The Twenty-Pound On My Mind Poem by Emeka GOC

The Twenty-Pound On My Mind


Ndigbo: Biafra, Lost A War sixty year before
However, the none physical war, injustices deprivation) s
Maintained by the state psychological grip
MH issues, PTSD trauma high as never like before
Like in a clinical dosage, despensed letherly, as a life fluid drip


Igbos; a single twenty-pound, a trillion pounds deprivation
Millions wake to an inheritance of silent grief,
An undocumented madness, a stolen belief
In a landscape structured by chaotic one-sided law,
The abnormal abnormality becomes the normal norm


Extraordinary renditions, borderless plots,
With justice tied up in bureaucratic knots
They stripped the hierarchy, collapsed the banks,
Wiped out billions and broke our ranks.
Offering a single twenty-pound note for a lifetime of sweat,


A calculated poverty, a generational debt
No psychological support for the bleeding and broken,
Just a forced assimilation, quiet and unspoken.
They forced the Christian child to recite the text,
Wondering which structural violence comes next


Where Gandoki, the war chief, lives a demonic, charmed life,
Sowing seeds of terror, breeding internal strife
The ghosts of the pogrom, the siege, and the dead,
Are planted deep in a schoolchild's head
Now mental health runs rampant and wild on the street,


While elites fly abroad for their bodies' upkeep.
The masses must deposit their blood and their cash,
Before state-run clinics will patch up the gash.
A robotic existence, an unmoving inhuman scene,
Born 1968; from the shock of a terrifying scene.


We survive in a state of trans-psycho numbness,
Hyper-vigilant, waiting for the structural darkness
Severe flashbacks, nightmares, the body on guard,
Living a life that is emotionally smeared and scarred
They tell us to steer clear of reminders and places,


To wipe out the memory of terrorized faces.
Took history, a subject off knowledge and memory
Out of school curriculum, where they can tell own history
But do not play the ostrich, do not bury your mind,
In the clinical coldness of definitions we find


Beyond the EMDR, the psychiatric breakdown, the fight
Beyond the static numbness of the Nigerian night.
For the trauma is sovereign, it runs in the blood,
A post-war psychosis we survive as a flood.
Three instincts remain when the state turns to dust:


No evidence-based traces, records or documents
Pogrom, genocide, hateful killings, they argue.
Economic blackmail and commercial kidnap, they quarrel,
In the hads of the victors, shared the oil block among themselves


Call them Fulani terrorists, they fight, they are our brothers
Mention autonomy for indigenous people, the North will cringe
The state kidnaps within the territories even beyond Kenya borders
They are feasting from the mediocrity hinge
Celebrating the fall of the dignity of man and own-selves