By Abdulmueed Balogun
PROMPT—No one noticed ...
my body gets fatigued easily, and even more
my soul. but to whose ears do I narrate my haunting woes?
everyone is down with personal nightmares,
we are only veiling our festering wounds
with faux smiles.
and that's what you get — platters of deceits,
when compassion is struggling to breathe like world peace.
the world's gradually melting like ice
into a pool of bloodbath, tell me, dear reader,
where in the world is bereft of blood-spillage,
where, of news that wrecks the mind beyond darning.
Abdulmueed Balogun is a Nigerian poet & a second year student at the University of Ibadan, studying Biomedical Laboratory Science. He is a 2021 HUES Foundation Scholar & edits poetry for The Global Youth Review. He was longlisted for the 2021 Erbacce Prize, finished as a Finalist in the 2021 Wingless Dreamer Book of Black Poetry Contest, and won the 2021 Annual Kreative Diadem Poetry Contest. Find his work in: Decolonial Passage, Watershed Review, The Westchester Review, Short Vine, Subnivean Magazine, Alchemy Literary Magazine, Soundings East Magazine, ROOM, Jmww Journal, Night Heron Barks Review, Bowery Gothic, Avalon Literary Review, and elsewhere. He loves you deeply and you know it. He tweets from: AbdmueedA and writes from Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.