Drive Past It

I stopped driving at 16 when I had my first accident. The cost of it all made me decide to let the keys go, like lovers on some bridge in Paris, after adding their locks to the teeming number that will cripple the bridge.

This is not a poem. And it is not about lucks or keys
or a kiss or about spoon feeding emotions
or trying to have a relationship
or driving a career worthy of a Fast and Furious adaptation or a Shakespeare narration.

This is to the one who has felt heartbreak close up but, like one of the blind asked to describe the structure of the elephant, will take my words with a pinch of salt. Add it to that part of your wound that a heartbreak caused, cover your cracks with it, do an Nsibidi inscription on your sensitivity.

Heartbreaks are bad for your Health.

Remember when I said I stopped driving, well, I will drive again, and again and again and again. That is how hearts get broken…and heal.

You love or trust or have certain expectations for/from people, their inability to meet up or match your expectations leaves you hurt, and now I have been summoned from Frankenstein’s grave to tell you this;

Don’t stop loving, don’t stop being optimistic, don’t stop expecting the best from people.

Don’t stop believing…
Don’t stop loving…
That is how hearts get broken…and heal enough to heal other broken hearts.


Ice Nwa Ǹkwọ
©2020

Swimming in molten streams

You say your heart leapt when our paths first crossed
That my frame made you melt, shook you shoulders in spasms
You say sparks flew in our sights when they first locked
Like rough iron faces slamming together
At the start of a melding of souls

You say molten streams surged up your skin when we held hands
Roaring and smashing and battering and burning and sinking us
You say we swam and splashed in pleasant thoughts of each other
Together, woven up in skyward soars and seaward plunges
A glinting pearl of cosmic thirst for love quenched

You say I played up your craving heart like a game
Hugs for dice, kisses for cards, every moment a bet tied match
You claim I aimed for your delicate core
Where trust sits tightest, where hurt cuts deepest
And yes, you say I fractured your fragile soul with imaginings not lived out

You say you’ll be wrecked no more
So you sit beside loving hate and cursing smiles
You raise a cynic facade to mock a mirthless world
But you die a million times over on your insides
You shut sunlight out to mourn love lost in secret darkness

You’re coming round to truth now
For we did swim and splash and sink in love’s molten streams
But I became the life raft to keep your shaken frame afloat
The burden of wreck forced your pained flight from Light
But I’ve owned it as paddle to steer you back to me

Ikenna Nwachukwu Alexander
© 2019