My life, My words, My strife, My awards, My sins, My achievements, My love, My all….
Author: The Divine Bandit
I am who I am because of what I say with the words that I have, the time I’ve got and the talent I possess. I will myself to do this daily because not everyone can do it. I am blessed to have this ability. I make the shallow look, and sound deep and the deep sound deeper yet with a simple meaning. I want every poem I ever write to be my epitaph. Sometimes I am in my element, sometimes I'm not. There are pieces I don’t believe I wrote because I am not that person anymore. But the truth is; this is a reflection of who I am, who I’ve been and who I will be. I started doing this at age 14 so I guess my works will best be described as “14 going on to immortality”.
I write to express how I feel
Other times it helps me to heal
Lovely emotions make me kneel
And hate tempts me to kill
Regardless of what I want to say
Poems seem to lead it away
My real feelings never see the light of day
And for all that my heart has to pay
I feel that writing does not cater
For all that I know, does matter.
People don’t know how what I’m about
Hence they tend to throw my love out
I can’t believe that it’s me they always doubt
So I have to control myself not to shout
Even though my affection I don’t always flaunt
At least a speck of care I always mount
My heartbreaks are so many that I’ve lost count
And wonder if my life, they will always haunt
May be one day they’ll flow like water
But I’m sure that it’ll be much later.
For now all I have to do is wait
And walk around with a confident, straight gait
There’s nothing I can do to increase the rate
Of finding my true and beloved mate
The day will come when I know my fate
How I hope it will not be too late
I wish your love would drop on me in its full weight
So that I can finally stand at my full height
Let’s hold hands and look at each other
From you I can’t stand no further
Let our love shine like polished leather
For there’s no one else I’d rather
I hope that I’m not being a bother
It’s just knowledge about you I’m trying to gather
Putting this down makes me feel like I’m degrading you
But if you let me, I can tell you what is in my heart
I only did this because I felt it was overdue
Hence it was tearing my inside apart
I hope I have said what I feel to the letter
For as you look at me, I know there’s nobody better.
I knew I had the story to write about way before I had the title. The events of the past weekend but one will remain etched in my memory. There was fun, pain (caused by old age and other organisms), fear, hope, desperation and prayer. At the end of the less than 24 hour ordeal. We were all a bit stronger than we went in. We were tired but we (most of us that is) made a promise to face the demon again. All tools required for the exorcism at hand this time. I have an inclination to melodrama and hence the introduction might read like we were the cast of a real great movie. But no, this happened. and I will try to narrate the events to as much accuracy as I can remember.
That Saturday started in a very different way than most. Saturday 6 AM does not normally find me awake, dressed and calling people to plan for meeting points, items of clothing and wake other people up. I sleep at around 4 AM on Saturday mornings, wake up after midday and spend most of the day in boxers and a vest. So you see the difference, oh and we all know how much I hate phone calls. Yet I spend hours on calls with her. (We are not going to discuss this. I have spiked your interest I hope.)
About 3 hours later, having fought the Limuru mist where the 50KPH speed limit in Nairobi seems like Need For Speed kind of movement. We arrived at the foot of the Aberdares. We got lost..twice. Our rental van driver is not the best at directions but he’s a real good human being. You’ll know why later in the story or in the next one. We had only 7 hours to go up and back down Aberdares Elephant Hill. 4 hours to go up, 3 hours to go down.
We started at a slow pace, waiting for each other at certain points. But with time elapsing and with the Central province clouds gathering. We realised some people were here for a stroll, others for sight-seeing and then there was us who were here to conquer the hill, nature and some of our demons if possible. When you have a brain that keeps you awake for 48 hours sometimes without a wink of sleep. You’ll understand why, I needed the body to be fatigued in all kinds of ways. Just to get some beauty sleep that night. We gradually left the others behind and with the first ranger (There were 2, one at the front, the other at the back.) we set our sights on being at the peak before 6PM.
Soon after, hell’s fiery gates were becoming a bit loose at the hinges. We just didn’t know it. We laughed on the way. I was feeling the sweat on my brow and enjoying it. I love sweating for the right stuff, not like the current Nairobi sun in which you yawn and your palms become damp and have to take another liter of water. We had been walking for about an hour now. I could feel no fatigue. My lungs were working exceptionally well. I must be good at this cardio stuff. 😛 What I hadn’t counted on was the silly legs giving in.
