I'M At It Again - 3 Poem by Victor Okey Nwatu

The posers that I skillfully side-stepped, dodged,
did the unimaginable, the uncommonly unthinkable.
Kicked me in the shin, rattled me and I budged.
I thought I was at my imperious best, unassailable,
but left faced down, grappling for support that’s rigid;
left inactive, without action, fully frigid.
The reason? I’ll try to really expound,
by kicking rhymes that are simple, not compound.

Long wait, turned out to be of no worth –
More like a billion multiplied by the figure “nought”
more like grains blown away by wind, heading north,
more like losing a war after a battle well fought.
Hurt my ordinarily impregnable feelings,
And despite my inner steel core, made me catch feelings.
Can this be happening to the good old me?
The one and only Vic2T, world’s famous me?

Yes, it was and is happening to me,5-star Vic,
Hit me like Mike’s right hand jab in his prime,
Made all my pride disappear, helped reason to click,
Negative reason, told me I’m worth a dozen a dime.
And this welled up those inciting questions,
Questions replete with morale-crushing actions.
It was the strand meant to perfect it from start,
That succeeded in pulling it all free, all apart.

Yes, it was all pulled harshly into many pieces,
Like a carcass ripped apart with steely talons,
In such a time so short it need no time pieces.
Causing a stream of tears, measurable in gallons.
Visions of a blissful future, irreversibly blurred,
and other aspirations and anticipations, cold-slurred.
Attacked and nearly dried up my fountain in its wake,
But I won’t capitulate, still held on for poetry’s sake.

Yes, for this revered trade of lines and stanzas,
inflexions, figures of speech, rhythms and rhymes,
I found energy like the major grid lines,
and penned lines in seemingly perilous times.
Took it all in, push, shove, barge and nudge;
without breaking a sweat, my stride, or a budge.
Sorry, in the last sentence, I think I lied,
I made it, but I budged, sweated, even cried.

but the power of ten Irene’s couldn’t wash me
away from ankle-deep length of hard-set resolve.
The power of a hundred Nigers couldn’t move me –
For I was the dam, the Kainji that it couldn’t dissolve.
The simmering situation, it’s high temp. couldn’t hold –
when it collided with a precision so point blank, ice cold.
And ‘doldrumic and lethargic” cloud gave way,
When a searing and scorching sun of resolve came it’s way.

But, am I really hitting by the cross hair?
Or am I just an aimless and wasteful loose canon?
Are these words in meaning and significance bare?
Are they stark hollow, worthless and wanton?
Ramblings of a “has been” poet, lazy to think?
Words not really worth their value in ink?
Are they senseless – just a waste of many a rhyme?
A fruitless venture of one with a pen and some spare time?

Or are heartfelt writings of a deeply involved soul,
whose emotions flow out with every syllable, every line?
Are they expressions of a desire to “rock and roll”,
after a harrowing experience of living under the fulfillment line?
Are they a blueprint for rebuilding, a useful masterplan?
Or musings of a disillusioned soul, a finished man?
Are they fragments of a victory song in the making?
A resolve for a soul who can have it all for the taking?

The onus of this opus, the final stanzas explicitly expresses,
It’s the crux of it and the others, just annoying, but useful excesses.

Okey Vic Nwatu; CCF, MMOV.