Re-reading oneself can be such a boring chore that I’ve always tried to avoid because of the emotions it inevitably brings back. Most times, one is just too glad to be rid of the overwhelming feelings that make one write in the first place to go back at will. I’ve just finished looking through all the poems that make up my first collection of poetry and all of a sudden I’m back with the overwhelming nostalgia of pre-University and University life. Maybe this year would be a good time to re-issue the collection into the public after five years of hibernating fermentation.

I am now officially looking for publishers for the electronic and print reissue in America, Europe and in Nigeria. Here, below were the lines I penned for the year 2000, written a few hours into that year while I sat in church on that December evening, bored to my bones.

The Year of the bug

It’s a new dawn because a year is born,
But are hours years for zero to mark one?
Men have flown to realms of high imagination
with anxiety and snippets of loose contrite illusions.
Of human clock, a stroke of the thin long second hand,
Or the gradual droop till the final grain of sand
Marks a whole new start – a thunderous landmark.
And new time commences, yes it remains dark.
Here begins a new dull span of restless days
Of ends unseen, unsure even when one strongly prays.
Called it a new phase, named it a new rolling life –
new day into pay; new life into more human strife.
And yet remains too cryptic and strange remnants
of words, thoughts, fears and imagination parts,
And of pregnant signs, sights and sighs unblown –
of things not yet seen and yet all unknown.

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