I applied my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also was a chasing after wind. —Ecclesiastes 1 vs. 14.
Always remember that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
I told my lover that I would paint madness, and that evening I brought her a drawing, all splashes of red. Burning red. Bleeding red.
…
“You need to see a therapist,” my girlfriend once said to me as a joke.
I wanted to say, I’m the therapist, I’m the therapy. But I didn’t, because there was really no girlfriend. Or, maybe there was, this lover of mine — a smoke that filtered into the realm of my dreams. I knew her only when I slept, only in my dreams. Yet when I woke up every morning, I searched the faces of people around me, seeking some sort of semblance I could match to her features. I asked her why everyone seemed to look similar except her, and why she, at the same time, had something that tethered her to every place, every person. She just had smiles and no answers. This blockhead of my dreams. But she was pretty, and I once swore I would die for her.
Well, I nearly died for her. I had fought a man for her sake, to prove how much I was willing to protect her with my feeble strength, for I had only been given power in a promo sachet, which implies that I’m not much of a strong man. As a matter of fact, my adversary had pinned me down when my lover vanished, and my screams traversed the liminal spaces between dreamscape and the reality of my mother’s bed. And, the next morning, I find myself kneeling at the centre of a circle of fervent prayer warriors.
A mother’s prayer comes with an echo, each word falling out with a thud. This mother, who had heard her son screaming into the stillness of the night all the way from the terrain of his dreams. Who had dragged her son out in the prepubescence of dawn all the way to the church to be delivered from the spirits causing him to scream. When such a spirit is your lover, why does a man even look in the face of his lover and see a filigree of stars, a hundred love verses? This girl who slithers into my head, who smelled of something deliciously heady, for whose sake I kneel in a circle of prayer-drenched women invoking grace for my salvation. This lover of mine. This madness of mine.
I remember that day that not all madness sparks off with absurdities — that, just like me, you could walk a silent village path with your mother, dressed in an Arsenal jersey and grey jeans, and still be on the verge of madness. Such unscreaming insanity.
In the very beginnings, your life was furled in the sweet safety of multiple assurances: from your siblings, your parents, your friends. Think of this future drawing near. Think of a vulnerable you in that near future, when what blazes in your eye now will be replaced by the residue of memory. I see it now, the fire of your aspirations. The throbbing intensity of your youth.
I was exactly this way when I came here. I, like you, knew the wildness of a beautiful future slowly morphing in your presence. I came here by myself, filled the forms and got myself through the breathing roads that are tributaries of the one union that is the South-East. I came here with a backpack of promises. I hoped I would learn. May the Lord not forgive me if I lie, but I’m learning. I’m learning that, like the hunger for food, all other hunger comes with the same stabbing urgency. And there is this one, this hunger twisting all slimy junctions of my insides — this hunger to at least make sense of my world. To look in the mirror and not see a stranger. To touch substance and not flakes of dust, to see substance and not a miracle. Like Christ, I asked so many times for so many cups to pass over me. But I did drink this chalice of madness, and many times became the sole witness to my countless unravellings.
Should I say it again? Not all madness demands you clothe yourself in rags or make curlicues on street walls with your shit. Some demand that you try countless times, fail countless times, and not get any reason for your failure except an assurance that you would fail on your next trial. Some demand that you just sit and write poetry on scraps and scraps of paper, only for a lecturer to tell you with the finality akin to the voice of a grim reaper that your work is liquid.
Liquid poetry.
Could it be the same thing I wrote to my lover, and she said I need therapy? Come, tell me, have you ever written a liquid poetry?
What? Oh, you have done one before? When your father died? See, there are many ways this life could fail you, and you would become liquid poetry yourself.
