(cover photograph direction: David Obi)
The Black Ink
I rose sluggishly one day
No desire for school.
On an empty stomach,
I left home.
My tattered bag
Dangling from my back.
I rushed to class,
Hoping to slip in without a fuss.
Set my books on the table
Next to my small bottle of black ink.
The teacher stormed in,
Shouting at the noisy class.
Startled,
I knocked the ink—
It spilled across the table,
Staining my clothes.
He stood there next to me,
Armed crossed, brow furrowed,
A stranger with a long black mustache,
And a thick, foreign accent.
He growled,
“Lick the mess, son of the street.”
Terrified,
I bent over,
Tongue to the table.
While the students, silent in shock,
Soon roared into laughter.
As I turn fifty,
I can hear their jeers,
Echoing in my ears,
Still piercing.
The Crime of Vagrancy
Sewing my days in a flood of gossip,
Treasuring banality with fanatical zeal,
As a kid, I saw school as torture, a pointless drill,
Dreaming to quit, letting life drift on quiet feet.
My life stands propped on my father’s legs;
I never find my own along the road.
I cannot walk alone between two sunrises
And secure even a slice of bread.
I grow used to sneers, slurs, and stares,
My skin toughens, muscles hardened like a beast—
A lump of flesh without a guiding head,
A vagrant shadow of humanity.
To prove my manhood, they married me off;
Now I have three children, ill-suited for tough life.
Their eyes are fixed on glowing screens,
Their minds adrift in clouds of triviality.
I’ve built a family too meek to harm a mouse,
Living, yet doing nothing worthy of living.
Am I sentenced to a prison of my own making,
A man whose feet would leave no mark on the sands of time?
