Depression

Sighs seep off from the burdened spirit like bubble gas
Complaints drip from the lip like a ruptured pipe
Murmurs break off restraint like erupting lava from a volatile earth
Bitterness pollutes the heart like sewage spill on a stream
Restiveness possesses the mind like a demon
Moody silence thickens the air like fog
Indignation redden the eyes like the burning end of a cigarette
Frustration depresses like the wreckage of a crashed car
Tension tightens the air like a hangman’s noose
Fury circulates the veins like liquid fire
Energy dissipates like a dying sun
Sanity gradually snap like an over stretched thread
Insanity approaches like an undertaker with a pale smile
Death beckons like a beacon!

Total eclipse

I bend my head to the large pages of the morning paper
Spread over my laps
And see the light fading fast
The stories are as dark as the ink with which they are written
So much tension captured in those pages
It’s a miracle that the paper has not caught fire
The photographs show grim faces reacting to grim situations
A few laughing faces but it’s only for the camera

I read of one day’s of worth of news and it includes
Treasury looting that makes Abacha look like an amateur
A boat sinking with all passengers on board
Plane crashes, collapsed buildings,
Mass burial given to whole villages by an earthquake,
Mudslides,
Religious and ethnic strife
Kidnapping of foreigners
From the Niger Delta to Iraq
Lots of obituaries, no single birth!

Page by page the horrors unfold until I fold them up at the last page
Then I raised my head in realization saying
“It wasn’t as dark as this yesterday or the day before, before…”
Cured of my illusions
I suddenly knew what to expect in future morning papers
A slow but steady advance to…
A Total eclipse!

Oily Faces versus Ugly cases

Like a hen and her brood
We, the followers, scratch out a living from our national soil
But our leaders are not scratching with us
They are digging with the machinery of Government
And finding massive oil deposits
The pipes they construct meander away from our locations
To theirs and their banks
No wonder the papers are full of smiling leaders with oily faces
And unsmiling followers with ugly cases!


Dedicated to us, the followers, the masses as we like to call ourselves