I remember my first published work. I was 17, my friend( a lady) was having her birthday,I didnt have a gift for her, Could not afford one. So I wrote a poem and gave it to her , she never read it, at least not in my presence , and it was clear , she never did. Ladies and Materialism!!! I took time to write that stuff, canceled over and over again, crumpled papers over and over again, felt headache maybe and the last draft was still roughly inked. I could have asked my mum for some cash to help buy something for her but I felt my words should mean more. I still remember her unimpressed face, she didnt give a damn.
I wish I could lay my hands on that peice of poetry again but it most likely ended up in the school incinerator on that same day.
fast forward to some few years, i got admission to study Engineering, that was the beginning of my poetry run ( wrote 100s of line each day), did a lot of rap music, wrote a lot of articles, made a lot of fruity loops beats, coded a lot, had wild jokes with my friends. Why? I wanted to run away from Civil Engineering, It was too abstract and we were not being challenged. It was just classes and exams , while my soul yearned for expression and entertainment.
So, my poems are not really published , they were written in closet and read in closet but one thing I realise is that every piece of that work saved me an ample lot of pain by helping me pour out my frustration and sadness before they eat me up.
I am still not a good poet. It is very hard to be good at something when you don't take a conscious effort to be. I just wanted to find a bucket of expression and poetry was one. My room at home still holds a lot of those pieces. I have turn some. I eat some up , I mean i stuff the paper in my mouth and eat until I can feel the taste of ink. They could not be seen, they lacked savour or contained a professed love for someone i later realize doesn't deserve it. If I ever become great enough to deserve some post-mortem accolades, then those pieces will mean something.
Literature mirrors life, they say. those pieces mirror me , my intelligence, my innocence , my pain, at the time of writing. So when I read some of them after many years, I just laugh at myself 'cause I could see clearly how low my maturity seemed and sometimes, it could made me sad, as I could see some of past pains.
Poetry is a mirror for me.
