Category: Thoughts

Thoughts

Take.

I. Ogunbase

Let me go in peace,
Let me grow in peace,
Take my feet, if you want,
It’s just a little piece.

You chained me to yourself,
Made me hate myself,
You’ve won this game of yours,
Let me save myself.

Let me go in peace,
I’d like for my tears to cease,
You’ve had your fun enough,
I’d like some breathing space.

I won’t say that I hate you,
There are no words to rate you,
I believe I’m just spent,
So please, grant me the grace of leaving you

Let me go in peace,
Let me grow in peace,
You’ve taken my feet, so congrats,
It’s just a little piece.

Thoughts

Forever…

I. Ogunbase

It has been forever since I came here to write anything… And to be honest, I’m kinda sad it has taken me that long especially after the whole “I’m going to write more” posts. Nonetheless, I guess I should still be happy I’m here.

I’m here.

To start with, I have been writing… I have been writing a lot more than I thought I would ever write in my life, to be completely honest with you. I have been a redditor (term for person who has a Reddit account) for a while but I joined a subreddit (site within Reddit) dedicated to writing and I’ve been using it to practice and hone the craft.

As a result, I ended up creating a subreddit of mine, where I posted the story responses to the prompts put up on the site. And that spurned out a lot of good things for me.

With all that happening, I was fortunate to befriend a lot of writers in the community who helped me get better with their feedback and criticisms and it all led to the following;

  • I finished and won at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) for the first time in my life.
  • The novel I wrote for NaNo was a novel that spawned out from a prompt on the WritingPrompts subreddit
  • Said novel is complete and currently in the editing process.
  • Also, wrote a few stories which were well received by the community enough for me to kickstart my own Subreddit.
  • And now I have some serialised stories which get posted on a weekly basis for people to read.

There are no words to really express how my writing over the last few months has transformed into something completely different and how the journey has taken me so far. It’s exciting and I can’t wait to do more.

Secondly, if you’ve been here long enough, then you’ve surely seen my back and forth writings about life and what not. Life has been pretty awesome. Turns out I needed to grow some and change my outlook on certain things in my life, and my unwillingness to do so made me experience or rather, deal with my emotions immaturely.

PS: I don’t mean that everything’s fixed or great, but everything’s good and I am content.

Lastly, my girlfriend is awesome, but that’s a different post on its own.

All in all, I’m happy to be back. I’m not going to make the promise of “I’ll write more here” and all that like I did last year, but I will try and be here a lot more than I have been last year.

If anything, I will be cross-posting the serials here also, under the serials tab so that you amazing people here can also read along with everyone else on my subreddit.

Thanks for being here, all the same.

 

Thoughts

Deep Dark

I. Ogunbase

The moment drowns out the noises,
Even as the colours fade to from the background.
You’re just left in the cold darkness
Staring into space,
Your heartbeat keeping you company.

It’s louder than usual.

Forcefully going through the motions of life,
That you’re out of breath from the reality of it.
Your lungs are working overtime to compensate.
There isn’t enough oxygen through your nostrils,
So you open your mouth for assistance.

You hear a faraway sound say
“You’ll be alright”
But as if on cue,
Your heart ups the ante and calls the bluff.

Your fingers wrap tightly around the first thing it can grip,
Your eyes get wider and colour comes rushing back into view.
Unyielding, unrelenting.
Everything shines with a glare that mocks you with the opposite statement.
“You’re not going to be alright”

You shut your eyes to blind yourself to the accusations.
You ululate in your mind to block the echoes reinforcing the statement.
It’s like you’ve been dropped in the ocean.
So you sink to the deepest parts,
Your arms flailing in slow motion as you attempt to swim to the top.

But you’re failing.

The darkness has come to claim you.

Then you feel a warmth,
A light breaking through the fog of cloud numbing your external senses.
It pulls you up,
Slowly as you escape the maw of the beast about to consume you.
You hear a voice, calm and soothing.
It repeats one word that widens your nostrils and calms your nerves.

