My heart is bleeding,
Bleeding words and agony.
My ears are ringing with rhymes so corny
These words in my heart, oh gosh! they are too heavy.
In the back of my head, I have dreams to activate,
But these hands are tied and buried without a casket.
In a world where people are brimming with talents,
All I have is words, words not so moving, so lifeless and dimming.
When they live in my head, I believe in them,
And so, my pulse is always vibrating, trying to move my hands for a release,
My vocal cords are always bellowing, but all that comes out is empty echoing.
They’ve become little voices in my head with their own opinions now,
We don’t want to be picture perfect, we don’t want to be gold-standard worthy
We just want to be words, worthy only in meaning.
I can feel my heart beat rapidly and I’m almost scared to the point of breaking,
Because now my body is failing,
This ship that is my mind and heart is no more sailing.
I can feel the mutiny, I can hear their war chants as they begin to fall out
My fingertips are bleeding with black paper trails of disconnected words
My skin, slashed from all sides with all that I’m afraid to share.
Somewhere on my wrist I see: “Too bland but we want to live”
In my ears, more ink blots struggling for clarity
This time they’re screaming: “Rhythmless but we were born to be”,
Like the angry tiny men of Lilliput, they’ve brought me down to my knees.
—
Read – Legacy – A Poem by Oreoluwa Lasisi, Nigeria
My name is Agbenyegah Sedem Kwame, and I go by the pen name Sed Austin Maverick. I am a poet, writer, and soon-to-be spoken word artist and podcaster. For as long as I’ve known, reading has been my happy place, and to have such a place where the things I feel but cannot say and the things I dream of but cannot have as of yet come to life makes every cell in my body scream to be heard and seen.
The love I had for reading blossomed into me wanting to speak my truth and take everyone along with me to the places I always dreamed of. So writing became my form of self-expression and a ticket to the many worlds that live in my mind.
I dream of becoming a movie producer and a published author one day, and I would be relentless in my drive to get there.
