Overtime

There you are, a young man feeling the weight of the world,

on your shoulders instead seeing it in front you

your mind worked overtime to tell you,

after that heartbreak that you were simply not good enough

every single day you single mindedly thought so

and it became so

the songs that you listened to the very day

walking, convening solitude, along the railway

you hated the world and everything its brought along

all you wanted was to exist in a song

for that’s the world where you thought you’d thrive

and for long, you forgot how to truly live

nearly a decade later and the very thoughts crawl

day and night, speaking the same language,

the language that the life on those lonesome walks

walks that you used to berate yourself

telling your own soul how less-than you were

in all walks

existence has become one dreary bore

every single object seems to jeer you

in a fetal curl, you fit yourself in a cocoon,

a less-than kind of cocoon that does not fit anyway

and your dreams poke like tentacles

trying to catch you from drowning

and you don’t. because there are twigs

sometimes, that save you from the grim waters

The Soulless Journey

PHOTO/COURTESY 

For purposes of not offending my host, I’ll say that I visited Cheploch Gorge. Other than the scenic features formed mainly by gully erosion, the area is exquisitely Phot. Forget about making love during the day, unless you are deranged. The tool won’t even rise to occasion. And if you manage to do so, climax will sound the same as a hot iron being cooled with water. I can authoritatively say that the entire population was conceived at night.

The escarpment is quite scenic especially if you harbor no thoughts of scaling it but to just to marvel at the wonders of nature. There are all manner of snakes here, my host assures me of that. In fact he pointed a location where a python was once killed. Even a rattle snake is present in this landscape. However, I was assured that years of human interaction have made these extremely poisonous snakes human friendly. When you encounter one, it will greet you like a long lost friend by sinking its fangs on your feet and injecting enough venom to kill you, as is the biblically accepted human-snake greeting.

After days of toiling in the sun and sweating approximately all my bodily fluids, including seminal, it was time to head back home. A two-hour trek, which was our choice rather than is the norm, we stopped by the tarmac a few metres from Cheploch Gorge. I would have loved to go there and witness the daredevil divers perform their tricks but I was too tired. Besides, my feet were already threatening  me through the standard feet language which is blisters. A matatu stopped and we boarded earnestly, relieved of the heat (I am speaking for myself here) and the fatigue.  There was only one passenger inside, which made three of us excluding the crew.

And there began a grueling and extremely soulless journey to Iten. The matatu flouted every single traffic rule, including the ones that are yet to be formulated. First it stopped at Emsea junction, a man with an indestructibly sheepish grin loaded a milk container, which may or may not have contained milk, but judging from the energy the handlers expended when hauling the container, it may have. He stood there, scanning the environment and returned greetings with such vigour that would have outshone a politician. We stopped there approximately seventeen and half minutes.

A few people boarded including a man who found it prudent to purchase meat which he would transfer more than ten kilometers away. Man, I pitied that meat. The driver kept enquiring who was ahead from his fellow drivers as well as making phone calls. We set off and he pressed the gas, triggered one of the many phone calls he made.

Along the way, we picked women who looked like traders or sort. One kept making phone calls with her mulika mwizi phone, then instructing the driver, who I learned was called Kibe, to stop at certain places upon which people would mysteriously appear and hand her money. She made close to five such phone calls. One woman was unsuccessful in using this technique and was forced to alight and board another matatu to head back. Kibe missed her stop point. Some passengers tried to urge her to use m-pesa but she could hear none of it. It was like convincing her to phone sex a few metres from her man. You would be convinced only if you had two brain cells that worked. And she had plenty of them in tip top condition.

At another stop, a swarm of women accosted us in quite a threatening manner, with an assortment of goods – tomatoes, onions, oranges, and mangoes. They surrounded us with eyes that suggested that somebody’s health exclusively depended on our benevolence, and that we’d be condemned to an eternity of damnation, or worse still, not reach our destinations. Realizing the gravity of the situation, some passengers actually bought.