I play football when I can, I walk to town almost everyday from Riverside and do squats with dumbbells every week day. So it was a complete surprise when passing through some bamboos, my right calf locked in a painful muscle cramp that had me on the ground in seconds. I was hurling cusses that would make milk curdle. 30 seconds later, the peeping hole in hell’s gates was open now. I was covered in Safari ants. Something tells me laughing at Wanja’s ordeal the week before or is it after? (My Karma might be a real mean b**** to see into the future) warranted this punishment. Yes she was attacked by Safari ants. 😀
This time, the cussing took an almost medieval turn. I think I was insulting those ants in Ogiek and high Neanderthalish. And these were not small ants, the ants in the Aberdares are either GymRats or Ninjas. With the bamboo cover, for an instance I felt like I was in Crouching Stupid Hidden Stubborn. My woes did not end there. As I stood up to run from them, mind you my other foot was still cramping so I was half walking, half crawling away. The left foot got the same cramp at the calf. I know, this is starting to seem far fetched. But nothing could be closer to the truth. At this time I let out a universal and forest wide “F***************************************************K!!”. It’s when I heard the echo and no person answering that I realised I was alone. Bollocks!!
In my struggle, I had been left too far behind by the pacesetters and was too far in front of the the second group. So here I was under cover of the bamboo trees closely knit together. No one in sight. Barely able to stand and slowly removing ants from hair. (Where’s a nice grooming monkey when you need one?) It’s at this particular moment that my aforementioned overactive brain decides to think of any eccentric wild animal that doesn’t follow rules and is not nocturnal like it should be. Like a leopard maybe. I grabbed a broken bamboo (seen below, we were to be companions for longer than I ever imagined) and now limping with both feet, (How possible that is only remains to be seen) trudged uphill, my cusses now reduced to whispers and whimpers with every step and now suffering from pain induced perspiration.
All Moses jokes aside. See my staff. 🙂
I did finally catch up with the team. They decided to wait for me. And boy was I happy to see them. I made grinning from ear to ear very literal.
How little I knew, the day would be getting worse. Because of the guy in red next to me.And here they waited for me. The Ranger having abandoned them and headed to the top.
My moods revived and a drink of water after. I was once again at the front. Leading the team to this goal that we were so intent on achieving. Do not ask me why they agreed to be led by a foul mouthed, injured and still ant infested Moses look alike. Oh the Moses part could have been it. Or maybe I just looked the most edible and of course the least capable of running away on the chance encounter with a wild animal. They’d take home a scapecoat of many colours to my mum if that happened. (Please, please tell me you got the genius of that statement 😛 )
If I fully describe the things we had to endure later on in the journey. These events might dilute the sincerity of the story. All I know is this. When the calves could no longer pain. Or my central nervous system just decided to ignore the pain. It was then that the cramps moved to my quadriceps (I can’t say thighs because for some reason that sounds lady-like. Worse in Swahili “Mapaja” Not a negative thing though). In the same order. My right quad then the left. At least no more ants then. But we would take a break every 1 minute, there was more rock than vegetation. Now with no more ability to lift my legs. I was wading through mud and water. The below is testament. Check the pants.
The thinking man pose was just to convince ourselves that we weren’t idiots for having come this far.
I was the willpower despite the lack of the ability to walk normally anymore. And my friends had the strength to keep me up when I was almost falling down. And at 6.30PM, I stepped at that peak, as the first of 2 people in our group. The other being Cesar who had made sure I wasn’t left behind to be some animal’s dinner or an elephant’s rag doll.
We made it to the top. And with our perseverance as inspiration many more than we had expected made it too. We smiled and laughed and lay on the grass exhausted. But a really cold fog covered us and we knew we had to get back down and soon. It would be a 2 hour descent. With heavy rain probably coming, animals waking up for the hunt and of course darkness and a very expansive bamboo forest to cross.
It got cold quickly at the peak. Gloves came out fast.The A – TeamPeople holding each other up for a photo.. This is a perfectly balanced symbiotic relationship. 😀Doesn’t this remind you of Munyao on that Independence Day moment?This photo has no filter, no flash was used and no it wasn’t sunny. We were surrounded by white, cold fog.
It is a great thing to see through generations. This here is my sister and a decade plus apart, she kind of almost lived the same life like I did. I loved this.
TheSix Million Dollar Man, we called him. He waltzed (more like kung fu-ed) into our lives on a nondescript day as we played kati and branda and the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. You see, it was break time. Break time, when pupils as young as five years or some old enough to be their parents, were all out in different corners of the school compound taking a breather from the harsh reality of books and teachers. Break time, when gossip and rumors took the blink of an eye to reach even the ears of the truants smoking behind the ablution blocks. Break time, when most teachers congregated in the staff room to sip tea from huge thermos flasks that mysteriously emerged from the female teachers’ large baskets. Break time, the twenty minutes in between lessons that the often corporal punishment-inclined teachers let children be children.
