Images (An Elegy For Shell Camp) Poem by Nkwachukwu Ogbuagu

Like a child's toy stomped on by a vicious adult,
These images haunt...
It's no pribble when I insist that their mothers' breasts,
Sucked lame by gelid seasons,
Wizen by the weight of crass technology.
I refrain from such glare,
Satanic, and saddled by moss, re-posting frantic lustre
Mirrored by a strafed desert.
Shell Camp lies raped by blunderbuss politicians,
Wayward, light-fingered sons of menstruating harridans.
Spitfire raves within dykes of wasting, refluent waters
The zinc roofs sing songs with broken tongues hewed
To fragments by yelling seas beyond the comprehension
Of pococuranti.
Where shall I hide my face this season?
Where do the apologues I learnt as an infant stream to
In one ray of branched clouds?
Shell Camp is in perdition.
Her court is one sloshed trough where wretched beasts piddle on
The vestiges of a broken past.
The images reside below the threshold of refinement,
Killing strings of beads that charm priests,
Concupiscent Bishops of holy sex.
And what do I say to the choir?
The singing vampires with aphonia!
The images are senseless.
They yield crenellations on smudges of ailing wars
Waged from gays and lesbians to bilking lawmakers
On the grounds of a prostrate and gelded nation...
The images tarnish my image -
That of a picaninny in white on red-tongue crimson
Now querying the essence of this waste.
This shock!
This pallor!
This silence in the face of fulminations!