There’s a monger down the market with foreboding on his cart,
He’s selling trepidation, wrapped in yellow chicken hearts.
If you’re looking for some extras, he’ll add a qualm or three,
buy a bag of angst and horror, you’ll get a new bete noire for free.
–Hanging baskets full with phobias, all a sickening bloody red,
cakes of discomposure made from the jitters, shits and dread.
If you have the collywobbles or some other sign of panic
his eyes will mesmerize you, and his force will feel satanic
as it lodges in your guts and mind – indigestible ideas,
evil essence, hate designed, fright-tasting diarrhoeas!
–
That old monger’s now become another terror-weight tradition,
through the ages he’s been waiting for the blackest, dire fruition
of his prophecies, all based on despair and the bleak suspicion
it’s the apocalypse there knocking; impatient for admission.
–
Thus he’ll stain your future with his spittle and his spite
he’ll prick your paranoia, wind you torture-chamber tight.
His outrage expressly confected, ignites the tinder-boxed mind,
it diverts from subversion and the neglected
and undiscovered crimes.
–
So go to the market if you dare, hearken to the monger of scares
but beware of ingesting the antipathy of his pessimistic wares
for they’ll jackboot over your dream-scape,
your thoughts – stale, soured
revealing a pitiful weakness in your pathetic, innermost coward.
You think only God can know what hides behind your veneer.
but to the monger you’re clearly transparent, he smells your sweat-stenched fear.
–
He’ll swear upon his pulsing wrists, the Reaper is somewhere about
he’ll leave your skin tense and goose bumpled and your head chock full of doubt,
you’ll feel locked-in-boxed-in-and-crawled-through by spiders, roaches and flies
your fear of what isn’t forestalls you and the monger cares nought of the price.
The words of Peter Akinwunmi (Peter Ak'i) 