Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

January 16, 1968 - Umuahia, Nigeria
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Night Nurse

Her eyes are laden with drunken sleep,
Silhouetted by lank, tired hair flimsier
Than the spine of an elderly, broken night.
Tattered, it buries the horrors of night;
Braided, it creases the rows of black corn,
Sweeping swiftly south and downwards;
Ponytail ties the umbilical linking life
And skyline light.
Lissome, she traipses with no lamp,
Even when darkness confidently pitches its nightingale’s romance
To district judges seated on the kerb of the apothecary’s creed . . .
With her the night loses its potency,
Its sacredness,
Expelling flies that die out on their own willpower,
Like winged dinosaurs,
Through the age of decomposing summer.
It's all been analysed beforeꓽ
The oneiric spell cast upon slow, difficult nights
When the breath smells like the anus of hell.
By the way, I drivel.
Not saliva.
Oh, no!
I drivel on about hissing nights that ought to be lonesome,
Stretched out, dark, and without rays borrowed
Earlier from a twerking twilight.
Restless nights, worn like silky cloaks, diaphanous,
Seeing through the naked veins of her sweet eyes.
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