I Carry A Poet's Burden

There was a morning, a Saturday morning

When the words echoed in my head

Exhorting me to rise and write them

That my heart beat for you

I was the titanic, setting sail

To you, the alluring iceberg

And our collision,

Oh! How beautiful a ruin

The simple thought of us

Wrecked every nerve in me

Sinking, I’d sink in a bliss

As unsure as tomorrow

I wanted to light the stars

The stars in your eyes

‘cause you lit the ones in mine

How much I wanted to

It turns out, sadly

There were things, certain obscure things

That you only felt in your thoughts

Among those things – love

Now I carry the burden of a poet

Expressing other’s feelings

Put my heart on the shelf

and, once in a while, read it like a book,

for the words inside it amount to a thousand pages

of feelings that died like untended fire

all I have is the ashes of a dream

how easily they slip through my fingers

just like you did, and I allowed

now I shoulder a burden,

a poet’s burden

Niruhusu Nikuite Baraddhuli

Kama kuku kwao mtama, chambo chako kikanasa,

Na kwa mkunjufu mtima, ‘kamchagua mkongwe hasa,

Matumaini yazama, vijana kwenye anasa

‘Kiniruhusu raisi, ‘takuita baradhuli

Kwa mapana na marefu, ukamteua Awori,

Nchi yetu tukufu, ‘mebaki la wenye gari,

Wakupa sifa sufufu, mwenye njaa ale mori,

‘Kiniruhusu raisi, ‘takuita baradhuli

Ulisimama jukwaani, ukanena wazi wazi,

Kama kundule kwa nyani, azma ya kijana wizi

Wamo wenye mvi vichwani, ila linavuja zizi

‘Kiniruhusu raisi, ‘takuita baradhuli

Andy Is Crazy Because of Love

Andy is crazy. People say it is because of love. Because he hasn't had a chance to confirm or dismiss the rumours, people believe it's true. 

There are not so many things Andy did when he was young that were those of a model child. He was truant, a thief, and generally someone who had grown immune to parental thumping. At school he wasn’t good at it either. Dropping out of class three, as was suddenly fashionable when one was circumcised, he disappeared from the village for close to a decade.

When he emerged, he was totting a digital camera, taking pictures of villagers who still found it attractive to have themselves printed in paper.  One time I accompanied him in his rounds of delivering the posed moments, frozen in time. We criss-crossed villages, and thankfully were successful in not being bitten by dogs. Other than that, people begged Andy to come another time. We crowned that day with a cup of chang’aa. He had money, a class three dropout, and I a university student, broke as broke can be.

On the way back, he told me stories which entailed who had HIV/Aids in the village. They were all people who we had made acquaintance in my brief stay at the local primary school. He named names, including that of a girl I had my eyes on. We later briefly dated, although we never met. She accepted my advances and left for Mombasa. He told me how Kale men are like currency especially among other tribes. He told about a Kamba chic whom he had managed to impregnate. She has my twins, he had said boastfully.

I would later spot one of the guys who he said was carrying the disease. His face had grown bony, and his hair had adopted a particularly pale and grayish color. His eyes must have began retreating back to its sockets, probably having seen enough already. With all the modesty I can summon, he was carrying death within himself. But then he was with a light skin girl, barely thirteen or fourteen. Being good with faces, I later saw the girl and almost warned her.

Andy left for Nairobi, hitchhiking my father’s car. We had exchanged numbers and promised to look for each other when I got there. I was not in hurry to get to Nairobi. It was pointless to go to campus during the official opening date. You spent a few days doing productive things such as looking after livestock until your classmates tell that they have been given a CAT. Then you would board a plane. And so a month later, I left for Nairobi. We never met with Andy, although he tried reaching me.

Fast forward, I cleared university, went to the village briefly and came back. There was no sign of Andy although I could see that he had erected a house. Nobody told me it belonged to him, it was just a hunch.  He would be in the village when I wasn’t, and I when he wasn’t. This should not be misconstrued that we had any important business. We were just playmates who life had caught up with them.

On that fateful day, I spotted my dad’s car in the compound. I was surprised considering that it was a Wednesday. He always came only on weekends, but then he always showed up when the sun had, observing the ancient ritual passed down by our forefathers. But then the sun was still up. Okay, it had set behind the hills that dotted the horizon, although it had not gone with its light. I did not give much thought to it. I may even have dismissed it with a remark such as ‘some rituals are bound to be broken, especially on Wednesdays.’

