Our king's land-dom.

who dares it,
defying all odds
scheme the plot, talkless
sum it up in action
an invasion on our king's land-dom?

a haven of fighters, of brave warriors
 axe and sword-wielding,
to the last of us

we were that invincible
or so were made to believe
until that year, year of our undoing,
when we had a near-total wreckage
 of all that exhumes life on our land

 it all started, when the fear 

- of losing to serious illness, our king,
(the sovereign one, only
with whom our hard-fought wars were conquered) -   

  with its deadly grip, stretched deep,
into the core of our sanities,
whipping up terror,
about our would-be fate
- aftermaths of our
king's imminent demise -

the terror, 

in its daredevilry, a mere war, confined to our innards, within,
     reaped its harvest from among our men, interred them on our land
even earlier
than was our ill king by whom
they were made only gore-inflicting warriors.

Solemn assembly.

when our revered vicar
as was his duty

mounted the pulpit place
full,
on his priestly regalia

-the one that regularly lures me into the clerical profession-

it was or a different mounting

that Sunday

we knew no less, as it was later confirmed
with streams of hot perspirations 

running swiftly on his face

they seemed to have evolved
from a boiling, within

at the lingering,
unspeakable and defaming scandals that have hitherto 

rocked the church

in a dwindling state -an effete in its efficacy 

mouthed before they were voiced, 

the words were glutted out

at us, from him,
our revered vicar  

hard-hitting, clonal versions too,

of the verses
the lector had read earlier

meeting hearts, piercing same at will

this air of eeriness
- solemn assembly -

greeted and beat us, demandingly even.

we were chuffed by it, in our differing ways

ooosssheeeeey(s) were chorused

 audeshi(s) muffled too

then, was our vicar glad
he had made all hearts to talk

            *oooosheeey and *audeshi are Nigerian colloquial words for thumb up and dusted in that order.

We'll kill despair, AGAIN.

Enlist! Gift despair a chase,

Say enlist, we must kill despair, again

For once, and by the eternal,

despair had died, not by a

 stroke

of serendipity, we saw to that

-That moment, of many, when we tossed

selves, 

unthinking, 

into the aperture

between a bull's horns,

 when we decidedly routed thoughts

along patchy paths to satiate 

our quests

we had done no thing but morphed

our despair into a hope, 

our only hope-

And the morphing, we took to be the kill

that, 

left despair just past half-dead.

Old, 

weak despair 

self-revivified, caught up

with, and sauntered coolly into us, 

into our

newly optimistic minds

We got despair anew, because we had hoped

Do we cease to hope? 

perhaps, we all should

cease to hope TILL hopelessness

So we'll kill despair, AGAIN, 

and forever.

Excerpt from THE WISH{fiction}.

  Held in an almost-retrogressive traffic-cum-present mess on his way to work, Adesina's tight fix was further worsened having a wordy as his cab driver that morning. The driver-a dark man in his late 40's- would stop at nothing to speak his mind as he drove. Apparently, he steered two wheels simultaneously; the car wheel {which he held loosely yet professionally in his hands} and an imaginative wheel of the thoughts on his mind.
The freedom of his lips he fully exercised moving from severe criticism of government to a detailed recap of a robbery incident which had occured at a first generation bank the previous day. He lamented the patently obvious ingenuous acts of the police for which they couldn't nip the robbery attack in the bud.

   Adesina {although totally indifferent}, could not forcibly block the waves of his thoughts (the driver's) hugging tightly his eardrums. He sat impatiently on the rear seat of the car rehearsing in his mind the words, phrases and clauses he would weave together to free himself of an impending Query again at work. The knack he once owned for punctuality back in school he couldn't boast of at his work place.
     Aside this little & tiny flaw in an otherwise perfect character, his boss and colleagues respected him a lot for his mental prowess. Like any other progressive, he held close to his heart a dream of his name enshrined in the Nigerian legal hall of fame. So, he landed no choice but to put his nose to the grindstone, graduating Magna cum laude in Law from the University of Lagos, proceeded to the Lagos campus of the Nigeria Law school, sat for and passed the bar{after those back-breaking hours and an interminable year of study} .
Now as a newly-sworn in attorney at Willie & Ogar investigations, the gene for punctuality as though they were, he must induce again,
he had to theorize earnestly in his mind how to send lateness to coventry. While the driver's mouth kept leaking, he was completely absorbed in his own thoughts.
     However,  the driver, out of his arguably-amusing sense of humour, made a witless WISH to God, a wish {only if he had known the meaning}for a postcognitive ability, to look into the past,  "I wish  the hand of the clock could be reversed so the events of this robbery can be grasped and
the robbers nabbed" He said loudly.
Oh ! what a pea-brained thought, he laughed himself out as the traffic lightened up gradually.

The driver's thought as pea-brained as he had tagged did not spare Mr Adesina of a slothful use of his intellect as well. He relived the past about his father's death, the circumstances around which it occured, and how a profession which he would later be in league with  had failed to light the dark spot of his death.


PS: THE WISH is a fictional story I am writing based on man's quest (even until now) to travel into the past so as to unveil the mystery around numerous events in our lives. However, this insatiable dream/wish to travel into our various pasts will always remain a WISH in as much
our past can noot be altered.
                                                                       April 2013.