Monologue, soliloquy at the backyard of midnight. My dear, this isn’t your fault. This is a universal pandemic of the heart. Grief turns everyone into a poet, but some just eat their poetry because they are afraid of the emotions they could vomit, and so they are eternally condemned to a regurgitation of fractured experiences. Grief is a sophisticated madness, I tell you. And don’t contort your face in unease. Or are you not familiar with the saying that grief is a wildness with home training, a tamed kind of rabidity? Soon, you’ll look for a loss to make the subject of poetry, but you’ll not find it, because by then you’ll have lost yourself. Snapping your finger only makes it come faster. More sharp and exact. Like that day when you felt the invasion of bullies in your head. The Sunday your father died.
Me? Yeah, we’re in the same league. I’ve a vacuum for a father, just like you. The day mine became one with the wind, I wrote poetry, unlike you. How disgustingly weak you are. You sit beside your mother, shedding nude tears and asking if the doctor could still do anything. Do you not see how white your father’s face is? Do you not see how it’s sapped of every vivacity? If you had sense, you would have gone to a corner of the hospital and written a million tributes, dedicating one to each grey hair he was carrying to the sepulchre. You love him so much that when the love translates to loss, you miss the essence of language.
Solid. You stand by his graveside reciting his biography. Your voice is hoarse as you say Dust to Dust, earth to earth. He becomes dust, he becomes memory. You see now what I mean when I say that memory is dust. You send in the first tuft of sand over him. You build him a home under red earth, in your heart. You remain strong in your sequestering.
Liquid. You lock yourself in your room. You haven’t got past the first few pages of The Great Gatsby, no matter how much you try. The river in your eye is overflowing its banks. You retch into the toilet sink for minutes and come back to your bed to sink into poetry. This is one thing you’re perfect at: the art of bad poetry. It’s catharsis for you, a levitation of some sort.
Under your pillow are things your mother shouldn’t see: condoms, porn magazines, a pack of Oris, even though you don’t smoke. They say dead people become ghosts, and ghosts are omniscient. You want the omniscient ghost your father has become to see these things and nod at the kind of man you’re becoming. You yearn for some validation — you want a connection. From your heart comes a deluge. Your bedsheet can no longer tell the difference between sweat and tears. You stink, but you don’t go for a bath; you’re liquid in this era of your absquatulation from peace.
Gaseous. There isn’t enough space anywhere. You’re now obsessed with escape. You’re trapped, like a game. You have been sundered into countless amorphous pieces. Since your birth, this is the first time you have seen the bald head of your mother gleaming in the sun. She looks weird with no hair. You look weird without your mind. You fall to music, it disowns you. The sounds are like mockery. You spend so much time looking into open spaces. Now, you laugh a little too loud, a little too long. You walk like you’re one with the wind. All your feelings are quarantined in the various compartments of your mind. You know nothing, you own nothing. Your sanity is threadbare.
You see how I’ve dissected your life with such stunning accuracy? Because I resemble you in more ways than one. You want to hold me and escape into the castle of your existence. You want me to tell you more. I’m not a tattletale, you know. You need to bribe me into more speech.
You’re coming close for a hug? Is this how you bribe your way into secrets?
Don’t touch me. Noli me tangere.
There is something searing in your eyes, this orifice through which all the contents of your being splay themselves open to the sun. There is something like worship. Like, if you give it more time, it would grow into deification. But you must know that I’m no god, and that, just like you, I wake up each day and find myself still tucked into this body, mapping out the routine for a day that could rebel against me out of its own volition. Did I not say to my lover, “Meet me at the salon by four, we would go see a movie from there,” and by four, I found my lover cooling off in a hearse, spreading flower petals on the exit road of this world? Had Daddy not promised to celebrate my birthday in grand style this coming year, only to end up having the celebration in ground style? He and worms are now under the bunker of red earth. A new way to explain stillborn promises — words that die at the moment of utterance. Did you not swear to give up everything else for him to live? Yet he had ridden on death’s high-backed horse, away from earth. You think of it as a form of secession, this defiant act of looking at the world in the face and swearing you don’t belong here any longer.
