A Note On Love
I’m in my 20’s & all I can say to the boy
in me is that he may never love/be loved.
I have stopped reminding myself that
I’ll one day stumble into the arms of love.
The reason is the mountain of loneliness
I have carried/still carry for these past months
& years.
Every night, I engage my shadow in a discussion —
of how I once strolled into a fountain of love & came
out drenched with rejection.
My next door neighbor is a boy & all I can say is that
he’s so fortunate with love.
During high school days, I wrote a love poem & kept it
to myself.
A girl read it & died with surprise.
After reading, she said, you need to be a little rich
to love.
My friends too tells me that the wall of my body is rigid
to welcome love.
& every morning when I stroll to the mirror stand,
I tell myself: love is distant from me.
By Emmanuel Ojeikhodion
Biography:
Emmanuel Ojeikhodion is a Nigerian-Edo emerging writer, poet & essayist. He writes to expunge his monstrous demons & documents the ripples from society. He has works published / forthcoming in Capsule Stories, The Lunch Bucket Brigade, Cons-cio Magazine, Chachalaca Review, Museum of Poetry, Déraciné Mag, Rigorous & elsewhere. He’s a finalist in the Best of Kindness Poetry contest 2020 from Origami Poems Project. He recently compiled his first Poetry chapbook & seeks a home for it. He’s a lover of Country & old Songs He tweets at @hermynuel.
The artist in me. After many years of searching I found love in my late 30’s. It was the angst of the artistic soul in me that confounded me those many years but it was the logic of love that grounded me. Good luck on your artistic journey. Revel in strong feelings for artistic endeavour knowing that love will find it’s way but not always in the way we expect or the timeframe we intend. Some of my best artworks were conceived through angst.