“Breathe…”

Your body complies as if on command,
And your heart relents its force on your veins.
The world returns into focus.

“Breathe…”

So you breathe. Slowly, as you try to regain control of yourself.

So you breathe.

Anxiety, Coping System, Descriptive, Emotion, Late Night, Life, Pain, PenPractice, Poem, Shorts, Sleepy time, Thoughts, thoughts, writing

Responsible.

I. Ogunbase

Responsibility is light.
Responsibility is heavy.

Responsibility is as light as a feather,
The spring in your step propelling you further till you fly,
It becomes the wings on your back,
Lifting you past the clouds till you’re up on high…
It is the cool shades you wear when you step into a function,
It draws the eyes of admiration on you.
For you,
It blots out the stars till you’re the only star shining.
The brightness lighting up the dark sky so intensely,
It only made sense for everyone else to shield their eyes.

Responsibility is the twinkle in your eye.
The confidence in your actions that make everyone want to stand behind you.
The winning smile that lets you past the doors that once kept you.
It is the strength you never knew you had or wanted,
Equipped to lift the burden of others.
It is the hope of tomorrow,
The sunrise on another day.
The assurance that you are in a better place than you once were.

It is freedom.

And it makes you cry.

Tears of joy, yes,
But not without merit.

After all those years of waiting, you’ve finally gotten here,
And it is everything you’ve wanted.

—

Responsibility is heavy.

It drags you off the edge of a cliff,
And lets you hit the waters with no mask.
So you gasp for air but the lack thereof doesn’t kill you.
You just suspend in viscous space,
As the liquid sears your lungs and makes you cry out for relief.

It is the bags beneath your eyes because you haven’t been sleeping.
How can you?
When it is knocking on your walls,
Questioning every decision you’ve made and
berating you for the ones you didn’t make.
So it renames you as “Negligent”

“You thought you had the right stuff but you don’t” It says.

Responsibility is a duty.

It commands. Never requests.
It punishes when you fail to reach the criteria it sets before you,
Even if the rule-book to your actions have been hidden from you.
It demands the entirety of your being,
Gifting you a burden that you can’t give to anyone else.

It gives you the option to ignore it,
Of which it incrues an interesting amount of interest on it.
So that when you return,
You will find your responsibility ripe with profits that you really don’t want.

Responsibility is not kind.
It is not cruel nor is it wicked.
It doesn’t love you and won’t give itself to hate.

It simple requires your best “you”.

And sometimes, that’s not enough.

Emotion, PenPractice, Shorts, Sleepy time, Thoughts, thoughts, writing

Days

I. Ogunbase
There are days when the sun in the sky is not as bright as it usually is.
To me.
The heat is either absent or scorching as sweat travels down my face,
never welcoming because there is no such welcome on days like this.
Days when laughter fails to lift your spirit up, instead reminds you of the
very obvious fact that today is one of those days you wish you could pick
up a remote and skip to the end.
But you can’t. I can’t.
Life becomes the cinematic experience that demands I get comfortable
with my popcorn in hand and tolerate the bits that come after.
There are days when music doesn’t move you. Doesn’t move me.
I, instead, dwell on the words till I find myself skipping through tracks as
I search for the musical notes that match the tempo of the mood the day
has put me in.
Days when you feel defeated.
Even when your belt and your trophy case are filled with your victories.
Days when everything just feels… grey.
Like the Instagram filter of reality has decided that the vintage grey-scale
tone is a better fit for your viewing pleasure.
Days when nothing feels right, nothing sounds right and you can’t stop
thinking about the green grass on the other side, except for the fact
that you don’t even know what it looks like.
Days like this when it’s hard to explain the nuances of how you feel
because words don’t quite capture the totality of the emotion…
Like a jigsaw puzzle missing a piece you just can’t place. But you know…
You know, that in some form… it exists.
There are days like these…
When all you want, is for the colour to return back.
And so you wait.
Descriptive, Emotion, IG Prompts, Life, Love, Pain, PenPractice, Poem, Thoughts, writing

IG Prompt: We Are Who We Are

I. Ogunbase

We are who we are

We are the children of the Earth,
the pride of the Motherland,
the beautiful melanated hue of human origin,
the inhabitants of the spectrum between light and dark tones,
comforted at the truth that at our core,
we know who we are…

We are the men seen as lesser men,
by lesser men who had gotten it in their heads,
that we were lesser than them.
So they tied, beat and tortured us,
moved us over the sea in an effort to own us,
and if they couldn’t cull us,
would relegate us to Poseidon’s waters
where we would watch the surface drift farther away,
as our shackles dragged us to the bottom.

