Nightmare Poem by Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

I saw in her eyes the sallowness of festered love.
My drum had beaten to the resonance of celebration,
Of the deeds of love evaluation.
Her art bemuses me, especially when spoken and
Sketched to the rhythms of assayed hollowness –
Mottled balances echo silently on withered spots,
And the words she cherishes lie way below frontiers of enchantment.
How short my éclat reigned!
And my blood congealed!
Do I lay prostrate to hypoxia?
If I could borrow a leaf from her, I trust it would be the leaf of Love.
And on the edge of skewered times, I would lend the fit of
Pyrokinesis, cauterizing the inclement weather of her deception.
There’s that culture shock which love carries.
It kills and maims, yet lays crusts of veneer on one’s
Premeditated ego, pointing skyward like the finial of
Root-pannelled structure of breathless architecture.
My heart aches to the illusion of several months borne
Through the whim of my angel.
I wake on the brim of her nose.
Her eyes are grey and distant.
Rust besieges her hair with sliced threads of extended harvests.
I level up to her art with a hamster tied to the loose
Slivers of bamboo elements – with a repast so heartlessly
Soured by the sun.
I lean beneath her iron door, long loosened by the courage
Of assembled art.
My heart bleeds.
She lied to me.
As slimy as the mucilage of the okra,
I have shed genuine light of her hidden treasure.
And on a dark, vengeful night on the corridors of April,
Saturn, spinning her icy rings, revealed much.
And her love, deep and garish, traces peregrinations of
A hunter’s search through wooded paths, rain-drenched and musty.
From the shebeen to the sacristy.
The village church bell peals to the beat of my heart – a heart so deceived.
The gloom, structured in gossamer, binds me, haunts me.
Red banners of camwood yield to the moist of invaded space,
Tenebrous, and soused with the tears of a fallen roof.
Flaking tongues of prurient monsters lick my toes in noisy flicks....
God, where have I been?