Prison - Obsidianportaldotcom

 

The path of the eyesight narrows to a standstill,
Crawling moonlights perched on the concrete floor—
Memories poured through the lone empty night,
Steadily, the mind crustily kneeled in the lying body.
Time sat beside the cold wall, tired of wandering—
Inside the yards, walled aspirations of stripped dreams
Hung on the floating stares of dissolving clouds.

Outside, the world is in another callous jamboree;
Young flesh, sprayed to fantasy-fanned emotions,
Splashed hugs, cuddled chocolates and costly teddies.
Infantile girls happily giggled to masculine burning stares—
Unconcerned, unaware, they frolicked, the land spiralled…
Justice sat alone— afraid, smuggled mandates banters
Loudly, Poverty hurriedly treks home, smiling for the
9 o’clock news; another committee to be Lazarus-ed
With fanfare and the day, like the rest, floats way!

In here, between the walls, it’s just another day too,
In the elongated month of an endless juvenile year—
No teddies! No justice! No democracy!
Only piercing memories of a failed revolution
And the young Blooded feathers of slaughtered birds
Who still gather at the other side of the tall wall,
In remembrance of the furtively peeped dreams,
Now fenced within the pants of our locked bodies.

 

Image Via
Anefiok Akpan 4Second post in the Brittle Paper Poet series, written by Anefiok Akpan.   The poem beautifully captures the solitude and melancholy of a prisoner’s life.

A graduate of the University of Ibadan where he studied advertising, Anefiok currently works as a part time Copywriter and Social Media Analyst at the Nigeria Centenary Project.

Anefiok speaks Hausa, Yoruba, Ibibio, Efik and English. He loves traveling and meddling in people affairs and is an aspiring photographer. He is the 2008 winner of The Wole Soyinka/Dapo Adelugba Prize for Literature.