be an artist?, you bloody arsonist
When you don't even know rhythm in poetry

Just park your things and leave
For creative minds to speak
Leave, please leave
Never look back, peep or pick.

©Akanbi Taofeek 2018.

*TO ÀDÙKÉ, FOR VAL*
.
I'm on one noisy trip, to odyssey
Where fine silks and silken crowns
Are tendered on the braided hair
Of a hillside girl
Where love is placed on a thirsty tongue
And eaten with wild fruits
Where I can sail away with time
Without rhythm or enchantment
But if I'm long gone
Plough the land, a shelter for my grave
Over the contours of my love lines
Then, I'll gird my bare heart
In the hollow of my eternal bed
To celebrate deathdays and not val.
.
George O. Victor
*TheGhost👻*
— To the lovers.

*THIS IS LIFE*

The sun has lost its pendant
While trying to shun the stars in pride
The moon is grieved as
The Pentecostal sounds of chattering hopes
Are but maimed
The crickets songs are devoid of thanksgiving
Soul beggars are riding on mares
mere wishes are thrown aloft in anguish
A seers thoughts are but unseen
A priest vision is blur, paradise is armed
The patriarch is obsessed with water
The kingfish wants to soar high
The winsome tides have refused to be ebbed
Mere anarchy against a loosed world
Joseph's dreams are asleep
Our Dreams are on a voyage
But the sailor sank.
This is Life!.
.
©GEORGE O. VICTOR
*THE GHOSTwriter*👻

*BLANK DIALOGUE*

Ma'am can you hear me?
Are you angry?
I can feel the holocaust over this telephone
Over these halt-lines of vocal circuits
I can feel your reddish mood
I beseech you,
Break mercy on this hard head
With your tender mildness
Like august rains on oak leafs.
Hello? Can you hear...
it's wavy!...Hello!, Hello!!

#Poetaineering
#ipen
©The Ghostwriter👻

*CATHOLIC FUNK*

We sang and rasped and coughed
As the communion touched our sterile tongue
My heart uncoiled and fell
Like notes from a drunken guitar
We breezed away from the priest
And held on to our saintly robes,
The darts swirling in our clenched fist
Like immiscible fluids
Then an hymn blared from the cubicle
With voices like whispers from gossiping angels
"It is well with your soul"
As if answering death, I whispered, "Me?".

_Happy sunday_
*©The Ghostwriter* 👻

*DAWN*

The sky had veiled itself with a sea-blue shade before Alani woke up that morning. The sinister cockerels had bathed dawn with coo-like dirges, and the sun in its bleached majesty loom above the lucid clouds unsure of which way to set. He groaned as he turned his side on the cozy mat he lain on. He stretched out his arms so hard that his bones cracked joyfully, "ahh". He sat up and bent his heads craftily to the sides and yawned, a pint of carbon dioxide oozed out of his unwashed mouth. He looked around his hut as if looking for something or someone that's not actually present to greet him. He sighed and got up, staggering about the room with his hibiscus colored eyed slightly opened like a drunk. He reached out to a clay heathen pot just behind his raffia basket and gulped a sumptuous amount of water from it, rinsed his mouth and swallowed. Satisfied, he jarred at the heavy wooden door and pulled the log used as a lock behind it away and opened.

The misty morning welcomed him with a new chapter of an history book. Children, girls in their pinafores and simbi hairdo, with lunch bags, madefrom local raffia to match and boys with their ever haggard but smart shirts tucked into their over-sized shorts with marching khaki sandals, chatted happily to school. Farmers with their sickles and nets walked with zeal down their farm path with their illiterate but hardworking children trailing behind them like blood from a menstruating woman. Alani looked on and sighted the long chaotic queue in front of Iya Dara's akara stall. Few successful men with their bicycles wink at innocent girls coming from the stream, with waterpot sitting graciously on their choral heads. These sights bore him, he shook his head, and sat down on the lawn of his hut, bare-butted.

Just two moonless nights ago, he had come home from the farm tired and dehydrated and his mother had caressed and massaged his body with shea butter but today she has gone to rest with her husband leaving her only son, Alani, to sojournthis world alone. Tears well up Alani's eyes and it fell in tiny rivulets down his cracked face.

He remembered when Maami, as he fondly calls his mother, had bathed him herself on his ninth birthday and had opened floodgates of prayers onhim. She'd sold virtually all her clothes to buy goat meat to make a delicacy for him on that day. He remembered when she'd run to the village priest when he was sick and cried bitterly at the priest's feet to help her son. He'd watched her face then and felt something he would never understand.

Likewise today, he couldn't understand why God should take all his family and leave him in penury."Everything good will come", he whispered and entered into his hut again and that was the last of him.

