TRANCE-SEE-SHUN

The rotten egg crack-broken,

Reeking through the corks

Locked-in on the mouths of our saggy sages.

They satiated the past in their salamislicing:

Is it about Africa? They asked

It is a twig with two horns,

Copulated through manual surgery.

Their faces were saturine.

So, we asked the bald pen of our balds,

Roaming the dregs of the present

In mere oblivion and polyandrous trance.

It was above reality

In black ink on brown pages.

Their stances drown with the dawn

Muling and puking our precepts,

In gargantua brain-washing.

Is it about the past?

“Oh, it was a yoke brandish by liquid shells

Mixed into fired quotidian historical miscarriage,

And colonial disected misery.”

The catechists joined the race,

To pull our spikes out of the spites,

In bowl-tied and hewn suits.

Indeed, they wiped our eyes of drops

That sacred pity had engendered.

But, they enchanted us with watery clog,

And package manna.

Then, we requested,

Bring in the historians with embalmed maps,

Vague directions and formulated geographical ocean spread.

Come, they told us,

“This was where your Grandfathers hid their

Bent barks and worn heads.”

What about this curved clusmy lane?

“Your Grandmothers bore your fated fathers here

And licked their bodies to quench with their rough tongues.”

The seers diced in the lots of a deem sight.

They could not look back but peep afront.

But they gave us a name;

A name beyond what we can bear:

“Oh you of the new generations afflicted by trance!”

The political boars  had a say,

At least everybody did.

“Come and see yourself in our mirror.”

It was too soon;

They infected us with electoral jaundice.

And so, when there was no solution

But iodine and plasters,

In the sores of our scores,

We see ourselves the way we are!

The breeds of western pride,

Only watching their plight on

Walls, books, and ill-documented museums.

They call it African Colonial Experience.

We diluted our colour that they call black,

With pancakes and mary kay.

We apply knives, cutlass and stitches,

To change our faces

Giving us long noses,

And white hairs.

We have grown

From the trance they inflicted on us,

We have seen ourselves,

And we shun their ways.

Still we feel the sting of their ignorance.

JOHN LAW