In every village, there are people who are always on top of things. They detect unusual activity, even in the wee hours of the night. You will be surprised by statements such ‘naskia unataka kuoa’ yet you could swear by god and sonny Jesus that you have never been seen with a girl, at least in broad daylight. In fact many girls get pregnant without ever having been seen with a man. Holy Spirit, you may say. But these people are in touch with these spirits. Just as Andy’s unusual presence, chauffeured all the way from the city of thugs, by my father, who would have had important things left to commune with office dust for a days.

“He was bringing Andy. He is mad,” my source told. “It seems malaria has climbed to the head,” he had added.

Later, he would tell me his story. Andy had a wife back in the village. She used to bicker with her mother-in-law a lot especially when Andy preferred to deal with his mother when it came to finance. When the bickering escalated, Andy took his wife back to Nairobi, and then came to the village to finalise a few secret things.

As people are prone to diseases, his wife called him that she had fallen sick, and had decided to recuperate among her people. I was not told whether he was aware about the fact that she had already gone to her people or not. My source informed me that he sold his motor bike and left to be with the wife. It was there that he parted with a bill of seventy thousand. Broke, he had sent an SOS back to the village that he was stranded in a strange land.

Then Andy came and did odd jobs here and there, perhaps to raise money to take him to Nairobi. His hunting ground, where he knew the paths of large edible animals, and also where the avoid serpents and other dangerous creatures, like political hit men. Then he went t Nairobi and can back, chauffeured by a Good Samaritan, and his mind was never the same.

He had gone crazy.

Since the village can never lack an explanation to anything, they said his wife made away with all his earthly possessions. She stripped the house of anything that had a value above fermented cow mucus. He now loiters in the village, finding himself in people’s beds, and sometimes talking about wanting his wife. hehe

A Day in a Dog's Life

A dog used to roam in my father’s compound (it’s his compound because I am past that age of recklessly using the word ‘our’). The dog had a name. Sura Mbaya. I will not dwell on how it got the name, because, just every dead human being, I am obliged to speak glowingly about it. Sura Mbaya did not act like a typical dog. To it, every stranger was a familiar, or he was just looking for someone familiar. People that roam in my father’s compound weren’t actually it first master. The first master went to jail for stealing cows. May be that’s why it looks for him in every stranger, only barking briefly before it remembers that it may be chasing its master and begins wagging its tail, as if to say in dog language, ‘I was only kidding.’or it may have been thinking that each stranger would give him a better name, or petition its change.

Well, Sura Mbaya was only good at three things- eating, shitting, and propagating its seeds. How did I know about the last one? It would disappear for days on end, and come back with bruises all over its body, but with a contented look in its eyes. From my experience, the dog world is a tough jungle because the bitches do not know anything about money. Instead, it’s about who has the strongest teeth, a menacing growl, and most importantly resilience. When the bitches emit the odour that tells other dogs that it’s that time of the year, a million dogs pick the oduor and follow it like that star that led them to where Jesus was born, only it leads them to where a million dogs, and one female have congregated for a night of brutal fights.

The lucky dogs, those which had had less fights during the day because their owners care about their conjugal rights, got their chances, quickly made out in their usual style that the dogs have been using for years, so much that human beings have aped it. I envy these dogs, except the brutality involved. There’s no one to tell them how it has to be done, because their females are yet to wear trousers and demand that dogs too have to take care of the cubs. But even when dogs attain that level of civilization, dogs will be dogs. Dogs will do their things and forget about it, and wait for the next time the female emits that oduor.

But woe unto us humans, we have to woo. I am not against the wooing, it’s the best part of living. What I am completely against are these human beings who want to tell how to do it. Experts. No, sexperts. Ever since the invention of the best thing after fire-the internet-you cannot rummage through the anonymous yet savage corridors of social media without stumbling upon headlines that explain how bedroom conquests should be done. Like, over time, we’ve grown progressively stupid in that department, so much that they owe our ancestors the need to re-educate us.

Errands In The Concrete Jungle

A giraffe with the Nairobi skyline in the background [Source/andBeyond]

You have lived a part of your life wallowing in the luxury of aloofness, cramming shit that wouldn’t even be a bargaining chip to use ‘toilet za kanjo’ for free. You cannot walk to that public toilet, umebanwa choo, and begin telling the mean faced attendant (by the way what does he talk about when people are discussing serious issues?) that you know about mitochondria, or, to descend to his level, that you know about salmonella typhi and vibrio cholerae. As far as he is concerned, you can shit on yourself with that gargantuan pile of knowledge. On the bright side, the cramming brought us to Nairobi, where we realized that those yoyos that made high school miserable came from high-rise slums-Pipeline and Umoja.

