Chronicles of Memory

I falter

At the waking thought of dilemma,

Offered as sacrifice

To the crocodiles of the Nile.

Pain enslaves

My faculty, pressed to the grave

Yesterday breathes again

In the chronicles of my memory.

Like birth pangs on a virgin

Unfamiliar with my kind of reality,

I express an exceedingly split personality

And my ecstasy

Is a reinventing of soulful misery.

Akpan