3 Poems│Nwaoha Chibuzor Anthony

Light and Darkness
I’ve gotten you a tomb surrounded by twenty one flowers – Anonymous.

(I)

I am a demon fallen in love with an angel.

Ha! Hii! Ho!

While growing up, I was taught how to give varieties of monosyllabic chuckles that paint my face neat and harmful.

I am ready to write a poem of five lines
in two stanzas
on her plump, drippy,
oily moustached crevice.

Maybe, it would be a blessing
to the little ones
whose first breaths will be
the fragrance of her crevice.

(II)

At first twilight,

A male demon and a female angel met
at the steeple of a high mountain
when the gods weren’t awake:

Revealing a new specie of image
formed from a mixture of light and darkness.

(III)

They cuddled

(IV)

They kissed

(V)

They made love

(VI)

They defiled the law of light and darkness.
Sins of their lovely frames
running naked on each strand of their hairs.

(VII)

She found this note under her door:

My love, I’ve bought you no dress
but I have gotten you my flesh.
So you could wear it
and feel yourself wearing a frame bigger than your shape.

(VIII)

He found this note on her forehead:

I’ve also gotten you a tomb surrounded by twenty one flowers.

(IX)

The gods wake

(X)

The darkness varnishes.

Clear spaces

Neither the earth nor the tallest mountain can carry my heavy heart.
Even the swiftest wind is slower than my illusions.

This blank paper stinks as I paint a broken poem into its cracked spirit.
Yesterday, I worshipped the wind and spat into the dust
and created a link that steals fractured gazes and burnt illusion.
Two minutes ago, I learnt how to sketch demons beside roses,
and drawn with a sinking ship and dilapidated building as the background.
I’m a broken leaf, made lonely by twists of fate, left in the crassness of dusty pathways
and begging to have its way into the smile of an old grave.

A fig tree without a skeleton, living in an earthquake,
with his unforgiven sin dancing naked on his beautiful lips.
My veins are pathways leading me to the tower killing bodies
and roasting them in the sacrament of woven silence.

One day, I will find peace
and the chipped valour running in my blood shall be
the chariot that wheels me into the cave of calming perfection and clear spaces.

How to paint a god
“…and he was there watching as the colours splattered on the vellum which he uses in drawing himself.”   – Anonymous

Even if you will need to go up into deadly realms, to find a suitable ink to sketch a god, you will need every grain of your spirit bowing below the wrath of the glimmering shades of its glory, and your flesh begging fervently to vomit the gem it houses – your skeleton, and also, your blood streaming along wounded path seeking for eagles to have their rests beneath the waters.

Once upon a time, on the mountain of craft, the gods were depicted with lines of gold mined from the abyss of nothingness, festooned with colours that not even an ant would sense its radiance.

Painting a god is very same as painting yourself, sketching out the innermost part of your frame and the feigning side of your plane.

To paint a boy like me, you would require a hermit, a blacksmith and a priest. The blacksmith would carve the prayers of the priest and the hermit, so that it could have it way into the smiles of my image that drop flowers beside every grave of its fold…

… shadows. When I look into the mirror, I see a boy among seeming filled space; a boy backwardly ahead of his shadow. The eyes, doors of the soul enthral at each gaze. Our shadows are effigies of our first selves that were lost while trying to carve a crux…

…dust. I could remember those days in Ihioma, when the dust of the red earth was like barricade in the veins, blocking our ability of finding the way out of the labyrinth of fate: “Beware of a naked person, who offers you clothes,” my father would say as he watches us play out a smile on his face…

…darkness. On the gloomy sky, two faded skulls hung over a black hawk which picks quills littered on a large field. A winged naked figure with white eyes, crying away its sorrow when the gods weren’t looking.

You are the artist. I am the paint. god is the image, made from ink.

Wake me when you’re gone. Lift the broken idol to the sun, and this poem will be done. A silhouette is bleeding out cologne of confusion, tugging ghosts and flesh apart, and grinning at its statue that got stuck in the crepuscular deluge of tousling maze. Call it art.

Nwaoha Chibuzor Anthony is a Nigerian poet and novelist. He’s also a student of the University of Nigeria Nsukka, and still metamorphosing.