When across seas, another whispers. The same thoughts and fears. The same plots and cheers.
For whom it may concern,
Forge ahead until you can no longer bleed.
Fall in love until you can no longer dream.
Feed your eyes and ears with all the knowledge your fertile mind will allow in this lifetime.
For you are married to the earth and stars my friend, and they in turn are providing the festivities which embrace your wanting person every feverish moment and haunted hour.
Fill your tummy with sugars and sweets and swallow fine wines imported from other countries without forgetting to maintain your good health for as long as
Forever will last.
( This week I was unable to write my Wednesday post for many personal reasons. This poem is my personal mantra. I read it when I was an emotional angry teenager and it has changed my life)
The chorus to Anthony Hamilton’s song by the post title goes like this:
Mama knew love like the back roads.
Used to fall asleep daily in her work clothes.
Mom I swear you never have to worry again.
Last Sunday was Mother’s day. Throughout the week, I got to catch up on several blog posts that I follow that had articles on lost parents written recently or in past years. Some of them had tears welling up in my eyes. This post is not only about mothers though it might lean a lot towards this earthly angels. Aleya’s story on her mum losing her father and her realizing that her mum was a daughter just like she was gave a new perspective on how many shoes one can occupy in a lifetime. A child will grow up to be a daughter, a mother, a sister, an aunt and a grandmother. She will experience emotions on several tangents and axes but one thing is for sure. The graph will always remain the same. Biko worked around the same theme. He brought his daughter into it. Her resemblance with his late mother – God rest her soul – is just the slightest projections of how the life force is transferred from one being to another.
Owaahh stepped outside his listicles and history zone to bring us a new side of him. The loss of an uncle who understood him. That one relative you know gets you despite being a generation or 2 apart. Suprisingly, he has no fear of death despite being a free-thinker (I use this because I still have no idea whether he is an atheist or he is agnostic) just like me a true Christian believer. The final piece I read by Magunga had a tear roll down my cheek (I can’t say I sobbed like Ruto on an election winning Sunday because that is unmanly of African men). He not only lost his dad but the burial happened to be on his birthday. I have since re-assured him that if we were to consider burial as a celebration of his dad’s life. Then he should be proud of sharing this day with him as 2 lives get celebrated on that day. One for the life lived and one for more years to come ahead.
I am lucky to have both my parents alive. And these 4 have given their existence new meaning if at all I never knew it. As the typical Mama’s boy and a last born, I shall mostly talk of my mother. As most African men know. The relationship with our fathers is a grunt stew spiced with a “Where did Stone Cold go?” rhetorical question here and there. It is not an Aromat moment. My dad once kicked a football to my stomach while we played against my brothers and his best words of consolation is to get up or we might lose the game. Dad, you are the best!! 😀
Now this woman Njeri, she is the apple of my eye. She has literally been there every single step of my life. From a sickly kid, through school, through life and she continues to be there. Her words, her prayers and her Bible have been a morality tower for as long as I can remember. Of course against her yardstick, I am as bent as a Vera Sidika shoe rack. She does not get yet how morality applies in my generation. Every generation keeps falling a level below.
The year is 1994. I am lying on her lap in a Limuru hospital. I have lost so much strength from throwing up all my food, all week. This was an illness that had plagued me since I was either 5 or 6. One last time and I had no more strength to hold onto consciousness. All went black…………… I woke up about 2 hours later. My mum was holding me on a hospital bed. She was all cried out. Apparently, at a certain time, the doctor after several tries at reviving me had given up and told her to expect the worst. I was back from the “dead”. It would take another 3 years before the illness finally went away. Never got a diagnosis. And by then she put at task the project to fill up my skinny bones. In a year I was the “fluffiest” in class. 🙂 . A “condition” that would follow me till running after some hard ball with curved sticks at the Alliance High School would finally burn up all the Fluff (Not you Zo).
This woman here is a Superwoman. Literally!! Seen here with the man who inspired my hair. “Mum, I heard you hating on mini skirts recently huh?”
That photo would need carbon dating were it not for the clear date below it.
