Fourteen years, I lived in dreams;
I bathed in the luxury of abundance;
Creamed with the fragrance of love,
And clothed in the cotton of bliss.
I was me in the future that was past.
But permit me to pass through that plain;
To recollect the realm of the rain;
To select the sadness from the smile,
And embrace the fault from the fore
For the future that is gone.
Mother once said
That love is old;
Older than the young to love,
And wiser than their age to grow
Eventhough he was meant to be loved.
Yet love was a forerunner
Living under the calmness of the mango tree.
He was a spirit hovering on the warmness of a man,
And settling on the touching of my skin.
So, I remembered never to question him.
He told me I was the star at night.
So, I remembered never to ask
Why he kept being the darkness for me to shine,
And when the leaves were silent,
He reminded me that I was the talking cricket.
Down the stream,
Love helped the calabash up my head.
And through the pathway, he was a companion to my loneliness...
As he echoed my name in the blow of every air,
And patted my shoulders on the rise of every dew.
If mother ever knew the truth,
Then she would've not been living in father's hut.
If at all,love was old,
Then, he wouldn't be calling my fourteen years old name...
Not in the days I had become burned by his flames.
What I never knew was the colour of love
Because he was always dark in the night sky.
His thirst I thought I knew,
Was cooked inside the tongue of the kissing man.
Yet, I kept remembering never to ask him questions.
I told mother that I would go
In search of love's younger son.
I would not return until I have a word with him.
If he was born out of that drug of sweet gradualism ,
I shall remain with him forever.
She cried with the sound of disagreement,
Pleading for me to stay back
Because I was only a child
And that love's son was the age of his father,
So, I could never understand them in a haste.
If I could grow in the shadow of her likes,
If I could swim in the pool of her fears,
If I could dance in the song of her care,
Or if I could dine in the meal of her union,
I would be taught the truth of love.
No!
I was anxious in my eyes.
I was curious in my thoughts.
I was thirsty in my heart.
I was in search of love.
Now, I am here...
Scattered by the scorn of sense,
Billowed by the breeze of brutality,
Wrecked by the wrath of wretchedness,
And knocked by the fists of regret.
Maybe, I was wrong.
I should have listened to mother.
I should have remembered to question the love I knew.
I should have asked about his life.
And not wallow in his lies.
That was only a shadow of the real.
He was only an imitation of the deal.
He had no care to bond our seal,
Nor built any hope to give us a feel.
He was lust, the one who was meant to kill.
I wish I never ran to him.
I really wish I never left mother's care.
It is even more difficult to know that,
I was entangled in the futility of my body.
I was greedy for lust.
So, that was imagination caught up in reality.
It was truth caught up in falsity.
And the more, curses cloaked in sick blessings.
Because I never knew,
I had told a lie to the future.