The matatu continued picking up passengers even when I thought there was no space even for air. In fact the concentration of carbon dioxide exceeded oxygen because there was no space for oxygen to circulate. But people still boarded as if there’d contract a fatal disease if they didn’t board exactly that matatu. I was particularly irked when a man, elephant in size, sigh at the sheer number of passengers, and still squeezed himself in. I heard someone call him ‘mwalimu’ and I pray that he isn’t a real one. We don’t need such teachers, unless they are in parliament.

At some point, there were more than twice the recommended seat size, people crammed in all sorts of formations and positions. I wondered how someone would sit in such an inconveniencing position, and still reach their wallets and retrieve the new currency notes to pay their fares.

As the journey progressed, people alighted until we were nearly the only people inside. The driver meandered the road expertly although he seemed to use his head to guide the matatu through the bends rather than the steering wheel. We passed by Tambach and a feeling of nostalgia gripped me. Four tortuous years. Four year’s worth of tortuous memories that molded us into the fine men we’ve become, contributing wholesomely, despite complete disregard to our livers, to the alcohol industry.

The rest of the journey was uneventful until we reached Iten Town where we boarded another matatu to town. The touts dared us to board if we had souls. And we did, because we had had a completely soulless journey. Also, it offered us a chance to see how Kenyans do not care for the traffic rules, least of all their lives.

Back Like All Was Normal

She doesn’t even beg to get back

She strolls back like it was all normal

Like it felt all too good when she wanted out

When all I felt was something drain out of me

Something that smelt like life.  Or love

I thought we were done for good

Every single thing we held dear – I

Felt them disintegrate to a point –

A point I didn’t want to try anymore

Neither did I want to care

Yet, when you seem to have made your mind

You stroll into my life like we are some lovers

Who had been away from each for a while,

ours’ been a year – just imagine a year

of waiting, longing for something ungraspable

a part of me died from the constant bickering

and I have often – always -  watered it

with the thoughts of you, wondering incessantly

if I had erred so much to be unworthy of forgiveness

the more I did, the more I wanted you close by – my mistake  

Perfect Loneliness

The steady flow of thoughts cascade,

down the crevices that stored your image,

numbed are the fingers that once traced

heavens on your silky smooth skin

and, as if fitted with needles

the thought of yours on my prickle me,

injuring,

  the painstaking slow process of forgetting,

as slow as time, crawls an inch in ten years,

and your picture, engraved in unreachable crevice – the soul

slows everything to distant blur, only you

only you is visible, stark and clear

On Bended Knees

A numbing sensation has taken over my mind

It feels like the onset of insanity, for I

have been insane a thousand times over

yet this, this bout of insanity, I haven’t experienced before

and I peer intently in the distant horizon,

with the intensity of a researcher looking at a specimen

yet the specimen, my specimen, is completely blank.

an abyss of sorts. And this is how insanity begins

I am on bended knees, begging for mercy

Yet I do not the sins I have committed – only the ones

I have been meaning to for years now

Their haunting is not even clear to me now

Pass me a bottle of medicine – not the usual

The doctor has since declared I am not drinking enough,

The highs I seek are now depths

And I, a man if intellect, becomes spectacularly stupid

Little Things

Life’s littered with little things

Many of which have turned kings

Into miserable and wearisome subjects

Piling precious lives among earthly rejects

How one tiny comment perches

Invisibly and is warmed until it hatches

And a brood of ‘not enough’ is raised

Diligently until the heart is dumb when praised

A tiny patch or stain grieves to no end

It becomes so hard to even pretend

And discomfort is nurtured, manicured

Until nothing is achieved, only a soul troubled

How bodily imperfections are readily rectified

Even when some results leave others undignified,

Of not death, or even more uglier than before

Yet we are in the image of God, biblical evidence show

Life’s little things cripple thousands

For they are multiplied like the sands

One walks with evidence of its existence

Until one settles of unsavory six pence

The Lost Ball

“Who lost a ball?” Mr. Wambongo asked after greetings which often followed an unimpeachable protocol involving us shooting up and saying ‘welcome to our class.’ Mr. Wambongo had a queer way about himself. He strolled around the school compound with his hands behind his back. He would crack a joke or two with you, a joke you never forgot. One such joke was the reason soldiers are required to to be physically fit. He demonstrated it using the one metre ruler, where he mimicked a limping soldier walking in combat with the ruler as a gun. The other joke was how he used to refer Maji Maji rebellion leader, Kinjeketile Ngwale. He pronounced Kinjeketile by ‘Englishizing‘ ‘tile’ which sounded as Kinjeketyle. One day he dressed down Mike for pronouncing it as he often joked about. I remember the stern look on his face as he said ‘kijana una mzaha.’