She never got to University and with her college education and her teaching career, she decided that all her kids will have to excel. “Education is the key” was and still is her motto. It would open doors that would enable you to unlock your potential. She was up by 5 everyday. To heat water for us to wash up. Tea and bread was always ready and lunch packed for the day. Our parents’ generation has told and re-told stories of having to walk miles to get to school in the morning dew and cold. I can proudly attest that I went through the same. The only difference being that I had shoes and some pretty warm clothes on. But my mum always knew deep in her heart that, that might be the way it began but that was not the way it was going to be at the end.
That is why immediately my KCPE results came out, she was up and about checking at national schools whether by any chance I had been admitted to one. The dream school was The Alliance. Hers and mine. But with some points off getting to the 600 mark, I was sure that dream was dead. So shock on me when she came home from Kikuyu one day with a list printed from the principal’s office. I had been selected to join Bush as we fondly (some less fondly know it. Starcherians and Mang’erians I see you). Selection number 116 out of 182. She had been worried for nothing but what a better thing for a parent to worry about. We had always had plan of how I could…no..would become a doctor. That was never going to happen for me as soon as we dissected that frog in biology class. But I am still a doctor of words. The Doctor Bandit? Close enough mum? no? ok.
We all have had those silly moments we think we hate our moms. Mine was probably because I missed a lot wrestling matches in primary school. She would try to explain to me how those guys were working and making money as I lost a chance to read and achieve my goals. But I would hear none of that. How could guys who seemed to be having so much fun be paid for that? Plus it all seemed so “REAL”? So it is was definitely a shock when later in campus I would miss watching football matches to go study while giving myself the same reason. Lesson learnt mother.
Homework time. That’s the kind of head I cover with this hair.
Fast forward to the present. She wants me to shave (This is notwithstanding the fact that she used to pay for my hairdresser all the way through college and campus). She also wants to see a consistent/constant girlfriend. ( Someone should tell her of Celesste – see my last post – then maybe she could pray for a miracle 😀 ) I am trying mum. Not really but oh well. She also wants to see my kids. I always counter this with. “You have 7 kids, and I am the last born yes?”. To which she nods. And then I ask, “Only 2 of these kids have given you grandchildren and yet you still insist on mine?”. She tries to convince me that she is getting old and seeing the last born’s kids would be a good chapter to close at. At this point I pull a Balotelli face.
She has a myriad issues with my piercing. Not actually the piercing itself but rather the sizes of studs I stick through it. I know how quiet and solemn dad is. So this eccentricity I posses definitely came from her. Try and convince her of that. Refer back to mini skirt above. I naturally revel in not following the crowd and stepping out of my comfort zone. It is no wonder that my favourite quote is: “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”.
In the end I have allowed work, fatigue and all other excuses I come up with to make my visits to her less often. I used to go home every 2 weeks. Now it is every 2 months. And the wife/wives (You never know new Kenya and all) and kids will only make this duration longer. I may not see her often but I never fail to tell her I love her. I have had enough friends and experience to teach me on the importance of the time we have with our mothers in this world. It is almost sure that rarely does a parent bury her child. And with this conviction that she might and probably will leave before I do. It is upon me to celebrate her in any way I can and when I can. She has seen me through to the ripe age of 27 and she still hassles me when I don’t tell her I have a cold. It is innately in her to do this. You will never be nothing more than her fledgling. My mastery of this language I write in is from her careful but stern hand that guided me through Hallo Children, Read with us and the then popular English Aid. Who gives a kid an Encyclopaedia Britannica at age 10? I have tried to use my poetic prowess to immortalize her in words but always failed miserably. Words cannot describe her. She can only be loved, be thanked and be remembered. In this literary annals of the Internet I can leave this note. And hopefully generations after can find it or the aliens when they finally find an intelligent species on earth (my money is on the cat, otherwise how do you explain being such an insolent pet and still getting the best of treatments?). In the immortal words of Tupac Amaru Shakur
“I am a poet!!”. That is what I told my friend last night when she asked me to write this prose piece about my current elevated heart rate. No, I am not suffering from HBP. Never have, thank God. Even when I was ultra “Fluffy”. You see the cause of all this hullabaloo is a girl. Who knows not my existence or my name. Ok, maybe my name. My pen name. But I will tell you about that in a moment. I am essentially a poet. I like rhythm and the ups and downs a poem goes through. I can feel the music in a piece. Know whether it should be a Hip Hop or Rock song were it ever to be used as so. Another thing is as a poet I don’t have to feel all naked to the whole world. I can hide within my persona. Say something means something different. Also, partly, us poets look down on prose writers. Hehe don’t burn me at the stake. We inherently believe that ours is a superior art form. Why, I don’t know. Anyway, this was one of the few reasons for the strong refusal to write a creative piece especially one that is factual, in prose form. In the end Shiku won. First I would like to thank her for listening in the first place. Though I had/have to part with 2 burgers (What this woman won’t do for food). She is lucky she has the “burn calories like rubber” gene that one. But I digress. So Shiku agrees to listen to my love (more of a crush) woes in exchange for 2 burgers and tonnes of eye rolling and those silly tear-filled Whatsapp laughter smileys. By the end of it all I have typed over a thousand words (my estimation skills are really bad). I have like a hundred typos. Courtesy of typing on a touch screen phone. This I will never get used to. I miss my Nokia E6-00. Yes, I am that ancient. It is then that she suggests I make it a blog post hence why we are here.
