What Person Will You Be? Poem by Raymond Anyanwu

Have you listened to your inner man?
What did he say?
“What kind of a person will you be? ”
You didn’t hear him asking?
Well, listen again
Stretch your ear:
Let your pinna pick the waves
Do your ear drums vibrate
And convey such to the auditory nerves?

But yet the man inside asks:
Do you want to be a personality
With a complex draining of the soul?
Sophisticated with instruments of feeling
And a system of controlled memory?

Listen still; he asks once more:
Do you desire afresh personality
Young as the end of the twentieth century,
But with a frame from times ancient?
And with a God even older than bodies?
Are you the personality for the earth’s surface?
Of places low, caves and wells frightening
Or mountain peaks and buildings tall and scary?
Are you like an inserted bifurcation, a cutting stiletto Or a stuck ladle? Are you smooth and sly
Like a spatula skulking up from underneath?
Or a pestle weighty and inept
Mashing good and bad in concert?
For a little flavour and a little aroma?
Your arrows do not direct at me.
For I’m as a trumpet
Sounding my industry vigilantly and softly
Like a lengthy will that began to be written
The moment I was born. But listen I beg of you To that inner man
And his questions respond