It didn’t help that he came in a car, a rare spectacle at this village school tucked in the midst of a piggery and the largest…
In her past they sang a song of victory.
They won the war.
In my past they sang my dirge.
Yet I won the war too.
But my victory was short-lived.
For a bullet fired in victory found its target on my knee.
And as I fell down to the ground.
My bayonet had gone through my throat and then tongue.
To say I was dumbfounded is understating it.
But their victory songs did not stop but the dirges did.
Because I did not die. I crawled to safety.
Away from their trampling celebratory feet.
I crawled to her.
She had seen me while atop her kraal.
She spread her “shuka” on the ground for me.
We fell in love in silence.
Then we became blood lovers.
As her fingers got covered in mine. Hers became cold.
Under the golden African sun.
Her wails were a harmony to the rapping of the “victors”.
In her sobs I found my inspiration.
Covered in her tears, I accepted my expiration.
It’s been a while since I did some prose work. The most weird part is that I barely noticed. When you have someone making your poetic juices flow. You just let your world drown in them. When you wake up dead, you swim in them and end up at the World’s End. It is when she becomes your Calypso, forgives you despite your drunkenness in her. Your scales and tentacles fall off. You’re free to play the piano and music once again soothes your cold cold soul. Now that I have written some non nonsensical purple prose that some might ask for an explanation to. I can go ahead and write about what the title and the entire post is about.
Before we go too far in the conversation. I will need to state this: I AM A CHRISTIAN, I BELIEVE IN JESUS CHRIST AS MY PERSONAL LORD AND SAVIOUR TILL THE END OF MY DAYS. I guess that will calm atheists down, I am not stepping over to your side and never will. With that said, let me indulge you in a topical discussion that I have had with some of Sanaa people before. At a religious level, people (meaning InSanaaNites) are always ready to indulge, without so much judgement. I believe that’s the way it was meant to be. The inspiration for this post came from a friend’s status update, and comical as it was. It got me thinking on some level of knowledge acquisition that most of us have learnt to suppress for fear of reprimand, “blasphemy” or being judged harshly. I will post the relevant part of the conversation that was had in the comments section of that update.
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Oh, if you wonder why the spaces up there, it is because when we (My friend and I) looked for the update on which we had this quite hilariously intellectual rather intellectually hilarious discussion, we couldn’t find it. It seemed someone had decided to report it and have it removed from his Timeline. Bollocks!! It’s his TL. Like really who does that?? *Calm down Bandit, calm down*
Anyway, the content and the questions therein that I can remember were:
God knew Peter’s life before he was formed in his mother’s womb. That means Jesus knew Peter would deny Him and He told him rightfully so. So question was, if Peter was really to exercise his “freewill”. Was he going to not deny Jesus and prove the Son of God wrong?
Of course with the line above that refers to mother’s womb brings up the discussion. Adam and Eve were not born of man. So they came from no womb. So might they actually have been the ones with the only freewill and they messed up? And is it possible, even God had not foreseen that?
Finally, of course the titular character. Judas Iscariot whom we called Judas “muici wa karati” while growing up which translates to Carrot Thief. Without him, someone else would have been chosen to betray Jesus, probably even Peter who clearly easily denied him. Not forgetting the doubting Thomas who even after all those miracles he had witnessed did not believe Jesus was alive again. Like dude, you were there when He raised Lazarus, why would you not believe He could raise himself? Or finally Matthew the tax collector who was more into money, the olden day KRA. 🙂 All I’m saying is, without Judas, there’d be probably be no salvation for us. We’d have had to live with the original sin. So what does one classify him as?
With the above said, it does give you something to think about. Just last Sunday I asked at a family gathering, why there are some verses of the Bible I’ve never heard read in church. Isn’t the whole book supposed to be His Word? I’ve read of rape in the Bible, concubines, Solomon was a modern day literoticist (my own word). And yet when I pen such poems I am labelled a….nah that’s a discussion for another day.
The answer I got was that these were rules that kind of disappeared with the first coming of Jesus. He became the intercessor and we are saved by believing in Him and asking him to become our Saviour. Of course one has to try to stay righteous. I use the word try because I am not sure whether any one person can achieve 100% righteousness being as the stain of the original sin is supposed to stay with all of us.