And so we came to the city. Over time, the grim and harsh realities of this god-forsaken concrete jungle has replaced the very knowledge we thought was a ticket to that Ferrari or Lamborghini with a huge void that’s very receptive of savage thoughts and ideas. For example you could be walking along Lang’ata road, and you suddenly see people milling around and peering into a ditch full of black sludge, and the mind receives the following signal; THERE COULD BE AN ABORTED FOETUS HERE. Or you could just be hawking your credentials in brown envelope then suddenly your eyes catch a glimpse of a man sprawled on the hot tarmac, still as if he can never vote again, and your brain picks the following signal: YOU MAY BE STARING AT A DEAD MAN. People could be fighting, and instead your mind waits for replays and slow motion, and blood spurting out of the fighters’ mouths.

On one occasion, I am walking home in the evening with the heavy burden of expectation weighing on my shoulders. I had prepared my body well in advance that the last time it took cheap vodka may as well been the very last one. May be I told it in a whisper, ‘baby, from now henceforth we will be drinking whisky, and sometimes beer. We will not frequent those dinghy pubs along Mfangano Lane.’ May be my body, using the correct apparatus, smiled in the same way a poet would liken it to the sun on a cloudy day. It turns out that without blue blood coursing through your veins, you may endlessly chaining yourself to the yoke of mtu wetu, renewing it after every five years. The only achievement you’d see that evening would be an accident. And the void begins engaging its savage receptors, roaring them to life like those cog wheels that mark the beginning of every Lionsgate movie.

It turns out that three Japanese cars decided to test their structural strength, catalysed of course by gross human incompetence. There were a pile of cars behind. Two potbellied policemen walked around without a hurry in the world, as if waiting for some instructions from above. Probably because there was a sparkling brand new V8. Accidents, just like all accidents are often a terrible inconvenience especially to pedestrians who planned on walking home without any interruptions along the way. As one of those pedestrians, I walked looking at the gloomy faces of the people who went to check out what had happened. There was disappointment, too, because there was no blood and no one was writhing in pain. Juts a slay queen in one of the cars fiddling with her phone trying to contact one of her sponsors to come and rescue her.

One of the guys involved in the accident drove a Toyota fielder. He was a middle age man, dressed and built just the way a taxi driver would be. I have never boarded a taxi but I have surely seen them hovering around taxi parking areas, talking animatedly like it is their sole job. The middle aged man was talking too, volunteering information to anyone who looked like they were about to ask what was happening. As part of my journalist training, I applied the principle of non-interference, leaned to grasp a few things he was saying then left surreptitiously as if I were some sort of wind. However, I gathered that the problem was solely on the slay queen, who had the letter L pasted in front and the back of her car.

“You see, she’s even a learner,” taxi driver said and everyone agreed with him. His car had born the greatest damage, having had to mount that barrier in the middle of the road. It decimated a few of those knee length plastic poles filled with concrete, crossed to the other side, the supposed Canaan, with a flat tire, patiently waiting for a handshake.

It is served to reinforce one prejudice about slay queens that I had held for some time; the only psychomotor skills the possessed were lifting one leg slightly up in strict adherence to standard photo taking procedures, which, if not obeyed, can lead to death. Whatever it is, do not put an L in your car. You can get knocked by a drunk driver and it will be attributed to your learner status.

The Phone Peeper

As a mature adult who gladly files nil returns every June, I take seriously my legal responsibility of peeking into people’s phones in matatus. It gives me a chance to make insightful remarks about strangers we happen to be travelling together, just in case we are asked to form groups on an impromptu trip to heaven.

For a long time, the arduous responsibility had been a dreary one, where the only things I managed to see were people chatting on whatsapp, or playing some really stupid game such as candy crush. That was nothing to report about, not until the other day.

It was a Friday, at noon, when I calmly locked the door to my house, walked a few metres and went back to check if I had really locked it. Satisfied that I had actually locked, proceeded (still calmly) to the stage. An excessively pimped up manyanga stopped and the conductor spread all his fingers to indicate the fare to town. Using the capture and recapture method, I concluded that it was the right amount.

