Noise

In Chibok, An IED finds it way Into the mind of a savage sect And made good use of the emptiness. In helplessness, Some school girls are bundled up From their school compound; Taken for a noisy ride into Sambisa; From where they will forget Their mothers’ voices. On the tube, There is a very loud lady Anathematising the “sharing” of blood In Borno. When she is done, The media is awash with the sound of ‘Na only you waka come?’ As if it is a joke To snatch young Nigerian girls From the four walls of their classroom Into the coldness of the wilderness To dwell amongst wild beasts. To learn new lessons; Weird lessons. In bed at night, My wife talks of Church bombings; Internally displaced persons; Slaughtering of citizens And the role of government in all of these And the security of our country And I pulled at the hairs From around her second mouth To make her change the topic And she falls for it and changes the topic. The white bearded Mallam On the rickety bus to Yola Fixes his eyes on me Like some foreigner And I feel the fire All through the trip And I burn and burn and burn Like the victims of Nyanya motor park blast It feels good though to know What it takes to Be burned into countless degrees. But after three weeks I am back to normal again I can feel again My senses are back again Working optimally And I can hear again As the presidential pit-bull And the black parrot The one that used to be In the fourth estate of the realm Begin to met and dole out Slippery speeches, speeches you can’t hold That comes upon our ears To push out every substance From our heads Everything except this load of hopelessness This bitter bite in our mouth This unwanted fetus That no one would claim And then the hash tags; The media craze; The count down The women in red And the men that joined The bring back our girls The Michelle Obama The celebrities from across The noise, the sweat, the blood The bloody thighs of those girls Their torn underwear Their wails, their sobs, their pains To say the least The echo, the deafening echo And how we wave them all aside And look the other way. Like it did not happen at all Like it was just a movie Directed by a director That must be a sadist We sweep it under the carpet Like our other numerous National issues But I won’t write another story on betrayal I won’t write another poem On how a nation Could forsake her innocent children Instead I would write of a country Stealing, stealing, growing Growing resilient to emotion; Becoming many times dead To any feeling Tearing its tissues to pieces And building new ones That will be senseless Lifeless Bloodless. And the noise And the noise And the noise.