I am Beside You

When the nights seem like temporary forevers,

The world unforgiving, weary, and lonesome,

Know that this is water under a steady bridge,

Even raging floods will not shake,

Because I will always be beside you

Perhaps the distance, and time between us

May make your world seem full of dark clouds, hovering

And the rain, always imminent, an impending doom,

But always know I will be your umbrella,

Your shelter, a rock of refuge

Perhaps our lives seem like a stage

Without actors, without the lights, or the audience

And the two of us far away, practicing our lines

I, have mastered a few of the lines:

I love you, and always will no matter the circumstances

I am always beside you, cheering you on

Wayward Nights

Wayward nights stretch their gory limbs

To touch a face, worn with deep thoughts

Alone, in a lonesome dynasty

Whereupon nights stretch to a thousand infinities

Unfazed by sleeping pills, and perhaps opium

Searching, seeking a familiar face

In every stranger that smiles better than the setting sun

Drowning the world with certainties, and dreams

A NEW NOSE

Because of the floods that have wrecked havoc across the country, I have decided, to plead with nature, to grow a new nose. I want to be able to smell disaster from many miles, better than our meteorological department who up to now is faceless. We do not see them on television even telling us to plant trees, and then end up with a tag line that we have all come to associate inefficiency, corruption, blatant disregard to the rule of law: GOK DELIVERS. I cannot entirely blame them; they personify our cherished ideals.

As it is, I have not decided to grow any more noses. The ones I have are already in surplus. It is just one huge pimple that has implanted itself a few inches above my nose. It is painful. When touched. And I can’t resist fondling it every second, just in case I can pop the contents out and let my face be the normal and perfect.

As the alarm went off, signaling a new day to pursue the same old shit (lick some corporate arse), my new nose is keen on telling me that it is not worth it. It is telling me in a language that would as well have been Greek, which of course I would have perfectly understood, that I cannot let people see me in this condition. ‘Why let people think that a terrible biological experiment backfired on you?’ It whispers. “you know very well that you don’t like weird looks strangers will throw on you…it is like someone pouring dishwater you, and from experience it  is not a very good thing.’ It goes on elucidating various bad scenarios that would occur, to which I respond in a kind: I AM NOT LEAVING THE HOUSE TODAY.

The world has natured a need in us to be perfect. You have pimples on your face? Here, have makeup. Your eyebrows are not perfectly aligned? Shave them and redraw with this. And our ladies have swallowed the bait. Perfection is the new normal. We men sometimes are not conscious of these things until the day our lovers decide to leave us and all of sudden we understand why we often woke up to a foul mood because each one of those mornings we woke with a stranger. Save for that, when strange things begin to germinate on our faces; pimples and boils.

Hollow Halls of a Soul

the aches, the longings,

that sprout beneath the angst,

within the hallow halls of my soul,

sometimes numbing, sometimes fulfilling

filling the crevices that your sweetness once sought refuge

then there’s life, then there’s more of it,

when I realize how stranded I am, among a sea of people,

aching with longing, to once again put the feeling into words

immortalize it, let the it caress the longings, and the aches

as the echoes of my heart beats

reverberates in the hollow halls of my soul

Clingy Sorrows

I bought a rope, and a lighter,

My sorrows have acquired life jackets, and boats

They, too, have insolent grins on their faces

My demons have learned a new language

And forgot the one we used to converse in

It’s colder and darker inside, lonesome and weary

Nights are long drawn

Mosquitoes have become menacing

Communing with me into the wee hours of the night

SUBTLE SIGNS THAT YOU NEED TO MARRY

In life, somehow, we thrive under deadlines. Just imagine what wouldn’t have been accomplished if there were no deadlines? Many of us, if not all, wait till the last minute to type that report, or waited till the last minute to do that assignment back in school. It’s the nature of being alive and without a hurry in the world. As such things that do not have a deadline attached to them, ticking like a bomb, will never really get done as quickly as they should be. One such is marrying for the man. The ladies, I hear, have their aunties up their sleeves, nagging and nagging … because of the ticking biological clock. Luckily for men, the clock doesn’t tick against them.

But then in life, there are subtle things that just appear to us, that seem to tell as we need to find a partner, marry and settle down as quickly as possible. Of course your years must be quoted in centuries and it makes sense, such as ‘I have lived for a quarter a century.’ If you have no kid out there, then you should be worried because you are contravening against strict African customs that necessitated you had close to three or more kids at that age. Bedroom conquests, although they did not covertly say so, were strictly for procreation. Having lived such a long time must be enough a reason to look out for an offspring. You never know when you can be hit a stray bullet, or you may just be visiting a sick relative at KNH, and the next thing you know is you are in the morgue, lifeless and masked people are conducting strange experiments on your person.