I boarded it and scanned studiously, with passenger’s eyes encouraging this arduous intellectual endevour, whereupon I selected a seat at the back for one great aesthetic purpose – it was the only seat. As if it was fitted with thousands of tiny invisible thorns, I carefully laid my Kalenjin ass on the green seat.

The seat could afford me a 360 degree view of the passengers, and my attention was drawn to a fine lass seated in front of me. She had these bright red acrylic nails. I watched her dive these nails into what I considered a dangerous territory and fished out her phone.  The phone had a cover with bunny ears at the corners.

The lady with red acrylic nails pressed the power button and then proceeded to draw a pattern as complex as nuclear physics. From my experience, her phone was more secure than our IFMIS systems. She couldn’t draw the correct pattern on the first try. Neither the second.

On the third try, she managed to bypass he security feature, then entered a pin as long as River Nile so that she could open her whatsapp. At that point I was wondering the kind of job this lady did. One way or another it involved her phone. There’s no way in hell you can put such stringent security measures on your phone if you just used to receive calls, send texts, and occasionally updated you IG account.

A while later she switched to the gallery, browsed through a couple of photos. She stopped at some, studied them in the same way you would study a mathematical problem that involved numbers and letters either on top or below each other, went to another or deleted them.

Then bingo, the photo that I had all along been waiting to see on someone’s phone. It was the photo one of the greatest news quality as taught in schools; unusualness. There, standing at attention, was a cartoon drawing of someone’s mjulubeng, and a lady on her knees eyeing the promulgation weapon with the keenness of a surgeon. The lady looked at it and a wry smile registered on her heavily made up face. I can’t guess what was on her mind, but it must have had something to do with Chinese debt.

Happy about this unusual sighting, I concentrated on the music playing on decibels that suggested that all passengers were partially deaf. It was great music that awakened nostalgic feelings. Some really nice old school music that introduced our teenageness to the idea of love – pure and undefiled. I personally was yearning to go back to those days when I could just sleep without ingesting some mind altering substances into my body.

The effects of the music was quite profound as nobody wanted to alight from the matatu when it got stuck in that jam at Ngara. Everyone was quietly seated, engaged in their own teenage thoughts and perhaps wondering where the rain started beating them. As far as I was concerned, life can’t get any cruel.

The Conman

He dressed for other reasons except fashion; everything on him was rated G (G for Gikomba). And like everyone else, he was trying to make it in the big city. But then there was something striking about him. He walked like he had just survived a tornado. There wasn’t a sense of purpose in his strides, he went, wherever it took him. He seemed to be escaping demons, demons that have made it clear that wherever he went they’d be steady on his heels. And so he just walked knowing all too well that the government won’t even save him.

He tried to make an acquaintance with me along Haile Sellassie Avenue. I had just emerged from traffic that was steadily building up. The sun was a little hot. I was carrying a brown envelope. May be that’s was the reason why he approached me. He thought I was a little miserable, that I had fruitlessly tried to woo fate into agreeing a dinner date at Kempinski. You, the envelope was a little worn out from manhandling. Then he saw it fit to pass me a bit of his misery. He should have had the mind to see that tuko ndani ya serikali.

‘Boss habari,’ he greeted me.

‘Poa,’ I replied, trying to sound as repulsive as the price of unga (when the price of unga was plummeting towards the sky).

‘Do you know where I can convert South Sudan currency?’ he asked. I thought him rude. He should have at least commented on the weather, what he thought about the NASA lineup, the price of unga…..you know strike a conversation. You just don’t go about asking strangers where you can convert South Sudanese currency, which I was sure he didn’t have any way. Unlike you, he thought I am bothered by the rising price of unga and milk. He thought I’d he gullible. No, man, I man above that, because we are in government. In case you wondered why we often make pathetic political decisions, collectively, we would like to clarify that we don’t want to give up a special monthly stipend for jobless people whose people are in power and those special discounts that make us immune from hiked prices of important commodities. 

Just to know the extent to which he thought of me, I asked him the currency South Sudan uses. He said pounds. He then went ahead and told me about there being a south Sudan and a north Sudan. He was trying to win me, and subsequently try to ask me to give him Kenyan money, at a terrifically low prices compared to the current market rates.

But then the notes could have been fake and that would have left me with the option of looking for desperate Kenyans hawking the same story as his.