we're stroking this chain in peace,
knowing too well how drifters  
who can never be welcomed as guests in peace
harvest unripened tranquillity by plucking their hair strands 
after carefully stroking each of it with tones of passion
 
we're stroking this chain in peace,
mastering the acknowledgement
that connects a boy to a waste bin
where the society disposes every rotten blames
whenever a girl is approximated into a hook in the sorrowful opera
of every odds that this uneven hypocrisy births.
 
We're stroking this chain in peace,
for ourselves who are forgotten places
where people spreadsheets to cover up a PowerPoint that clouds the windows of our weaknesses.
 
we're stroking this chain in peace,
learning to stab ourselves severally without letting this knife kiss our blood with its sordid lips,
else our visitors will become bloody photographers;
shooting & capturing & archiving the accounts of this hidden civil war for the public to see & perhaps,
laugh at.
 
we're stroking this chain in peace,
becoming a cloud of smoke that
whirls around this chimney of fragility in silence;
of course, we must not let them know
how many times we die as unusual survivors before the clock strikes 3 AM.
 
Kaodili, I'm not dying yet
we'll together stroke this chain
till we find a place empathetic enough
to call us owners 
even when we don't deserve to be one.  
 

Biography:
Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan is an emerging writer from Ebonyi state, Nigeria. He’s a penultimate medical laboratory science student who explores medicine in the day and worships literature at night. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in several literary journals; both online and printed. He was the winner of 2018, FUNAI CREW Literary Contest.