Portrait of a boy dissolving to ruin

What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Portrait of a boy dissolving to ruin”?

Well, I think portrait of a boy dissolving to ruin came into my mind because I wanted to write something about suicide, and speaking of suicide, on the 13th of may 2019, a friend of mine, from the university of Nigeria committed suicide. Now the reason for his suicide is different from what I really wanted to paint. Suicide comes as an act of depression most times and I think it is the least thing people want to talk about.
The fascinating thing about portrait of dissolving to ruin is the imagery it possess, In Nigeria, most people live with HIV/ AIDs and most of these persons are unaware that they can still live with the disease for their life time. So the poem is about a boy who goes to check his HIV status and discovers he is HIV+, so he goes home depressed, thinking of how to live in the world and when he doesn’t have an option, he thinks about how to ruin his body, so he drink two bottles of poison which is an imagery in the line “so he drinks two puddles of rain…..”

Portrait of a boy dissolving to ruin had three drafts. Before I wrote the first draft, I had written a poem for my friend who committed suicide, I would say it was an epistolary, the poem was epic and all it contained were questions, great questions that when I go through again, I would be like “okay Akachi, I wrote you this, to tell you I love you even though you left me in this world alone.” So it was a poem of consolation, of giving myself space to think, rethink and make up my mind.

Then I wrote the first draft of portrait of a boy dissolving to ruin, and it was still like writing my friend a poem, so I decided to write something different and make it in a prosaic manner. So I wrote a second draft and then a third and then gave it a title because of the theme of the poem.