Sometimes it happens this way: something breaks off from the empire we have safely built and tucked in our minds, crumbling a passionately nurtured peace, razing down the storehouse of our joy. Then the nation falls, this nation that’s our body. Then our hearts inherit wrinkles from all the dying it has been made to survive. This is where the intelligent men say that “A wrinkled heart equals a wrinkled brain, the same way an egg equals a full hen.” The ashes from a burned sheet of paper are no less ashes than the ruins of a burned castle.
Where are you now?
I’m still here, in this body.
Doing what? Can’t you just come out for sightseeing?
No, they are sanitising the streets of my body, so I can’t leave, not too far.
Okay. I wanted to tell you, If you need a more straightened-out mind, I’m at the backyard of hell. Okay?
You hate these voices in your head.
Father Boromeo, your rector in junior seminary, calls it the voice of conscience. But you’re sure you might be the only one who has a talkative conscience. You know this isn’t right. So, most times, you’re in the backyard, leaning on the spirogyra-ridden walls and praying into cupped palms. You hate to pray, but like drugs to a sick man, they are bitter but essential.
Water falling from heaven to earth wets the ground; prayers rising from earth to heaven wet the sky.
In church. Liberate Yourself 2024 crusade. Everyone is praying, and I’m the only one tight-lipped. I don’t know what to say to God. I don’t know if he would even care a shit about my own words, when there are better articulated sentences being sent up to him. My mother looks at me from the corner of her eye, and I impulsively mouth a few Hail Marys before her attention shifts from me again. I hope she understands.
I think of God asking what’s all about the deluge of prayers at the foot of his throne. I think of midday biology lessons, my teacher explaining that only one sperm cell succeeds in fertilising the egg during reproduction. I think of all of us gathered here in the church — suppliant, yearning hearts. Maybe God would answer the best-said prayer after all.
A church usher comes to me from behind and taps my shoulder.
This boy, pray.
I turn and look at her. I think I catch the scent of her wrapper before the wrinkles on her face. She smells of old age, like she has spent all her life begging God for plenty of things and receiving very little, and is still relentless in asking.
Close your eyes and pray, the woman comes again, looking at me like I’m a breed she has never seen in her whole life.
I want to ask why she looks so tired that her senescence is pronounced down to the minutest detail of her appearance. But I know what her answer would be. I know that she would say, “I was once beautiful.” And it would sound so much like the truth, that: We were all once beautiful.
Before the sun settled on our heads and burned us bald. Before we became so naked that we don’t remember the feel of clothes. We were once beautiful, before…
And even you, you were once beautiful before grief, before you became a liquid poet.
I’m not talking so much about beauty now. I hate talking of things that are constantly shape-shifting, that refuse to be faithful to one form. Because, what do you mean, all colours are beautiful?
I’m not trying to be a vain philosopher. But, either way, our land was built on what was once a river of questions, of never-complete knowledge.
The last time I was in church, the pastor said that all men, no matter how we look, are created in the image of God. And that same day in the news, there was a report of a child born with six fingers on each palm. You ask, does God have six fingers on one palm in some images of him? Does God have brittle black hair while making most Africans and flowing blonde hair on the day of making the White folks? Well, anything is beautiful. It’s your body. And if tomorrow you no longer understand this body, call it by its name and await the silence of its answer. And this is the bad thing about owning ourselves — how eternally ours our bodies are; how we can’t disown ourselves until we die.
You remember your teacher in primary five, the one who was a victim of a fire accident in her house? You remember how beautiful her body looked, how much of a colossal, perfect artwork she was, until that night when the fire from her lantern grew wild and nearly razed down her house, burning her skin and that of her children. Do you not remember now the assault it was to behold the new state of her epidermis after the burn? Do you think now, beautiful?
