Berger Bus-Stop, Lagos. Photo Credit: Fadaka Louis

This is lagos
A city of peace in a thousand chaos
A city of plastic tins and many tin gods
Rising stars and fallen albatross

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Welcome to a city of angels and demons
Fair weather friends and abominations
Those who have grapes and sour lemons
Those who never abandon

A land of many task masters
Waters filled with lurking disasters
Over riped gutters filled with adorable adulterers
Many ladies over coloured in mascaras!

All hail the gods of iron that creak the roads!
The countless wails of their crispy boats
The stinking sweats struggling with the over worn coats
Packaged illiterates toiling and cursing  on their yellow throats!

A land of freedom in slavery!
Mean souls with extreme savagery
A loving mother cuddling a hopeful imagery
Everybody is rich in lagos is the painful summary!

Lagos is like a promiscuous bride!
Calling everyone  and tossing all her suitors aside!
Lagosians have lived with her pains beside
From the deep slumps of Ikorodu to the Lekki sea side

The bright side
If you have never been to lagos besides
You would have to feel it’s pulse on the inside
Many souls whose lives are spent in buses and pent houses

The countless sound booths wailing on the dark streets
Folks dance away their sorrows with the jazz beats
While people shake their violent butts with impending deceit
These are the daily lives of the scythe and the elites

They are men who feel like gods who
 would never die
Hard-hearted men with fearsome pot bellies like flies
Sexual predators with ritual sacrifices whom many authorities cannot defy
The ugly side of the coveted beautiful bride

Hard working men who with sweat have toiled
Some have seen the day and night boiled
Some whom benevolent spirits have their kernels cracked
And those whom the gods have forgotten and soiled

A city of a thousand voices and solvent screams
Buried In ecstacy and groans in a geiser of screens
Pantomime characters mincing and menacingly extremes
A City of many progresses and aborted dreams

Our society has refused to listen to the voices of those who have lost
Neither the voices of those who are lost
These voices sum up the brutal cost
Of living in a land mixed with lust and exhaust

Words will never define all the happenings in this land
From otodo-gbame to Victoria island
We can only say the few and their brand
Forgive if you haven’t been mentioned those mentioned are popular demand

Lagos is the only possession for the very many
All they ever have and all they hope is in this genie
They cannot leave this city nor go back to aunty jennie
who have more properties than them living in this city

Lagos is the dream cast for those with talents
Dreams fantasy to those who are resilient
Those whom with only two pairs of clothes have vowed accomplishments
They are the owners of lagos and all her enrichment

The endless opportunities
The endless wretched communities
The frustrating ambiguities
Is the hall mark of lagos countless abnormalities

You cannot exist in this city except you are partially insane
It’s not a city where folks fear disdain
When the time is right men act as though on cocaine
And the ladies many who beat up men

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Sweet lagos they said and they took me on a plane
The tall buildings and their alluring window pane
The beautiful cars and the endless complain
Loan sharks who crawl lagos to deceive with mysterious chains

I have spent myself marking this city
loan sharks pray for victims in their kitty
Pretend to have pity
Then arraign you in a torrents of activity

Pharm Odudu Akpaete