BIOGRAPHY

Okeme James Jerome is a native of Okpe Kingdom of Delta State. He was

born February 18 in Warri, Delta State, Nigeria. He is currently
studying Geology in Delta State University, Abraka. He developed
interest and started writing Poetry in the year 2011. He also writes
prose. He loves writing, computing, exploring and travelling. He’s a
success in progress.

WHO’LL TEACH ME POETRY?

For ages

my weary eyes have watched Sages mount stages

lit up dull faces

freed others from mind cages

and touched lives in different places

with lines from their pondering pages;

But who’ll teach me poetry?

Their powerful punchy puns are so full of actions

Giving me an unequal and attracting reaction unlike Newton’s law,

it gives new things to ponder upon till I begin to wonder

Who’ll will teach me this poetry.

How they do it I do not know

They’ll tell you how trees waved and danced at a passing wind

Which made the cloud sad and heavy

That it began to weep upon a broken land.

In utmost perplexity, my ability to replay how they play with words

Is a reality of complexity in simplicity.

“A good bard is one who hates to love what is bad”.

How well they take pleasure in the pain of a person

Who has no one to teach him poetry.

Day after day, I hear of mystical mysteries

Of how their pens bled to the death of a man who bled to death

In the hands of death who came to earth in form of another man.

They fought back, spilling the blood of their pens for spilled blood.

It was war for war as they punctured silence with the nib.

They say poetry is life

A part of nature, a path to happiness.

That’s why their rhymes flow like the Rivers

Soar high like the eagle and roar like the Lion.

They’ll spice up words with aroma ascending like sweet smelling savor

That’s why I can’t wait

for who’ll teach me poetry.

They say it’s art

An act of painting pictures with words

Which soothens the heart like an alluring cologne with delightful impact;

But it’ll be an act of injustice

If there’s no one to teach me this poetry.

Like Torn Kites In An Hurricane

 I cannot speak because my mouth is a grave – ‘Departure’  -Romeo Oriogun

Out of the depth my cry, give ear and hearken– ‘The Passage’, Christopher Okigbo

Am here and there, like torn kites in an hurricane,

lift these broken cupids- the memories

of an ephemeral love- off my eyes

and teach me how to be here again.

wake the bones the quills of your departure scythed to shingles

and grinded thoroughly to dusts by those memories of rose-budding and ritzy plastic asps

touch my heart, lift the phoenix that keep memories and caligraph

in the nucleus of my heart the ways to let go and find love again.

Lift these fingers of song that buried the soporific egret I had been

before the shredding of the sky

Hold my mind away from wandering to the lawns and boulders

on which we had supine and rolled fancying the hovering

clouds, heart frisking heart.

Malandra ! Take me back; pick me away from the lonely

road in this tainted rose-quartz dotting my heart .

Malandra! am gone old with white turfs on my scalp still

counting the days of love , death, kisses , romance

and beads that carried your waist to

the full moon-

teach me the rhymes of living ,

the song of resuscitation, the dance of reawakening- teach

me how to see you in the eyes of another maiden fair as Malandra ,

slim, quaint Easter Angel. Teach me to love again- that

love isn’t what takes us away but keeps us,

that love isn’t a parazonium that parts the tongue and hide in its belly

burial grounds defaced by the anguish of burning relatives-

lift away pains of memory- zap the outlines of

death pouring and drenching me

with  fluids and grimes of  catacombs –

lift the graveyard am becoming and stick in abyss

the twirling mourners roaming my street,

once golden, now jagged, tainted by footprints of

howling ghosts and reeks with the corpse of

the angel cartooning lullabies on heaven’s gate.

XENOPHOBIA

I’m not what you think

Though, I’m not perfect

See me as your brother

Life’s too sacred to shed,

See the streets all dented

And stinks,of decomposing bodies,

The gutters’re inundated with bloods,and the owls and vultures’re busy feasting a banqueting.

Come let us reason together

Brothers, let’s be civil here

Stretch out your arm, take mine

Give me a hug and kiss,

We’re beautiful together Sisters,

Let love reign supreme.

Blood is thicker than water

Live and let’s live

Two wrongs doesn’t make righteousness, we’re the world

And may the soul of Madiba rest

In peace…

I came here…

Because I’m in love with Jo’burg

And love is universal!

