"Blame trade" by Oke Emmanuel Ayomide

At the newspaper stand

I sit but my heart stands, wailing

Where saliva absconds from blazing tongues

Where ears are soiled with words

And noise nurses nonsense

Is it just me?

Or are their words Jezebels of different decibels?

On the meandering labyrinth of uncertain possibility

Lies the apathy of the starry-eyed ones

Fate of dreamers who are patriotic blind men

The cold sun will rape the desert with a summer snow

Their mere hope for more hopelessness

Nigeria’s pregnancy of solace is a tale of aborted

miscarriage

The dark dashiki dwarf opined

A green tomorrow is possible but simply overfed

Like an eel on a terrestrial terrain

The Nigeria of my dream is one void of maladies

That political administrators be burnt in an incinerator

is my gospel

The heads that ache the body, our elected dilemma

The genesis for our macabre of insanity

The staunch words of a short man in starched regalia

A curt intervention comes to salvage nothing

Another side of the coin sung with a baritone voice

Puffing his cigar in a creepy creative display

And speaking on the egregious wonderfulness of home

Of home where leaders and citizens feast with corruption

And of his blithe and lust for the national cake

Painting home a caricature of misfortune and corrupt gluttons

My heart cries at their cacophonous rants

Dangling illusion pivoted on a slanderous trade

Exchange in their hellish colonies of ideas

With hoof of words stampeding chances for

thoughtfulness

Dispelling any chance for feasibility

And writing the future of Nigeria on a slate of futility

With the blood of the unborn tomorrow

So I choose to betray silence

For if the supposedly bad play bad politics

And the supposedly good play good blame trade

Still the solution lies not in the abundance of slurs

Let the old tell the young, let today fax posterity

That I have chosen to hope and think for solutions

For if I bask in a parade of tirade

What shall become of this blame trade?

Oke Emmanuel Ayomide is a 300-level student in the Department of Industrial and Production Engineering, Faculty of Technology, University of Ibadan. He is a fast budding writer, actor, public speaker and campus journalist whose interest spans through short stories, poetry, drama, relationships etc. He hopes to impart and influence lives with his consuming love for arts.