Broda Romanus was our neighbour, two doors away from where I lived with my mother and three siblings. He sold laces at the shopping centre, played blues every night in his apartment, and on Sunday evenings, my siblings and I would look out our window to catch him leaving for his evening dates. We loved his sneakers. My brother sometimes fantasised about owning them. But then I still remember that evening, that Thursday evening, when I was hunched over my Quantitative Reasoning assignment, and my brothers were watching Champions League finals, when my mother rushed into the living room with the news. Accident, Romanus, Trailer, Hospital. We could hear the street boiling, all young men were running around looking for anyone they could join in his car to go visit Broda Romanus at the hospital. Our father left the match halfway and didn’t return from the hospital till the next morning.
The next time I did see Broda Romanus, some four weeks later, the first thing that struck my mind was the shoes and the trousers he wore for his evening dates. He will never ever wear them again. He had been amputated because his legs were badly crushed in the accident. He was brought home in a wheelchair. With no legs. Same Romanus that jogged the street every morning at five, whom we loved to watch bend over and tie the laces of his shoes.
I’m thinking about this man now again, how he must have had to redefine fashion for his body. How he must accept being without a part of him that has always been there. How, following the unexpected incidents that occur in our lives, we shift the boundary-markers of ourselves, but never deny the existence of a boundary. How this man would have to recondition his mind so that when he features in his own dreams, he is now a man with no legs walking with crutches.
I ask again, how do you negotiate a new body?
Think of your burnt teacher, my sweet legless Broda Romanus, and tell me how you think of all these without the temptation of bursting into tired hymns. Calm down. Take some water. You look lost. Some things are better understood when you don’t understand them at all. It doesn’t matter if the salt goes in before the pepper; a soup that’ll turn out bad certainly will. You don’t owe yourself all this mourning. Okay, sleep. Okay? Lie down gently. Don’t hit your head on the bed railing, or this fragile head of yours will get a crack.
Pay no heed to the clock. Sleep till you become one with death. Till you leave a print of your figure on this bed. Sleep to ease yourself, because it’s only now — in this oblivion — that you’re away from the judgment that grows on the tongues of people like weeds. They will say you did this. They will say you said that. They will you look this way, you talk that way. In sleep, you don’t care about all this judgment. The night holds you in its bosom. But there will always be morning, and they will come laughing with all their ugly mouths. You should say to them, “Unwrap me softly, layer by layer, memory by memory. Unwrap me and see if I deserve this prickling laughter.”
Close your eyes and sleep. Can’t you? Insomnia? Insomnia should be a problem of rich people, people with no other problem that they name slightest things problems. You can’t toil a whole day and still can’t sleep. I would have sung you a lullaby, but since tasting a threnody, lullabies have died in my mouth.
Sleep. Sleep. Wake up now. Are you dead?
Hours ago, you yearned for sleep, and now you have gripped it tightly like a jealous lover. Wake up. The world is conspiring against you, crashing against itself, and here you are feeding yourself sleep to the point of crapulence. Of what use are you if the world italicises your name when writing a list of normal people?
I didn’t expect you to sleep with so much peace. Yesterday, someone you have known for years walked past you without recognising you. A lecturer asked for your name, and when you answered, she twitched her lips in momentary confoundment and asked: Is that your real name? Real names, fake names. You can’t remember how many times in your lifetime you have been asked your name, nor can you remember how many times you have had the answer, nor the number of times you presented a fake name. Now, you still wonder how many parts of a life are linked to a name. What and what you would have been doing differently if you bore another name.
That year in school, in a class full of common names — five Emmanuels, six Divines, three Emekas — you were the only one with a truly rare name. In the whole school, in the whole of your class. And it was just you who had that problem of waking up each morning with a river of water on your bed.
At age eleven, Reverend Austin flogged you every morning as though he could flog change into you. He made your classmates report to him whenever they caught you drinking water past seven in the evening. Still, you made water on your dorm bed. I know boys like you, because I was once like you. In one of the most prominent memories of my childhood, I had a minor fight with my brother, and he told my classmates that I bathed him each night we slept. I wore shame as makeup throughout that day. So, I understand.
