Gardener Of Ruins Poem by Chima Ononogbu

The garden is seated upon a hill.
It has a gardener in a groove of ruins
Astride hooded cloud of wild unreality,
Galloping on a wave bustling with tales decades ago abandoned.

In these four rambling years,
He scoops up imaginations off the tattered plains of paranoia,
And trades in grating insanity as if in gold and silver.
He is fettered to superstition like a lizard to a tree.

His languid ego his chains and shackles.
Dead from the neck up, he is empty and irascible,
Refuged in his membrane a ragtag crowd of narcissistic thoughts.
He seethes with rage and hate when the air hums

The melodies of birds of free wings,
But lullabies he sings to scorpions he raises
That sting with poison fermented in the bed of his tongue.
He said to rotten food: "You are my bait"

With which to lure and feed my hunts,
And nurse their bitter teeth to cut like a blade.
Then, among the butterflies, send them to bite and tear
In the dead of the veiled night fated to doom.

The vintage tree, in royal rind, is his to climb,
but so afraid he dances about its trunk,
wherefrom he ruffles the waters of crystal spirit; and
at garden's eyes, he looks daggers with eyes erect as bull horns.

Oh, how alarming his perilous spine, how maddening his gutless gut
That he spits fire inside the rivers that quench the garden's thirst.
And under the garden's beds he plants combustible nails,
And swept into whirlwind fluffy air that gives the garden a cheer.

Now the sun's gentle flame has grown watery drips,
The face of the stars fallen out of favor with brilliance,
The moon oaring away into a far dejected cloud,
For the countenance of the garden is many faces of dry leaves.

Even so, at dawn comes a resurrection, a liberation bell,
Even keepers and watchers with faces furrowed of dissatisfaction,
Decrying the desecration of the sacred oaths of the garden,
then in the voice of trumpets they shout: the gardener must go.