You feel the wetness on your pillow and you wonder if it’s the water from your leaking roof or the hot tears crawling down your cheek cause they both flow simultaneously, one is cold and the other hot. The rumbling in your stomach, the bags under your mother’s eyes and the increasing grey on your father’s hair makes you crave for a chance to win no matter the struggle.
Just one chance is all you ask, to fight for what you think is yours. You want to fight to live, to eat, to breathe, what more can you wish for, what more can you fight for? You’ve never known luxury as a way of life so you ask for only very little.
The only one thing you dint wish for was to be born, it was freely given. You came from two unstable people who fought for a chance to be stable, you never got the best of anything, you had just enough to live another day and have grown to this life of hard knocks.
You want to take your destiny in your own hands, but how can you when you can’t even define destiny? how can you fight when your bones are weak, how can you blow trumpets of war when you fear to die? how can you dream big when all you dream of is the emptiness that the hunger brings to your stomach.
All you wish is fighting chance to dream and see it come to reality, a chance to work, any kind just to have a decent take home pay, a chance to have an education, to study, to become great teacher and lawyer and pilot and doctor and even a president, a chance to be able to express yourself without fear or intimidation, a chance to chase history, to make history and to write history, a chance to be great and be creative, to be in music, in fashion, in dance, to make a name for yourself no matter how high or low a thing you do as far its legit'.
You fight for a chance to be rich even when poverty is all you've known, to believe that poverty is not a crime but that if only you had better opportunities as the rich you wouldn’t be this screwed.
You want to create wealth, to give, to help, to be a blessing, to create success, to make a name for yourself, you want to fight hunger and poverty and corruption and war and terrorism and disasters, you want to bring hope to the eyes of the Nigerian child, a chance, for you are African and most of your countries are in conflict, there is drought in your horn, your north, up in arms, west up in terrorism and south in flood.
All you want is a fighting chance to live in a world when every 18 minutes, a young person’s life is taken, when your future looks so bleak, when you just want to be something and anything but a nobody, all you crave is a chance to fight.
Though you got history filled with dirt and you want to glory in your glories, you don’t just want to read history but write your own history in gold letters.
I love life and very positive about it
I'm very ambitious and there's so much I would love to do, see and experience
I like to read, I love to write, I like to think, I love to fantasize
I talk very less but I'm such a good listener,
I love to wake up and watch the sunrise in the morning and notice the sleepy ocean at night and wonder what goes on under that tranquil.
I love the smell of the sea, I love to sink my legs into the moist beach sand and just sit and stare as far as my eyes can reach
I love nature, I love the rain and the dryness the harmattan brings, I wish it snows in this part of my world
I like to be alone, I like to be surrounded by people sometimes, I love to laugh and just feel like crying sometimes.
Might I be in love again? sometimes I feel butterflies, sometimes I feel fear.
My ever first words were in Pidgin, it was my first language before I learnt to speak English.
I love the sanity in the villages and the noise in the city,
I love the tipsy feel of alcohol but I dare not..
I love high heeled shoes but just might never wear them again just cos
Tombra, a girl,
12,13 slim wrists long neck,
she walks wearing peach, blue flip flops
stepping with familiarity
over the slippery backs of 8 pipelines
she is at 5
holding an umbrella with a bright yellow shell on it
she seeks protection from a gentle rain falling from an African sky
behind her, between giant palm leaves
dragons roar, bellowing black billows, seething
belligerent belches of acridity in the sky
when I put my ear close to the glossy paper I can hear
her asthmatic breath
each clap of her plastic flip flop against her heel
makes a poem, applaud the poem in her step
it is the sound of everyday people who live between the pipelines, tapeworms
vampiring the placenta, excreting toxic
into the bloodstream of a nation
the rivers are graveyards, the wetlands thirsty for clean breath
the land is haemorraghing
miscarrying cocoyam and vegetable seed
Boys who have given up waiting for jobs to come
Idly eye her as she walks by
A generation numbed by the futility of existence
It is ironic that their most valuable asset is their Achilles heel
As the stagnancy of fervent youth
Dumps them in the hands of AK47 robber gangs
who howl in the night to the tune
Of their masters – myopic madmen in business
Grappling for a fist of flaccid dollars
Greed at the price of a village
But then again, everything has its price in this world
Like this girls poetry in her step, her lungs
A fair currency, fat with poisonous air
Her mothers sludge garden, her fathers chest
Face and shoulder, burned in the last accident
The truth is a jealous but patient thing
It brook no hazes of the facts or credibility gaps
There is only one fragrance it will lie with
Time, the scent of time moves from fresh to death, rot to humus fertilisation of new days
It is between the pages of a day in court
That a mystery will be solved
Why it takes twelve long years to walk the twisted violent gauntlet to justice
Why nine lives were thrown into a wound cut with knives of lies
How the spirits of the tortured and the murdered
Can be redeemed from the dispassionate mouth of brutal
greed
And how with the wondrous alchemy of Nature, instead of bitter bile
Rising into the mouths of fishermen and farmers
work songs will rise over the trees
Will dance with the fish along the creeks
Will paint across a sky uninterrupted by fire and towers of black smoke
And how the poem of the girl with the blue flip flops can be fetched
From under the fattened rump of human disregard
And raised to re-imagine the world
Why she close the umbrella with the yellow shell
And walk in the unpolluted gentle rain falling from an African sky
Poverty aint crime, just cos u poor doesnt mean u less intelligent..only means d rich had a greater opportunity than you did.. A fair system with equal rights with a fighting chance will bring success to every young person that shows smartness by being creative