This story needs a simple back story. I am picky as hell. Ok, hell isn’t so segregative maybe heaven. But in my entire life I have had 3 real relationships. There is a 4th one I don’t count because it was forced on me. That trick girls pull of telling all their friends you are the one before you even kiss her? So you have to become the boyfriend to avoid looking like an asshole to a bunch of people you have known for less than 24 hours? Well, never falling for that again. Let me be labelled an asshole but life is too short. I have a friend, Neema, who has worked in a morgue and is the proud author of the Morgue Chronicles. She drilled into me (Zosi would shout “phrasing” at this point) the fact that you get easily replaced when you die way before EABL had that idea (Awesome Ad by the way). You will notice how easily I get off topic. I am such a scatter brain and possess the attention span of the offspring of Dory from Finding Nemo and Chowder.
Errrmmm..where was I?
You will therefore forgive me for all the comments in parentheses. But that is just how my thought process is. So back to being picky. My 3 relationships. No breakup is easy. Last one was harsher than all. So I kind of gave up on love blah blah. But that is not what the post is about.
This post is about poetry, crushing and She. We shall call her Celesste (Don’t mind the spelling 🙂 ). I started writing poetry at the age of 14 in Form 2. That was almost 13 years ago. Yes, do the quick math of my age. Anyway, my poetry writing teenage self was motivated by a crush at the school across (We actually used to call it Across, Ax for short). This was the famous Alliance Girls high School. She was a class behind in Form 1. So the crush, had all the Shakespearean poetry I had read in an Encyclopaedia Britannica by the age of 12 come crashing down around me. I wrote and I wrote on some old exercise book. My love poetry is too strong. It has so much hopeless romanticism in it, it would have the strongest of girls running for the hills. I told Shiku that last night when she proposed I tag this new damsel in the poetry I have written for her (You can find the 3 poems here, hapa and ici). I however don’t know how I knew that then but that Form 1 girl never got to read the odes dedicated to her chocolate skin or her eyelashes and body in a maroon uniform. When her name was mentioned I used to lose my appetite. It was no better that my friends started calling me by her name. It’s no wonder I grew so thin (I have proof, I look like I will keel over before my next meal). Lack of appetite, hot ears, cold sweats and a sweet throbbing headache were just some of the symptoms of liking or maybe over-liking a girl for me. I thought it would always be like this. It is a sweet sickening feeling (like the smell of Dinitrogen monoxide, wooii I am such a geek) that you hate the fact that you love it. But that was not to be ever again for 12 years till 5 days ago. My thoughts are now re-grouping and I think I finally get why my boss calls me 106.5 FM (I will explain that on another post if this prose thing works out). Let me introduce you to Celesste.
