Let’s Destroy Our Culture

let’s choke helplessness in the crib,
that our children may grow.
we know we must destroy this culture,
pulverise wretched heirlooms that request our dignity
destroy
this nihilism we have cradled all our lives
boil this evil thing in its bathwater
and stop our ears.

we can be naked, but wish we had at least a wrapper for mother,
a loincloth for father, but the winds, they whip us with failure
and whistling reminders we weren’t meant to grow up
and neither were they- we simply got lucky.
now the country will try to shame us, then kill us, or kill us, then shame us.
but we must destroy our culture first.

can we
trip the cancer dancing up the stairs calmly
can we
cancel this deathrow of resigned waiting
can we
build shelter?
to shield us from strokes, and prostates, and bad hearts?
to cover comrades and alma maters,
everytime?
what

anticonvulsants for these paroxysms of despair
what
nifedipine
for these tensions?
we must destroy our excuses for this non-life,
shoulder into the right to be good children, good parents,
good humans and not flies that simply cannot, and just because.
what
shelter
to shield us from brought-in-dead hopes after the frantic racetracks
of 2am towards decrepit ERs?
what
censure
of tribal watchings of your family dying and children unable to fly because, Condition.

death to Condition that says
we cannot protect our children,
cannot protect our parents,
we cannot be
saved from humiliating hunger and stolen pensions
in this nigerian prison that chose us
death
to frantic searches of empty pockets
for a little more change for tests
you must do to know there’s nothing to be done
to save your loves
death
to extortion
in the next round of levies for futile trials
at saving the latest fallers through our floorboards
death to all-seeing national symbols that did not sound the alarm
against killers of neonates and cutters of girls down under and stealers of children studying for exams by lantern, that all-seeing eye that saw
disaster coming and kept silence.

we know we must forget, then excise and cauterise the parts that try to remember these ethnic dances of waiting for devourment by prowling tigers we could have trapped.
we must hit in the skull with blunt objects, our tendencies, these tendencies to keep our families asleep under roofs afire playing chicken
with ruination death to the machismo of seeing who can survive the night cold when we only needed to pick tinder in the morning
death
to potbellysim,
and the everlasting youth of elders stolen from children,
lining pockets of their babanrigas.
botulism, a horrible death, to supervising omertas of uncles raping our daughters.
a plague upon the unvaccinated lies that we did our best. when we never have.
callous inquisitors for our voodoos-
the voodoo of oppression
and rites of dispossession;
for our sacraments of apology-
if the younger is wrong, the younger will apologise,
if the elder is wrong, the younger will aplolgise.
death
to coerced apologies to keep a leering peace.
let our pretentious silences burn to cinders.
let
ash rain upon pauses in which the truth is too afraid to speak.

burn it down.
an erupting vesuvius upon it.
death to the kraken enslaving
children hawking in traffic for tonight’s dinner.
death to this non-life. gouge out its eye. neuter it forever.

We will rebuild our future from the purity of ash.

© Tolu Oloruntoba
6.30 pm, October 11, 2014