By your third year in school, you are the popular, intelligent senior who still hides to take his foam outside before the rising bell. And, one day, you go to Google and ask it for a name for all this madness. Google calls it Enuresis. Even the most damned things have names. I told you before. But, then, Google doesn’t know all things. At least, it doesn’t know that it’s not only water that makes up a river. And what’s on your bed isn’t only urine. And that two liquids can flow from the same fountain in the course of a night. So, you know your shorts are drenched, but it’s not just from urine.
Here is the confluence of what night means to you. The boy in your dream is so beautiful, and the girl who makes your head spin has large gourds for breasts. This could be a sin. So, you tell no one about it. You would be eighteen soon, and no one would be able to understand why you take your foam outside every morning.
You make sure your trousers are always ironed. You don’t waste a day to replace your bottle of perfume when one is finished, but at night, you create a pool in your bed. If anything has caused you to pray, it’s this case of you being a water-maker. But God doesn’t bed-wet. So, you doubt He would understand. He might look into your heart and find a drowsy landscape He doesn’t recognise.
You stammer in your prayers. Sometimes, you don’t pray at all. But why? Why don’t you pray? Prayer is the key, if you must know. I admit I told you earlier that I couldn’t pray in church, but I grew up in a house of prayers, six years in Sacred Heart.
Seminarian Anthony insists every student must be at the chapel by five for the morning prayers. No student of Sacred Heart would ever start a day without God. So, he makes sure we kneel without using our scarves to protect our white school trousers from stains. You don’t do fine-boy for God, seminarian Anthony says. It was the worst offence you could commit in Sacred Heart — not participating in prayers. God help you if you’re caught.
The seminarian shows up again at 8 p.m. to monitor the night prayers, to ensure we pray for the repose of the faithful departed. If I had the heart, ‘the liver’, I would have asked him if the faithful departed also prayed for our repose here on earth. We deserve some time off from this endless chore of being alive, too. But I never asked. The same way I never asked him if he truly cared what we did with the rest of our day, within those hours that keep the morning and night prayers apart. The time when two boys trace the anatomy of their bodies behind the classroom blocks, when junior students jump windows into the kitchen store for some garri. When a student skips classes just to stay back at the hostel and raid his classmates’ lockers. Still, by 8, we all kneel under the watch of Seminarian Anthony to pray for the souls in purgatory and thank God for a day well spent.
In the arsenals of those hearts in the chapel lay individual accounts of a day’s madness, of all the sins that taste like cruise. Sometimes, I watch Seminarian Anthony and wonder how much madness he had fiddled with throughout the day.
Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear
This man in a suit is crazier than he appears.
You don’t hate colours, you just haven’t found the right shade;
Well, beauty is in the brain of the beholder. So, tell yourself, “I miss you.”
Pray the feeling is mutual.
Pray you love yourself so much to halt in tracks of evaporation.
…
I told my mother I would write her a love poem
and I ended up talking about flowers that wither at dawn
I know a love poem shouldn’t be about withering flowers or dying things
But you know also that a man buries a part of himself in his writings.
…
I’m tired. Come, come, let us rest here a while, so we would have the strength to continue this business of being alive. ♦
Daniel Echezonachi Maxwell is a writer and an English and Literary Studies student of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Isele Magazine, Afrocritik, ANMLY, Electric Literature, KokonutHead Media, PoetryColumn, Fahmidan Journal, Naira Stories, Shallow Tales Review, Brittle Paper and elsewhere. He was longlisted for the 2026 Jacob Zilber Prize, twice shortlisted for the Brigitte Porison Literature Prize, and was the winner of the 2024 Ikenga Short Story Prize and the first runner-up in the International Prose Category of the 2026 London Literary Prizes.
