ETCHINGS ON A CARVED SKIN

OKOLO CHINUA

My heart holds many locked rooms within, rooms I cannot open

I walk the stairs of my memories each time I close my eyes

It’s soaked, dripping…

A drop for the first time I broke palm nut and smiled because the stone finally made contact with the nut and not my fingers…

Two drops… Another for the time when I first looked myself in the mirror and failed to find myself

Professor says you’ll find yourself in mirrors…On Wednesdays you’ll find him making musings and scribbles just beside the dump… I wonder if he’s that way because he has not found himself….

I find my reflection in the eyes of the one my hips beckon to…if mirrors hold me I wonder if that’s why I find myself drawn to her eyes each time we become one…

Drip…. Drop…

My mind runs through my memories and sometimes a memory recollected runs me through, reminding me why I have locked rooms within me…

Green… White….Yellow… They spell life

Black… Brown… Me… They spell reversal

I’m  a coloured painting in the background watching as my maker erases, raises…and sometimes I wonder if I’m a painting painted or to be painted…I want to become the brush.. Or maybe the colours…. But not the painter…I want the painter to become the painting…

At nights I let myself soar the sky as I watch from beneath

Up there I find the stars in an ever warming embrace…The moon smiles at me and I drop a whisper… The air carries it… The moon smiles…A cloud walks past the moon and I wonder if that’s how moons blush….

Drip… Drop…

It’s about to rain and the droplets sink into my skin

Rainfalls and downpours… Sunshine and uproars…

And I’m beginning to wonder if our language is just a sad attempt at not understanding one another…

Drip… Drop…

I perceive the scent of dawn and its line stands far ahead,

The day is here and somewhere beneath, someone holds the night that has just left here… And I bless the day because it survived the night.

OKOLO CHINUA

is a writer who writes for many reasons, the beauty of tomorrow being just one out of the many. Currently, he is a student of English Language in the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra, Nigeria.