Shealt your swords

Shealt your fears

I am not a foe!

But let love reign supreme.

The Storm that Raged in a Tea Cup

A dark curtain had been lifted

then came white ones with

meagre manna or mists

for pretty patterns.

A sultan stirred some tea

using a golden paddle like a ladle.

The tea was in a tea cup, a mug

that mounted on a saucer, a saucer

that endured the cup’s hot temper.

As the sultan stirred, particles

of beverages melted with joy

they even when to the sultan’s

throat with glowing glee until

reality came in the scarlet hell

of busy organs.

The sultan stirred and tea stared…

bubbles formed, waves rose,

wind whistled a provocative song.

A storm was a hummingbird; wind wrestled

with tea, the cup broke and rage

lathered the tea into a sea

that drowned the sultan

and gulped the house

into its runny stomach.

Prison Break: door burst, the sea

tea ranted on streets, sank cities

and crowned the country.

A nudge is needed, a poke

is the only language a mind

understands to call this only

an imagination, to calm the storm.

HOW MY GRANDFATHER FELL

A body becomes spacious like an empty room

Suspended in the fumes of alcohol.

It wags as if a house is trying

So hard to hold its door from slapping

Against the wind, or as if a paper is trying to say

Too many holes are littered into its skin.

This is a body caught in the amber liquid

Of a sad wine, pale like carrions of old bodies.

This is a body holding out a breath like little owls

Gasping on an old carrion, it smells of a body

Intoxicated in an old whiskey.

I have always wanted to say my grandfather

Is a faint half-lit candle burning in a graveyard,

—His body is a graveyard in between solitude & divorce

—His body wobbles into a dim flecks of light

Like a hand reaching out for its old self through a mirror

And then everything stumbles into a loud silence, into debrises.

FAKE PICTURES

We are 365 in a room filled with sand
still, we know the colour of our skin
& our names are holding a diary
maybe to read, ’cause my last name is a home finding its feet in the city of nightmares.

The name my mother call me is erotic
like the sweet water in my lover’s eyes
which made me long for rivers bearing
the language of boys without fathers.

You can’t tell me I am a boy in my mother’s skin when I am stronger than –
our family’s picture & my body is a god
holding the wind in pieces of shards.

Here we are, dancing to the last music
in our father’s backyard ’cause we are
children of solent noise in our mother’s shoes; so we don’t talk not untill we are hungry.

I wonder why my pictures are always missing in our house maybe a poet is known as a bastard;
then i should have being told all pictures in my father’s house are fake!

BIOGRAPHY

Adeniran,Ogooluwa Joseph is a Nigerian poet, writer, and a student of Bowen University; English language. He started writing from 2015. His poem ‘Song of dark rooms’ was shortlisted for OKIGBO’s POETRY CONTEST, 2018.
He was also appreciated by BLACK PRIDE MAGAZINE has ONE OF THE BEST PAGE POETS OF THE YEAR,2017.  His poems have featured in Anthologies, Magazines, Blogs and Online platforms. He is a young poet that believes in the power of words – healing
He hails from ibadan.

Facebook ID:Adeniran Joseph
Occupation: Student
Number: 08102947083
Blog:thepoetryinvoice.blogspot.com

• AFRICA FEED THY HERO! BY TUNJI OFFEYI
• Little kids, yet big man belly
  Medical people call it kwashiorkor,
  Their mothers love them, their leaders
  care less about them.

  Their heads like a ball of water melon sits
  comfortably on their neck which is
  just like a pupil’s arithmetic ruler, did
  they sin against the gods? No I don’t
  think so since the gods cant talk.
  Yes I know ,yes I know the rich don’t
  Reach out in this part of the globe
  The up town people look down on the
  Down town trodden in the down town,
  But I feel for the rich, because these
  Unkept unsung little heroes are the
  Tomorrow’s pride of the black continent
  If black is truly beautiful? Black leaders
  must feed our black toddlers today
  so they could mount wings with white
  brothers on the mountain top, else their
  will be fire on the mountain if they fail to
  fire their dreams.

  Black rulers think about them, if only you
  Can let them live, let them live, just let them
  Live ,let them live.

