Voices from the deep; Unspoken

Its chilly today. Maybe an inspiration for my thoughts. A shattered heart , broken soul and a troubled mind- that was my morning for you. Come to think of it, that’s how my mornings have always been for the past few years. Same old routine;tears, red eyes, headaches.Its hard enough to open up about your personal life, but its even harder to keep it inside when the hurt is consuming you slowly and the darkness is becoming farmiliar. This is the voice of a child who doesn’t know who to turn to. A child who has lost all hope in life with each day passing. A child whose days have turned into nightmares and nights, well, lets just say he doesn’t have nights no more. Just figments of his fertile imagination in a farmiliar dark world.

So I joined uni this year. Pretty cool , right? No! Campus has been a pit of misery for the past three months. Not because i’m a freshman, not because of the routine. That i can handle. Its family. Do you ever think of how important family is? It is the sole institution that defines you. You can’t run away from it even if you tried, and trust me, i tried. So, what do you do when family turns its back on you?

I never really had a childhood, I was indoors most of the time. I never really had many friends. So I resorted to writing poems to make life the least bit bearable,it worked. In my little artistic mind I was in a happy home, a model family but in reality, it’s never home sweet home for me. Funny thing, dad isn’t a drunk, that still buffles me because he used to beat up mum every night. From my room I could hear my world crumble with each cry for help. What could I do, I was… just a child. I still wonder to this day how he could claim he loved her when he beat her up like the Yoruba drums of Nigeria. Sure enough she sang to his beat, the saddest song I ever heard, a symphony of screams and tears, pleas and thuds. That lullaby of tears that sung me to sleep. I guess that’s what ‘Macho’  men do. So I made a promise to myself. When I grow up I don’t want to be a ‘Macho man’ .  I don’t want to be a man, I want to be a child. I want to live in my dream.

I can’t tell you the number of times we asked her to report him to the authorities but I guess that is what is called love. That selfless resolve to bear all pain and hurt hoping that someday things will be alright. I have learnt though, that hope  is just another word the English coined to blind us from the reality of this world. I’m not entirely a pessimist so, lets just say hope did exists…then it must be buried in some cemetery and engraved on its tombstone are the words…

World Hope.               Died during labour

Most of us, mother included believed in the power of hope, but hope don’t have no power. Its all in our minds. Call it … Imagination. Yes, that’s the word.

That was then, nineteen years later I still hear that lullaby, she now has a heart condition but her hope…well lets say, her imagination, is still ripe even at her age. Clinging to a lost cause in the name of a husband. This child is no longer a child anymore, he saw the world through the eyes of fists and knuckles…heck! He could be the next Mayweather, but he don’t know how to fold his fists, he don’t know how to play the drum. His hands play to the tune of the brush and perfection of this mind. He was not his father’s son. Wait…am i my father’s son?