The following events take place between 1900h on Saturday 2nd May 2014 to 0000h on Sunday 3rd May 2014. I had just arrived for the BAKE Awards at the Intercon (Thanks so much for this Ray, without you, I would not have known of BAKE, registration or obtained a ticket. You are God-sent. Add that to getting to lay eyes on this Celesstial-my spelling- creature). This was my first time. I had not been so willing to attend because sometimes I enjoy my company and my inside jokes (The Divine and Bandit are an awesome comedic duo). However I had to show up for this one. My friends Owaahh and Liz Lenjo Kagz were on the list of nominees and I would never be anything less than supportive. For Owaahh mostly was to make sure the plagiarists(not Ghafla) did not win or something like that. For Liz, it was finally about getting a sit down with a friend/sister I had known for over 9 years but barely got to meet ever so often. So we get there at 7 PM with Zo and she leaves me alone to go change into her awesome boots (Seen here). That meant I got to choose where we were to sit as we waited for the rest of Sanaa Book Club members (We call them InSanaaNites and we have a Facebook Closed Group, Twitter account and a WordPress blog) to arrive. Being my first time, I was overly eager to see what happens so I chose the second row, center, right in front of the dais. I am barely paying attention to the room by then because:
1: I have over 4 Whatsapp groups active and I don’t want my messages to pile up
2: Despite not being shy, my eyes really are. I have the notion that you might learn all I am thinking by looking into them and so they avoid other eyes unless when they want the person to really know I mean what I am saying.
However soon enough due to the constantly ON Internet activity, my phone soon beeps at 15% power. So I switch off data, engage power saving and pocket it. Then for lack of something better to do I start admiring the decor and looking around for anyone I might know. I have enough writer friends. But before I could find one I knew, that’s when I saw her. Seated on my extreme certain direction (Yes because right or left will reveal her identity) was the most beautiful person I had seen in live form (3D anyone? No? OK ).
She is somewhere in this crowd…sigh…Courtesy of BAKE FB Page
As in really, I am not exaggerating, that was and is still my perception. I understand that people see things differently so leave me alone and my opinion. She was busy talking with the lady she was sitting with and so I had no way to catch her eye. I added that to the night’s checklist though. I had no idea who she was. My mind tells me celebrity, socialite, radio presenter etc. No prejudice or negativity but I ain’t got time to chase around that kind of woman. They have their kind of men. To each his own.
Time for that? No, we have none to spare.
It is later in the night. She has eluded my no longer shy eyes till now. Then a certain blog wins a certain award and she stands and walks to the dais. Yes, right by my strategic sitting space. Oh madonna mia!!………………………………………………………..That was how long JP and I had our jaws on the floor. Zo now practically hates us. As in really, 2 guys who were supposed to be her dates. Owaahh is looking down. Pretending to pray (the atheist he is or is it agnostic?). He knows there are eyes boring a hole in his Megamind (Not a joke on the size of his head but his mind, really he is a genius… 🙂 ) daring him to look up and make a comment. Oh the intricacies of this book club. That has never discussed a single book to date I dare say. All we do is drink and give each other writing ideas and also get each other jobs. So all in all it works.
Celesste looked amazing. Yes, I now knew her name. She was given a chance to say thanks and her voice had me singing “Alouette” by Gilles Dreu in my faux catatonic state. When she walked away to go back to her seat. I swear, this Carlos Santana and Chad Kroeger verse played:
Like a gift from the heavens, it was easy to tell
It was love from above that could save me from hell
She had fire in her soul it was easy to see
How the devil himself could be pulled out of me
She sat back down and my eye game continued. She finally looked at me and smiled (This account might be fictitious, she could have been smiling at a bulb for all I care). I was in a different world by then. I got totally wasted on her (Phrasing!! hehe Zo). I mean I was drunk on her. Ok, is there a better way to say this? I was feeling drunk the rest of the night from the experience of having seen her. There!! Anyway, time moved slow and time moved fast (This sounds like the Charles Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” phrase). The night was over, she had won. People ganged around her. Taking photos, saying congratulations etc. There was no way I was going to walk over and say hi to her in all that melee. Hold up before you judge me for being timid. There is one thing guys are afraid of when approaching a girl. Not the lady, not the rejection, no. It is the rejection in front of people who know you especially silly, blogger type Sanaa (yes that is the short form of the club not SBC) people who would not let you hear the end of it. So I hoped for a chance alone that never came. We walked out of The Intercontinental at the same time. Of course with my “entourage” giggling at my torment.