As you walk across your neighborhood, you take note of kids playing with their tiny bicycles and it suddenly occurs to you that it would be a beautiful sight if that kid originated from you. When your heart goes ‘aaaaaw!’ in a strictly feminine way, my friend find the nearest cute thing, even if a tree, and go down on your knee, for its nature way of telling you that it’s your time to procreate. Even worse, all the friends you were in high school with start posting picture of little pinkish human beings on their whatsapps, and you have to imagine all yours that were trapped by latex or those that were gunned down by the ever efficient Super Agent Postinor. You may regret once or twice, until you take at least four beers and you find yourself in the same circle again.

Sometimes, on  evenings, when you trudge up the stairs to your little ‘sheethole’ the aroma of cooking food, doused with all the spices imaginable, arrests you in one dimly lit corner of the stair case and tells you in a diabolic grin: ‘you may have to get hungry, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ Inside the houses emanating that smell, are wives doing their things. The man, if he has not passed by the local, has his feet on the table, watching important things such as lotto and sports betting adverts. What about you? You will be welcome by the stale smell of dishes that you haven’t washed since Agwambo was a toddler. Which reminds you that you have surviving on one sole culinary skill, boiling things up and adding salt. When it gets to this point man it’s time to get a helper.

As men, we are both biblically and legally allowed to be hygiene challenged. Questions will be thrown at men who are abnormally clean, and you don’t want to be one of them. These questions, mind you, put to question one of the core reasons as to why are a man in the first place. As a matter of fact and urgency, you are allowed to employ the following hygiene techniques every day, until you find a wife. When it comes to dressing, you have two techniques to use when all your clothes are dirty: looking through light to determine which is less dirty, or sniff to determine the extent of sweat you have deposited on your clothes. However, the sniffing technique is quite irrelevant when certain small insects drop dead, which you have to update you laundry techniques by getting a wife, assuming she subscribes to the traditional roles of the wife that our fathers have, since time immemorial, determined as the correct and acceptable reasons of paying too much unnecessary dowry. If not, my friend join Maendeleo ya Wanaume. Revive it if you have to, they’ve been too silent of late.

And then the cold. Although you do not want to give the wrong impression, that sijui he wants constant sex, which is hundred percent true, this is also part of the package that just demands that you marry quickly, through whatever means.

Of Whatsapp groups and the people in it

She is asked whether she’d be willing to be added to a whatsapp group. She completely refuses, as if she is allergic to the mere mention of whatsapp group or as if a brain eating bacteria spread exclusively through a whatsapp group has been invented. She says she belongs to four groups, and the fourth one is because its family, which leads you to question her priorities.

Unlike her, you and perhaps me belong to a million plus one whatsapp group. There’s one for job, one that represents your passion (drug consumption group), one for school if you are still in one, one for family, plenty for politics…until a million of them. In all these groups, there are some characters who to your last nerve, of course if your life is not interesting. Mine is. I have however heard what pisses people off in regards to whatsapp group. The key is minding your own business, but it is an alien concept for some people.

The caring ones

Unlike many people, I find it normal for people to want to wish people good morning, a nice afternoon, and sometimes a good night. I do not feel pissed when such messages pop up in a group, because I do not even make an attempt to read them. But when people issue a decree when forming a whatsapp group, that such stuff is forbidden , you definitely know that it gets on some peoples nerves.

The ‘if-you-don’t-forward-this-to-ten-people-something-terrible-will-happen’ kind of people

These by far are the worst kind of people. If God would listen to people’s suggestion, then these people would be already condemned to the hottest part of hell. Nobody knows where these people are. I have no close relation or friend who sends such kind of messages. Should I happen to know one, trust me I will hunt him down and make sure he sends it to all people I hate, everyday for the rest of their lives.

The quiet ones

These are the ones who never say anything even in light of grave injustice meted on one of the members or even all of them. Their only notable significance is their numerical value. The only notification they brought to the group is when they were added, and when they shall leave. Often times they don’t leave. Just there, absent but present.

The opposers

Then there are those who oppose everything others say. It is as if they have veto power. When the group decides on something especially when they are offline, they demand who made such decisions as if they own the group.

The cardinal rule in being in any whatsapp group is: learn both the scientific and the art part of minding your own business, that is, if you cannot locate where the ‘leave group’ button is. otherwise, you have no right to complain of others conduct in whatsapp groups considering they are the only ones in their villages who have whatsapp-enabled phones that run on symbian OS.