Day 30: Within

Yaahoo! I made it. 30 poems in 30 days!

Within the shadow

You stumble on the factory of grief;

The release of tears

Curtailed and brief.

And of hope deferred.

Our flesh pines like the noon dusk;

The breadth of our days is a speck of dust.

Within the shadow

Expectation is sallow.

Sighing and tears,

Doubting and fears

Birth the circle of existence-

A summary of our experience.

Babies born out of wedlock,

Education is tough luck,

The system’s all messed up,

Gridlocked!

Without the shadow

Reality grows talons

It’s the disease called herd instinct.

Well yeah, it stinks.

Humanity is past feeling

And the best days of our lives unfolds

Within the shadow.

The music moans a dirge

I can feel my shattered bones immerge

In a hub where love is unknown.

Hope wanders like a stray, forlorn,

My heart beats in sync with trauma

Too cold to feel warmth’s aura.

Within the shadow

The days are possessed with rust

Still the night times recall the process.

It’s hard to imagine trailing this course

Any chance at all, of access

Out of decay into an illusion of success

Is like passing thro’ the eye of a needle.

Within the shadow

Hate fiddles

Inflicting torment on the soul in rations.

Dead is compassion;

Safe from the cares of rescuing the perishing.

In this climax, truth is lying

Shameless to the face of the oppressed.

The import of the message is over-stretched.

Within the shadow

Staring in-thro’ eternity’s eyes

It’s near-impossible to realize

How fleeting is time.

The race is weary,

Death is tranquility.

Here lies the bones of determination,

Beneath the palaces of a plague.

When the human heart experiences corruption,

Paradise is seldom regained.

Akpan

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Day 29: In This Position

I

In this position

My story is an exception-

A passionate execution.

My beginning

Was at the inception of misery;

Multiplied opposition-

Human and supernatural

And now lament is ritual.

I am a predestined individual

But it don’t seem that my faith’s got collateral.

Since my beginning

Tragedy has defined the essence

Of my existing

Now I reminisce

In this place of memory’s evanescing.

Cause from my childhood

The good I dreamt

About youth

Remained true fantasies-

Fairy tale excesses.

The streets are the crematorium of destinies,

The cemetery of dreams.

And nobody else has been schooled like me

On this thesis.

I’m letting my pen bleed

As I preach with my soul’s ink

On the lethal repercussion of human greed.

See me in flesh and blood

Rotting in poverty’s spot,

Evil super-imposed before my eyes.

In this gangster’s paradise,

It’s difficult to breathe

Cause the polluting multiplies.

I have witnessed the sun bow down to darkness,

I have struggled with the rage of madness,

I’m living in the eclipse of goodness.

Surviving the time is impossible.

The days are apocalyptic

And decay is inevitable.

II

In this position

My mission has reached a conclusion.

As I battle this pollution

Stash’d in a corner

Like some wasted leftover.

Take a journey thro’ the windows of my eyes

Into the catacomb of a persecuted mind

If you can visualize

What you can’t feel.

I sweat blood to earn a meal

And that was no big deal

Cause my nightmare was kill.

I lived in a mansion

But situation had a passion.

I battled my demons

With terror devised weapons.

Lions, three times my size

With hell’s option for compromise.

But then, I had the end in view

Like a chain-reaction on cue.

The tears betrayed my eyes,

Made it impossible to hide the several sighs.

Money answered all things

Affection became one of those things.

Friendship’s deceit

Hurt deeply like the betrayer’s kiss.

Mates dropped out of school

Like what’s the use?

No one gives one damn about youths;

Not Papa’s tools

That didn’t provide enough food.

And since there ain’t no job opportunity

In the hood

Creativity is one fat bull.

Trauma follows me everywhere,

Hopelessness fogs the atmosphere.

It rains on a sunny day.

And that’s the cost

I have to pay

Since I came to be in this position.

Akpan

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Against the Ropes

When my back’s against the ropes

And lethal punches rain on me from ten gloves,

Ask me not to be a graceful loser.

