Read: Oluwadamilola Agboola | My Escape

I tried to get inside,
but it’s like someone changed
the locks from outside.
I used to think that I was locked in this sweet nothing for the rest of life’s unraveling.
But today, it’s different because I am locked outside of my sticks of cigarettes.
Here is where I hide my head when the rains fall hard on earth’s soils.
And even though she hides me sometimes no longer than five minutes,
I still run to her for shelter, over and over.
Her comforting arms, she wraps around me;
around my head especially,
at the corner where my mind is.
She protects me from the cloud of reality that threatens to maim me.
She’s my rock!
This one time she took me from cloud one to a hundred in the tick of a clock,
she shielded me whenever I asked her. She was my rock!
But today, I’m locked out of my shell.
Someone locked me out from inside my addiction.
I have had to smoke twenty sticks in ten minutes as opposed to six,
before I feel that safe dark cloud of comfort that right now I miss.
My addiction served me an eviction without a notice.
What’s the assurance that if I found another, she wouldn’t dump me even quicker?
My escape is holding me slave, someone, anyone, please raise the gates

© Oluwadamilola Agboola | 2014