And even then,
amongst the creatures at the depths of the world,
they still couldn’t break us.

We are the 5am Nurturers and Gatherers,
toiling through the field for produce
just so that we can feed our young and ensure they see a better tomorrow,
because today just feels a little harder than it should.
We watered the earth with our tears,
and reaped our sown seeds with sweat and death,
even as they tried to break us,
but they only succeeded in making us stronger.

We are the families with one less member in the family.
So Mummy’s out there working two jobs and a late shift,
just to keep a warm bed to cuddle into at night.
Because Daddy’s not coming.
Because Daddy went shopping with Uncle Timmy for some flour.
but Uncle Timmy can still walk the streets,
while Daddy’s under a strict curfew and stricter visiting hours.

We are the marchers and the protesters,
clicking our fingers to the mental replay of Martin’s speech,
so we light the metaphorical candle in our hands,
as we sway from side to side,
humming a consistent song,
“Free at last”, or so it would have gone,
as we realise that they still haven’t managed to break us.

So they switched formation.

Drycleaned the white robes, got into politics.
Burnt all their crosses, and made laws instead.
Decade long feature movies of their hit novel
“How to Oppress from behind the Curtain”
Made strides at conversation with us,
out of the mouth of a metal barrel.
They wanted compliance,
with a medical dose of a bullet per prescription

And yet,

We are still who we are.

We are the entreprenuers of a new age,
with new dreams that have no shackles on.
We are the executives and the cooks, the businessmen and women,
the lawyers, engineers and high school student with 83 college acceptances

We are the trendsetters, the music moguls,
the ” Who Run The World” ladies with unstoppable energy

We are excellence itself.

We are the Kings and Queens of civilisation,
the rulers of ancient lands over the waters,
descendants of the birthplace of life itself.

We are the mothers and fathers,
brothers, sisters and uncles,
that stand side by side with those we call our own.

We are black.

We are proud.

Anxiety, Descriptive, Emotion, Late Night, Life, Pain, Poem, Prose, Sleepy time, Thoughts, thoughts, writing

Shot Glass.

I. Ogunbase

Adrenaline and emotional pain, poured into a shot glass for your heart to drink.

You’d call it poison, I’d call it life.

Life, like the pound notes entering your pocket, but bleeding through the hole at the bottom as you try to pay the debtor for “one more day”.

Like the great staircase leading upwards, whose only requirement is that you step on the head and bodies of others to ensure there’s enough space for you to claim as yours.

You’d call it deplorable. Some would say “Competition”.

Competition as basic as who gets into work the earliest to bask in some sweet brownie points of being “ever ready” to get to work. Or is it the excellence in one’s field as they struggle to show that their work is worth taking notice off above others?

Or maybe it’s the “trying-to-1-up-you-by-showing-you-how-much-I-can-provide-for-you-when-contrasted-with-how-much-you-can-provide-for-me-” sort of battle, as couples hug in public as they joust in their individual mental landscapes.

Some would say its healthy.

Others would liken it to alcohol.

But after the first couple shots, the burning feeling in your chest dissipates as your body temperature rises from the pot of emotions bubbling underneath.

Words start to slur as words decide to stop lying on your behalf. Memories merge into an amalgamation of horror and fancy as you play the “What If?” game with yourself.

Then the world spins, and you taste the exotic dish of hard granite and dirt on your lips to pass the night.

And for a moment,
however brief,
It
all
just
stops

And then you awake.