Life after death

-with you i ask questions of life after death,
i only told you i was going to Cotonou
i told you i will return a week after,
you pleaded for yoghurt and apple-
Not the biscuit-type
which tree stood in front of the broken wall
At Isieke
But that which Eve seduced Adam with...
i still remember you saying:
"be careful, please, my love"

and before i returned, you are gone
If we are as important, we need to know
where death takes our souls to,
If we will meet again
in the bliss of heaven,
not in the maddening crowd of Mile2
It seem now the only memory, refusing to fade
clinging on to me like a question mark
hung on eternal sentence...
i was born April, why will it be a dark month?

is life a promise made a whore
in bed, just before orgasm?
Are we a horde of kikiriri inmates
chained to Becket's theatre?

Could You not have shown me the car crash,
in a cinema of dream
so that I will wake up and cry,
cry again and some more
bid her farewell, oh rose of blues
and write this blossoming epitaph
while she sit beside me, help hone the muses,
recite the dialogue and console me...?

Because those who leave
knows the isthmus of armadegon
like i know the road to Umuidi!

Henry Ajumeze