Bio

Tunji Offeyi is a poet,journalist and global analyst based in the UK.Past winner of the prestigious African 4u award as a distinguished African in diaspora making Africa proud in my own way.

Blog: tunjiwrites.blogspot.co.uk

I am definitely not my hair 

By Thando Mabena

This, my thick black kinky hair,

is extremely coarse, dry and tightly coiled with broken promises

And a hidden agenda,

Much like our politicians.

It has the texture of an overworked old sisal rope and occasionally throws tantrums like my two year old when sleep chooses to battle him.

It is tough, this hair of mine, like hardship and poverty.

It will stand stiff and tall in gale force winds while roofs are being blown off houses and trees arch to back flip.

It will stare a bottle of gel in the face with neck snapping attitude when styled into a bun and vehemently refuse to lie back flat and sleek.

It’s length is a magic act fooling even the harshest of critics with the keenest of sight.

It will shrink and have me looking like a boy posing for a mugshot at the first contact with water.

Then the next hour, be shoulder length and frizzy like a cheap weave.

Combing it is so painful, like a break up via text message, but with more tears and even more confusion.

This here hair of mine, is a plea for forgiveness and mercy from karma for all our sins.

My hair is a real struggle.

Me, on the other hand, am a pretty easy going girl with a happy soul and a colourful personality like a packet of M&M’s.

Not to mention a deadly sense of style too.

TIGON

There’re forces that ‘d pay homage

As commandants of the nation’s pride

But they came to hold all hostage

Imposing only but hopeless ride:

One’s a tiger blinded with goggles

The other’s a lion with leopard’s colour

It’s a league of military baa–fool

That wanted to make everyone a fool:

One came into power

Through tactical negotiation

The other came

Through the madness called election…

Rigging and raping democratic ethos.

For the corrupt anti–corruption crusaders

It’s business more than as usual:

One stocked out billions

To sustain the economy

The other wasted more billions

On jamboree clubs’ infamy…

All in the name of wooing foreign investors.

It’s a case of all-round allusion not illusion

That the masses become tired of complaint:

One’s bluntly arrogant

Displaying madness within confines of rocks

But the other’s rascally insensitive;

Claiming to know it all

Only to suffer from poverty of ideas!

Despite the morbid oversea trips, junketing all days.

And being arrogant in ignorance,

he’s to be worshipped in foolishness!

For the citizenry it’s pure massacre

That blood letting’s but a daily routine:

Under one’s regime

Political enemies ’re dealt with

But the other killed millions

Just to make billions –

By allowing the masses to die of frustration.

It’s a hay day for democratic rape

That he smiles making man an ape!

And my conclusion…

The hybrid’s a Tigon:

The looter of the looted funds

That in this regime, there’s no comfortable

living but hunger

As each day bring to the masses more darkness

Making them innocent victims of idiotic madness.

What a bold stand for morality

That we turn rapists after the preachment

What a display of stupid arrogance

Setting up anti-corruption commission

by the most corruptible…

Oh what use’s catching a thief by a thief   If not to make thievery a religion?

It’s anarchy everywhere. Everyone’s in mega pains…

And it’s this, the buffoons do.

Dear friends, colleagues and fellow Nigerians.
We, bring you love and greetings from above, in a time such as now in our generation. In politics they say, that the heaviest prize for declining or refusing to lead or rule, is to allow, to be ruled by someone inferior to oneself. And on this ground, the time has come, when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, thus such a person must take the position because his conscience tells him it is the right thing, at the right time.
Holding onto this very truth, we present to you a true Nigerian, with great potentials and strong willpower, who has decided to take such position, without fear or favour.
It has always been said that, it is bad, that all the people who knows how to run a country are very busy, driving taxicabs, trading and or cutting hairs. But here is one among the equal that is ready and willing to prove it wrong.
This person is Ali Soyode.
Hear this, Our concern is not whether God almighty is on his side, but rather, Our greatest concern is how to remain steadfastly on God’s side, as God is forever right.
So, join us to support AS4President 2019. As he prepares to make his public declaration for 2019 presidential election, this week in Abuja. Nigeria
AS For Assured Solution
AS For Assured Security
AS For Assured Sovereign Nigeria
YES HE CAN
This message is brought to by… AS4PRESIDENT 2019 Diaspora Team.
Alistair Soyode
Bentv Channel