PIERCED BY THE YEARS

One portentous morn, besmirched augury

Glow’d, twenty summers ere now; o’ injury.

My begetter, aflame with fell fury,

‘Gainst reason; ay! Ire of penury,

With inured heart, takes judgment sans jury.

‘He is bewitched’, goes his claim. Oh lone street!

Streets of Uyo; clamour’d with woes in fleet.

Forsworn there by dad; to not make ends meet,

But by enchanted guidance o’ new helpmeet;

Mum having struck, years gone, Stygian sixth feet.

Lachrymal wantonness o’seven year old;

Brooding brink of solitude do enfold,

Pelting shrill pangs of winter clime so cold

Plays telltale on my skin with stealthy scold.

Was I a changeling? The dice wrongly rolled.

Oh what is life? I grope but for fleet end.

Days plagued and bedeviled with thistle bend,

Nights saunter as they forlornly pretend,

The celestial orbs their choler do send.

Oh death! Thy swift bliss have I come to lend.

The prickly tares of the years ruin me bare,

Shackles of peril stream ‘bout like nightmare,

Abyss of lonesome despair chastes like hare,

Woven dearth, famished bowels; they all glare.

Waking up each day anew makes me scare.

Shall I hark stilly claims of melody

When lips smouldered with acrid agony

And strength and glee cloaked but with perfidy

Hap, echo sorrow-clad tune so sulky?

How well will my ink forswear elegy?

Twenty mute years! Wild years! Denuded years!

My murk brow enshrouded with frore of tears,

My heavy heart bedizened with wild fears

From drear and malefic streets; den of fierce bears,

Where e’ery baneful miasma on faces smears.

Oh mocking years! Feigned truce thy hoax plaything.

Under thee my progress goes teetering ,

Love disrobed and deflowered; mem’ries sting,

Joy ravished and defiled like caught herring.

E’ery season, thy maladies to me spring.

Oh loose years. No, yes! Bedecked with nescient

Wit; endued on head so magnificent

Yet, at e’entide, groans, and though effulgent,

Pillows its thoughts on piteously plangent

Rocks oft girdled with throes briskly ardent.

Drudgeries despoil faith, sport and repose,

Crush evanescent joy like trampled rose,

Slake thirst with dregs o’ dolour, ay, draught of woes!

Warmth and mirth slayed in torrents o’ lurking throes.

Self, self! A shadow perched by diurnal foes.

Mimicry, that of torn-clasped existence.

Puah! Puah! I spit gloom with tongue freighted thence

By blood from languid-clenched teeth. Puah! Puah! Hence

Has fate ‘pon woes makes guile tryst with my sense

That thus pierced, ruined; does but sit on the fence.

What! E’en my ink bends to the knells that toll

A loathsome longueur to before my soul

Which, pierced by the years, its stripes did befoul

Its essence. Lo! I grasp with hiss my bowl

Of murky fate; to gulp till the dice roll.