Silent Voices

Never Too Old

76 We cheated to get what we cannot really handle We cheated to get what we cannot really handle because We were poorly taught by our teachers Knowledge You are such an elusive And fragmented a resource We cannot solid claim on you lay In any single region You we often celebrate In our tropical region Teeming with idiotic crowds Of hand-clappers and praise-singers Undue fame we desire to attract And thus the grains that build up daily For quality content and form you to gain Frozen solid blocks soon become Indeed heavy icescapes In our polar region Where both content and form they lose In this core of self-centred pride Never Too Old You are too old, I’m often told, And your hands so cold, Your face-skin fold on fold 77 On yet another fold, To tell you’re really old, Though not yet cold, As your heart’s still bold And dressed in gold Which, though so cold, Is never too old. Getting into the Ethical To get into the ethical Life might go hypothetical With some tint of the musical Or even of the lyrical And certainly the theatrical But yet not so hysterical Nor grossly hypocritical Let alone so political To make it wholly clinical And get into the ethical BB-lambasting as Potent Ism (In memory of BB, the Obasinjom Warrior) When racial arrows reincarnate Strew our noble sky spitting Bilious profanities on our afro-psyche Adrenalin-secreting BB-lambasting feats Apocalyptically defines our potent Ism ’Cos the Dictionary engraved as it is ...