My father is a stranger in my heart


I want to run away from myself
bury myself in the thought of a madman
he understands grief as a mouth filled with pebbles, as ghosts whistling in his pockets.
Life is such an empty bird without a song,
My father is a lurking stranger in my heart-
I know his smell each time he is wrapped in
a story that has no beginning but deadly end,
Each time he is ceased in a graveyard that has
No opening but a bottom of endless nightmare.
his days are gardens washed into the nile
he emptied his mouth into a song & birth certificate of tears leaving home to find hell.
he is there flapping into tenses of gazing men
in every lisp on his lips like a wisp
waiting for the last gaze of a july sun.
I followed the steps of Enya from his eyes,
I understand the only time in an exile is the time
You are suppose to leave your skin to another skin to stay till you regain yourself in yourself.


Let me help you understand this:
My father is a song in an exile mile away.
My mother is his lynched lyrics painting his sins.
He bottled her like a maji from Tomi Adeyemi'
Thought, before I was born there was a raid.
I'm lost in his assaulted plights daily
I tried to save her but saving her is a sin
The more mouths I created, the more plights
she swallows as the time ticks away with tears.


I want to run away from myself
& hide in another's skin whose shadows were dedications to the gods of waiting &hoping.
I don't want to have this man on my skin again.
I want him to remain a stranger he is to me...
Like the pages of burnt men' stories, let him be.
Like the elephant wills of the African night,
Let him continue dreaming about tomorrow,
Do not hang him on my skin when we see tomorrow!


©John Chizoba Vincent
# The_Boy_Hero

Paternity test.

It's a suggestion.