The battle has just begun.

When I look blinded for destiny,

Searching, despairingly for something invisible to me,

Ask me not to give up so easily.

All this would be worthless without the adventure.

In the event of my instruction,

When I learn vital lessons through challenges,

I look to see beyond the deception

As I pick from seeming weeds gleanings of corn.

When my back’s against the ropes,

When unnumbered adversaries surround me with stones,

Ask me not at such moments to give up,

The victory is already won.

Akpan

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Lifestyle (II)

How dare you question how I live,

When your assistance was invented to deceive?

You feed your greed

By the breakthroughs I achieve.

I let pain explain

The degree of hate I experienced on this tragic plane,

Cause the dogs are not to blame

For the name of the game.

Yet, the thugs must be crazy.

They call us lazy

Cause we provoke their hypocrisies

And expose them shady.

I do what I gatto do-

What needs to be done to get thro.

There’s hell to pay if I wait on you.

And hell’s really child’s play

When you analyze this tragedy I face.

It’s hand to mouth

And it’s world war IV to zip your snout

While starvation stabs at my throat.

It’s either hustle or I turn ghost.

In this life, you never get what you truly deserve

So I endure a fragile reserve-

A youth with one purpose for a future:

To outlive the laws of nature.

Indeed, you call me criminal

Cause I chose to be a unique individual.

You made a ritual

Of hunting me down

And succeeded in making a little fortune out

Of it while you raped my town

Naked. Truth’s abbreviated

For the prosperity of the party’s hidden manifestos,

All these god wannabe psychos

Refraining pathetic allegrettos.

We are champions of the struggle,

We were here before you,

And after your game fizzles like dew,

We’ll still be here as blinding proof . . .

Marked for death,

It’s very hard not to be afraid.         

You can’t predict what’s next

Damn, all your wit’s engaged.

I’m enslaved

By your freedom

Cause your variety of emancipation

Was designed to incarcerate us.

I invented a personal opus

Within: I’ll bear my cross.

If ever my path hits a deadlock . . .

I’ll brush it off and I’ll walk on.

So don’t question me

If you won’t place your faith in me.

I perceive it’s my destiny

To fashion a lifestyle out of my misery.

You can’t alter my prophecy!

Akpan

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Lifestyle (I)

Question my lifestyle

Hypocrites got me hypnotized.

When they’re the very things who compromised,

Switching the truth for a set of lies.

Through the years,

We’re still shedding stifled tears.

We had our multiple shares

Of deliberate pain and bold fears.

So we do what needs to be done

Cause till kingdoms fall,

Fools will never learn

Nor could they exactly discern

That the reason we still breathing,

Even though, we still bleeding,

Cause the drama they keep bringing,

Is cause we ain’t quitting.

Heroes ain’t made, but born.

I was born of the fiercest persecution;

Tribulation that would pale the Armageddon.

Was taught it’s my destiny

To endure soul mutiny.

Now the labors of futility

Label my existence vanity.

And why should that bother me?

Or stand in the path of who I be?

I will live as I please

And the vanities will never decrease

But increase to disturb the peace

Of every one of ‘em hypocrites.

I was born into the ghetto

Of the shades of sorrow.

Life’s never been what it seems

So, I’m not gonna pretend that ya’ll w/out sins.

From your least to the greatest

Your very kind of virtue stinks.

I hustle cause life’s a gamble

I struggle to go thro the huddle.

The race I run

No other human can outrun.

Just put the crumbs together

And the imposing sum will make you numb.

And somehow, I find the breath to exhale

And by what’s leftover I attain.

Still all your corrupt talent could see was a thug.

You make the sign of the cross

Yet, squash endangered souls like a bug.

Now the outcast from the last

Shall creep fast and proceed to be first.

If I be lost

My blindness would blind the sun

To hydroplane me through

The darkness of fools.

Best not question my lifestyle,

Cause still I’ll rise.

Akpan

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