Fast forward to this week. I have found myself reading a blog that is not so manly in this century. I have written 3 poems about her but not to her. My ears still burn hot, my appetite goes away and I break into a cold sweat when my best friend who for some reason we work together with calls me Messi (that is not his spelling). He spells his as Messy, a play at the first poem I wrote about her “I am a MESS”. I have hope that she might know of my existence one day. For what is life without hope? The hope to wake up tomorrow. The hope to get promoted. The hope to get some supper. The hope to get some 😀 . The hope to live to see another day. All I can do for now is exist in this state. Write out all I feel and maybe kill it like I once did in form 2. But I know it will not be easy. It took 3 years then. I wonder at this stage in life how long it will take.
This is not sexual attraction, not a kind of love. No, it is a crazy need to know her, hear her speak again, exist in her interpersonal space and show her the crazy levels she has taken me to. All this might never be. But as I told my insomniac partner last night. It really does not matter (Though even if she does not fall for me she might still fall for my hair, hers is longer than mine hence no jealousy like I have faced before).
Manes people…manes!!
She has done wonders just by her existence. Because of her I have regained some discipline and self-control I had long-lost in campus. I am back to working out at 6 AM. I am back to doing the few karate katas I learnt in high school. I am not taking sugar anymore. I am writing a post at least every week. And most importantly she has rekindled that hopeless romantic, belief in soul-mates that I had lost. It does not have to be her. All that matters is that if she could make me go nuts as I have now. Then in the future someone else would too. So for now I say thank you Celesste.
Somewhere in the darkness hidden in plain sight
No need to adjust the light to feel his might
Exists a star, shimmers once in a while awaiting the opportune moment to light
Somewhere deep in the silence, lies a dreamer
Just getting it wrong on the timer
The spotlight missing him, but never losing hope of reaching that spot that shines brighter
Listen closely and you can hear his bellow of a fighter
Somewhere swallowed in loneliness, exists a lover
Masked by a past of heartache, now just an observer
Hidden in a shell of mistrust that acts as his cover
Yet with each heartbeat he converts into a believer
Somewhere behind the sweat swamped faces is one with a salty mixture of tears
Shed as he tries to figure life’s complex ideas
Not satisfied of living a life that is in arrear
A warrior just looking for that problem solver
Hoping he doesn’t end up on the wrong end of a revolver
I am shamelessly crushing in a manner they call today “no chills”.
I want to use the letters of her name but no that is too main-stream
It is more than the shape of her eyes, the glimmer in her smile.
Nor is it the accentuation of her face by her eyebrows.
Maybe I will talk of such unique thrills.
Light up the literary darkness with her beam.
Then wrap up this daydream and store it in file.
Or maybe I will nurture the dream and watch as reality grows.
This is a new one even for me.
Writers block from having so much to say rather than vice-versa.
When thoughts trip and slide on words.
Then a throbbing sweet headache starts forming at the temples.
Reality just let me be.
Let me forget my past and open this tabula rasa.
So I can compose ballads and hang out with bards.
Then with a shrine of letters and notes I can set an example.
Determined fingers type away.
The brain whips up vocabularies one after another.
My tongue plays with my teeth as it always does.
And still I feel the language does not suffice.
These words I want to say.
The opportunity I don’t want to squander.
A talent that now I feel once was.
Yet I am so willing to pay the price.
In those almond eyes lies a deep mystery.
A mischief so creative it makes the room hot.
And that smile tells a tale.
And its “once upon a time” rests on her eyebrows.
The words from her lips tell a different story.
Of joy, success and what has been naught.
The intrigue of her hips is revealed after several a-cocktail.
As the wind whispers gratitude to the Maker for whom He endows.
Like the Bandit I am, I remain in the shadows.
Yet my divine words I let out into the open.
And I will hope that perchance she might stumble upon them.
So I can leap up and save her from the fall.
With new-found confidence and bravado.
I can serenade her thoughts with rhymes and maybe a pun.
Bad memories we can both condemn.
For then our lives will be entwined with a scrawl.
I am not one to not live out my dreams.
One thing I always know is that I have to try.
I choose to ignore the naysayers and jeers.
As I begin to spin the wheel before I acquire the clay.
I am going ahead, full steam.
I am creating and thinking up scenarios on the fly.
As I slowly erase my doubts and fears.
In my world, where two Es meet, the outcome is always an “aye”.
The Divine Bandit™ 