Unwritten Echo

 I said, bartender, pour me one shot of whiskey , the kind that burns enough to remind me I’m still here. Then add two shots of pain, because God knows life has been serving those without Ice, kindly add a dash of memory while you’re at it, the sweet kind that turns bitter halfway down cause they say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade but what if the lemons keeps coming from the same tree? What if the sweetness fades when I mix it with Hennessy just to drown the taste of things I can’t undo? See, I once dreamed of being young and unafraid, of loving without losing pieces of myself in the process but I gave love raw, reckless and real and it drained me till even my silence grew heavy. I used to think love was magnificent the kind that makes poets out of broken men now I just think it is expensive and the currency is always your peace. I remember being seven years old lying on my back under the sky wondering what it felt like to be over twenty, so sure that by then I’d have l...

  Nigeria is (65) sixty-five years, sixty-five years of independence, sixty-five years of promises, sixty-five years of betrayal. It should be a celebration, but tell me, what exactly are we celebrating? We have watched this country bleed for decades, not just from external wounds but from the inside, from the greed of leaders who swore oaths with their mouths while their hands dug deeper into the nation’s pockets, from the silence of those who see evil yet pretend not to, from the poverty that has grown so normal that hunger now feels like a natural state of being. Tell me how do we talk about Nigeria at 65 without remembering the blood that has watered her soil? Benue, a land once known for it's rich harvest of yams, is now a graveyard for too many innocent folks, herdsmen clashes, killings that go unchecked, families displaced, children orphaned and yet no justice. Each massacre passes like a storm, the same government that is meant to protect us just shrugs, issues a statement ...