Often times when I go to town, to ilè olùjí, I still see strange inscriptions made on the shackles of a broken hut. I can't read them but I have this feeling they're directed to me, like this man that always visits me at midnight on every moonless night.

.#iPenAaua#History#Memories#Creativity#TheGhostWriter👻
*George O. Victor.*

AMAKA

Amaka,
So I was right, when I
pointed at this bread fruit tree
two years ago, and
told you that that was how
this love may end.

I told you that it may fail
and fall unexpectedly,
like the huge heads
of those Ukwa fruits,

You smiled then, and
holding my hand, your
chiseled pair of honest lips and innocent eyes
reassured me
that that was not possible.

But we no longer talk!
You neither return my calls, when
you miss them, nor my texts,
when you read them.

And just  yesterday, I saw
you, holding a man's hand.
He was tall and looked rich.
And he was not me.

Sanctus

2014

I know a nation
Where the labours of the heroes past are in vain,
With barrels of empty cultures

I know of a heaven
Ruled by corrupt gods
An aristocracy of bigots
Amalgamating significant segregation,
Ethnic collage on ethnic collapse.

Once upon a nation
Of flourishing nature,
Bond by splendid culture,
Grew on the wings of civilization,
Now crumbling in confusion
Should we still blame the colonial masters.

          ©Nathaniel stella.

*ABÈÈNÍ*

Abèèní
Refuse me a final refusal
For when máámi sings my oríkì
In smouldering sounds
I will rustle into a romantic haze
And dance the steps of the blazing tribes
Of Ilè olújì, with your hand in mine
Cradled in a responsive grasp

Abèèní
For color and lustre, I beg
When the veil of Ilè olújì uncovers
Our interlocked legs
Wave your tender hands to the children
Armying after your gorgeous lot
Wave until their legs are free
And their heartbeats are settled.

Abèèní
If maámi welcomes you
with a twitch of an eye
Embrace the dust with your subtle knees
And kiss her embroidered legs.
For in her grace, our love is primed.
Abèèní, tend the weeds around báámi's threshold
And strike the mould— A thousand times!.

*FOOTNOTES*
Abèèní- A yoruba woman's name
Ilè olújì— A town in Ondo state.
Máámi—Yoruba name for Mother.
Baámi—Yoruba name for Father.

*©George O. Victor*
*Ghostwriter👻*
©2018

*THEY TOO*

They too, have lain amongst dreams
And perused, in tears, and in a streamlet
Down the torrents of retreating hopes
For the fading face, of happiness.
.
Oft' times, their flattened chuckles
Are accompanied by orchestrated sounds
Of hungry stomachs and rotten foliage
Of infected water.
.
They too, have implored for mercy
Lying on church lawns
Whilst their kwashiorkored legs kicked feebly
And their heart begged for a warmer home.
.
Their footprints are synchronized
On the path of the supple stream
Where they sought their dreams
In a bottle of liquid hope
.
Their hollow eyes
Traveled In plunged requests
To the hearts of the natives, at the market square
For a dime, to quench the belly
Of its humdrum
.
Their hands, held in an accord
Coveting each other's dream
And renouncing desolate days
Ready to flare a good bye
To suffering.
.
Perhaps one day, they would say
I would buy mother a silken towel
And look askance at her ashen face
And tell her the world is void of love.

If by the morrow
We wish upon a shooting star
And lay our heads against the earth
We pray to be deftly sewn
To the wild things of yonder realms
.
But now,
They will scavenge the refuse dump
For a meal or two
To last them a million years.
.
*The Ghostwriter👻*

Let me
.
I know from thousands of cuts you bleed
These cuts turn scars and scars repeat the deed
I know millions of pain has been deposited
Into the bank of your memory
.
I know you are the priceless jar broken in a millions pieces
Shattered with turbulence heart crisis
And just like Vasily Perov paintings, your face preach beauty
And tragedy
You are burdened and you wallow in misery
. 
But darling,
Let me be the glimpse of light your darkness
To lift up your burdened poor soul
Let me be the one,
To make you feel like Newton when he discovered gravity.
.
Balogun David Tolulope
Drunk_poet

*Penalty of Godhead*

The old man's bed
of straw caught a flame blown
from overnight logs by harmattan's
incendiary breath. Defying his age and
sickness he rose and steered himself
smoke-blind to safety.
A nimble rat appeared at the
door of his hole looked quickly to left and
right and scurried across the floor
to nearby farmlands.
Even roaches that grim
tenantry that nothing discourages
fled their crevices that day on wings they
only use in deadly haste.
ousehold gods alone
frozen in ritual black with blood
of endless tribute festooned in feathers
perished in the blazing pyre
of that hut.

© Chinua Achebe