Adagio (Slow Burn)

by Chioma Okereke


Approval seeking prima donna

Complete with attention deficit disorder

Should ensure that you remember me

Long after our paths have uncrossed

And monogrammed memories

Be the albatross

Threatening your current situation

Allow the subtle manipulation

Of remembrances

To tease you into submission-

And when you succumb

Will-worn to what could have been

Remember that you were warned

And you will mourn my passing

 

Let the last thing we said

Be forever embedded in your skull

Wallpapered words

That refuse to fall or decay with time

And in dreams

Let the only vision you look upon

Be mine-

Immortalised perpetually

In youthful grace

Heady cloying impertinence

Let the past tense invade your present

Until you cry out for escape

Not even waking hours will save you

 

I want to the femme fatal who

Makes you hide in your garage

Twenty years after the fact

Unearthing love letters

Whose message holds compact

Upon archaic, crumbling borders

Grasped  light between your fingers

To preserve them until your deathbed-

The woman

Who turns your head in supermarkets

On buses

In hope

The only living ghost

Unburied         eternally haunting

 

I never quite believed I could break you

Make you question decisions you made

Undress your future

Leaving its paltry corpse on display

To turn your appetite

 

And all at once

Choices so right at the time

Are relegated to the back of closets

Never to be worn-

The glare off your ring faded

The prom king crown

No longer befitting a receding hairline

 

Allow me to accept the blame

For a willingness to please

Owing to my childhood innocence

Apologies that I couldn’t sit still

Never seemed quite at ease

In anticipation of your disappearance

Under the guise of my apparent faults

 

Let the wisdom instilled in adults

Correct all inconsistencies

Regarding our history

Experience soften harsh edges

Until hindsight bring you to your knees

A mere shell of a man

Broken

Begging

Begging

Begging my forgiveness

 

And know that

While hell hath no fury-

And age fosters empathy

In other more malleable females-

We drama queens couldn’t care

Less.


Adagio (Slow Burn) by Chioma Okereke

© Copyright 2003. All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be duplicated or copied without the expressed written consent of the author.


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