What struck me about Mr. Wambongo was that he was never pretentious. He punished you and you didn’t keep it in your heart or mind. Almost certainly, you deserved the punishment. But not that Sunday afternoon, after we had just had a helping of rice and beans in its usual minute ration. Kapserere food couldn’t even sustain a rat for a week. It’s a miracle we survived there.

Food aside, Mr. Wambongo strolled to class that day with one intention – to make me in particular never forget him. I admit he was a good teacher. I was a little gutted when he left unceremoniously. He had asked about anyone who had lost a ball in an unusual drawl. It still rings in my head as I write this. Dickson, discounting the fact that his name has a dick in it, shot his hand up. It’s like he had missed raising his hand up, considering the fact that, academically, Dickson and I never missed a flogging.  

We did not know where the conversation was leading to as Mr. Wambongo expertly guided it as though it were boat on a treacherous part of the river. I do not know how it led to who was playing in class, but it suddenly turned to a football team being named. Dickson by the way didn’t even know how to kick a ball, at least in the proper way. The captain was named, who in turned named the next person, and it went like that until I was named. Victor Kiptum named me. That’s what I remember very clearly. In fact I can even see him turning, as if seeking my approval and then spitting out my name. Because I had never learnt how to snitch, I calmly told Mr. Wambongo that the team was complete. It had Radovan Kimutai, Victor Kiptum, Kelvin Kipkoech and I, Brian Rop. We may have been more than four, details escape me now. It not being an exam, I can confidently say that we were four.

It turns out we were wanted in connection with broken spectacles. We were then taken to Mr. Wambongo’s office upon which our names were entered in the infamous black book. Infidels. Degenerates. Contemptible junkies. An afternoon that had promised to glide past like it has done for ages was suddenly covered with an ominous gloom. A novel that one had promised himself to tackle suddenly had to wait there, naked as we attended urgent disciplinary matter which we completely had no clue about.

I do not remember whether Mr. Wambongo gave us a beating but I damn well remember that we were given a punishment to wash the classroom. We were in class seven at the time, and forming the bulk of the team during our usual match between class seven and eight, it might not surprise me, had opta started taking stats, that it was the day we got walloped. You know, like the 8 – 2 drabbing Man U gave the ever lowly, under talented Arsenal.

We took our punishment without complains. We scrubbed the class clean within twenty minutes and with very little amount of water. Then we casually walked out and crossed the road by ourselves –which was a mistake punishable by death. No pupil was required to cross the Eldoret-Ravine road alone, you had to be supervised. Again, quite casually, we changed and hit the field like the players we were.

It turns out, as we mused, that we had been used to sanitise someone’s negligence. Her name was Sandra. She had broken her glasses or even lost them, and there was no way she could break the news to her parents without risking third degree burns from her parent’s ire. There had been talks that we’d even buy the goddamn spectacles. To the extent of my knowledge I do not know whether our parents were informed.

As we mused, quite bitter at the injustice, there was absolutely no way a ball, kicked as it was supposed to, suddenly developed a brain that told to go, open Sandra’s desk, break her spectacles and calmly fall down like nothing has happened. Our bitterness would have frozen a loaf bread. We completely had no clue about those spectacles.  We were victimized, period. Because we were children of lesser god’s, at the time.

Right now I am not bitter. Given Sandra’s position, I do not know how I would have broken the news to my parents. Man, my eyesight would have fixed itself. As they say, sometimes, the end justifies the means. I hope it did, Sandra.