In the end, my belief in God supersedes the things that certain religions have tried to impose on human beings. The Catholic church still fights with the Protestants while they read from the same book. Ok, I understand there are some differing or additional books somewhere.
The God I serve is in my being, I feel His Love. And when it comes to His Love, 1 Corinthians 13: 4 -7 holds true. Otherwise quoted and applied in how well I know my God. He is patient, kind. He does not envy, He does not boast, He is not proud. He does not dishonor others, He is not self-seeking, He is not easily angered, He keeps no record of wrongs once you accept Him. He does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. He always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
And I will say this as I have said before. The day I lost my religion, is the day I felt closest to God.
I’ll probably get some backlash for this but I always find it so weird. How harshly we as Christians judge. We judge the gay people, the alcoholics, the smokers etc yet commit the very engraved sins on the 10 commandments on a weekly or daily basis. And isn’t judging also a sin? Isn’t there a part in the Bible that alludes to one being judged as harshly as they judge others?
In the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
I am a Christian via Jesus Christ not the worldwide conflicting definition of who Christians are.
And to the person who reported our discussion, a brief word from my friend:
The donkey pointed him out.
But I was busy paying attention to the dry bones.
In the valley I became one with the shadow of death.
And the book I chewed was all vinegar.
With a slow hint of brandy.
But the pungent smell of stale beer emanated from it.
They must have served me the bad wine first.
I followed the star.
But she was more into undressing.
And David was not her role model.
She was not dancing to hymns.
But for the notes from the hims.
The notes she could hit.
Covered up his hits.
She ended up underground.
And not that she wasn’t discovered.
She knew many a producer.
Many had produced her.
Pimps were her brethren.
Though not twelve, they found her more apostles.
But this is not her story.
This is my truth. Not a legend nor a myth.
It’s the test of my faith.
The struggle that brought us here.
Where we rise with each trip.
We shine with each limp.
These lions don’t recognise me.
They tear at my flesh.
And what remains, they roast on a warm fire.
With their band of wise men.
The politician, the banker and the lawyer.
The test of my love, the test of my kindness.
The loss of my patience that has me recording all evils.
Revenge that brought us here.
My heart wants its due.
But vengeance is His.
My brothers sold me out.
I’m a slave in her house.
She looked back and now I’m the one who’s all salty.
Her husband has the concubines.
Yet I’m the one paying alimony.
I don’t even qualify to be dead beat.
Like Uriah, the boy isn’t mine.
But this third day, the sun shines.
He’s risen they say but I knew it before I saw it.
Because I felt His hand on my shoulder.
I felt it tug me away from that wrecking ball.
And now on His shoulders.
I won’t even ask my shoe.
I was hurt and I was bad.
I could feel my spent harmony coming back.
And with time my soul’s voice also found a place.
Because I rise like Maya Angelou
He lives in me.
No shame no guilt.
I won’t blame him, for me; He built.
And I’m his child, no longer a Gentile.
For on that wooden stick.
The one they make fun of when they speak.
He witnessed my fall, how short I was from grace.
And as the garment tore apart, he qualified me for the race.
Have I told you I like you?
Have I mentioned the grass that grew after my luna madness dissipated?
Have I said I’m willing to leave the slow club and just go?
Have I described the nostalgia of the fresh rain on this scorched earth?
Are my guns pointed at these roses? Did I slash a hedge just to get ahead?
Is your voice such a melody that now I’m on this sound cloud?
Is your voice so husky and mine so deep that we are the new reverbnation?
Did I say I’m coming home to you? Even if you’re not white trash just beautiful, will this ever last?
Shall we go on and leave each other breathless? Shall you join this course?
Have I promised to change who I am? Probably give my friend his nickel back?
Have I confessed the biting of fingers? The biting that lingers?
Is it just the sun that won’t go down or is it the starry eyes of Andromeda that have me in constant warmth?
Am I writing or have I taken the road less traveled and now I’m just addled by the frost?
Is that maybe why my lips are purple? Hibiscus words collate at the meniscus of those tears they say we should discuss.
Do the scenes that play in my mind remind me of you two?
Does this seem vaguely familiar to the loss of my space?
Should I move to a sports car and just let this van go and play it by ear?
Should I chase my music and just let myself glide into your beat heaven?
Is it time to figure it out and just have more of that?
Is my new canvas well stretched out? Should I just pawn off my easel just so I can boast that I make some more notes?
Is it time I taught? Is it time I gave you my current notes?
Should I take the leap, come up with a riff that will give off some new notes?
Have I told you I like you?
The Divine Bandit™ 