Date You

Now that you want a date, someone to change the tone and taste, of things you’ve been doing, people you’ve been seeing, thoughts you’ve been having//
Yeah, am thinking I can be in all your plans, all your dreams I’ll cram, all your fav things I’ll learn//
And then shine them back to you like this naked sun//
Intensely drape them in nothing, but pampering and sweet nothings//
Yet, if you take this step, and I take the next, who knows might become something//
And make it worth your while, in style, am sure to bring the glow back into your smile//
Keep it there for the longest while//
Its inside there, just faded with the love well gone drier//

In between love lines you‘ll be searching for clues//

When you explore the possibilities, half a chance to tackle you, make the glow in your adorable eyes sparkle, become your heart’s call, you’ll take this chance//
And get it rolling, after all it’s just a date, maybe just this once//
Nurture it to become something you’d be feeling, the commonness antidote//
Not like anything you ever thought to sort//
After that we proceed to//

Dazzling you, lay back, let me adorn your thoughts with fact, your desires with tact, anticipation//
And wrap your hopes with exact, expectation//
Then pour passion like our red dinner candle dripping wax, exhilaration//
Embody the way you wanna be treated, shower you in relaxed, adoration//

Yearn for little things that give me an edge over the rest//
Outwit them till you fall through the stars straight into my arms//
Until you have no doubt to date you I should be the one.

44 Years Later!

It’s a crying shame and an unfortunate sarcasm that we are finally able to recognize Kenya’s foremost freedom fighters after 44 years. Moreover, just one – Field Marshall Dedan Kimathi Wachiuri. Whatever happened to all the rest who fought alongside and under his marshal? Don’t they deserve some kind of honorary acknowledgment too? Tumewacha mbachao kwa msala upitao, tusishtuke tutakapo ambulia patupu!

It’s a crying shame and an unfortunate sarcasm that when we purport to celebrate the essence of this inauguration which is FREEDOM, we are muffled by formalities that stifle that very freedom. I was arrested taking photos of the monumental launch! My crime was taking the damn photos!!!!!!! 44 years after our so-called independence, ordinary Kenyans cannot take fu@#%$ ordinary photos in public?! And at that of their freedom protagonists! Yet they keep telling us to shout “Najivunia kuwa Mkenya”! Utajuvunia vipi kama huru chache hizi huna?

It’s a crying shame and an unfortunate sarcasm that not only was this recognition long, long overdue, but also the audacity that such an occasion can be used to dampen the liberties that these great women and men fought for is outright appalling! Kuna sababu wanaiitwa Mashujaa wa Uhuru!

It’s a crying shame and an unfortunate sarcasm that our leaders are still living in the analog days where owning a camera meant you had a studio! Hallo! Camphones, camcorders and camera-ipod-phones are the jargon of this generation that you are blindly leading! That means a photo is a by-the-way-fu#%$^&*-stick-your-middle-finger-out snap! We need ask rights for that? Hawa wazee wamechoka, sioni hata Energizer ikiwasaidia!

At this rate, I think it should be around 2051 when we come round to appreciating the efforts of the revolutionaries of our time - Githogo et al. Damn! So analog-minded, no wonder they just can’t comprehend how the taped messages were done! Huku wakisema wakenya tuna uhuru kushinda hapo kitambo? Can you define uhuru?????????? What we have is In-Dependence.

So at the end of it all, i managed only the photo above, maybe appropriate. Freedom hidden in some patriotic false cover!

Mshairi Holla!

mshairi! been trying to upload my comments on your site but alas! you've had some incredible poetry and i have been feeling the posts but it bugs that i can't comment - some technical hitches! the post you have currently is equally impressive, its great you holla on graff art! inspiring to say the least ...... i hope this uploads, and more importantly, that you see it!

And the poem i promised you looooooooooooooooooooong ago, almost to the point when we transcribed our emotions on cave walls to stand the pages of ages.

Mshairi

loved the smile word playing poet

her lines drifted me to that duet

in quiet basement siestas

in solitude where i thought

daydreamed and internalised

her smile

her play on unspoken words

flood my mind with blind infatuation

her style

her say on unsung ballads

Complexities III - The Spider

This life is like a spider’s web. The flimsiest of all that you can fall back on, yet to the owner, seems so strong and so dependable. Our claim to this fleeting space is filled with nothingness, yet we seem to cling onto it like it was eternity itself. We ourselves are the epicenter of this desolation and selfishness ensuring that everything else revolves around us. Anything that comes into our radii of clout, we quickly squash, chase away or simply stifle with our egocentrism. Yet, in a swift swing of time, the web we so painstakingly and intricately weaved and then called it our life is hurled into nothingness, the empty spaces it leaves behind inherited by others doomed to counter the same fate. Wind-blown, discarded and isolated, we learn only too late how we could have been so much better, so much fuller. We learn to love and to shower caring to vacuity when these things matter no more.

We just lowered my Great grandmother to her grave and whilst others thought of it as her final resting place, I thought of it as the beginning of her epic journey. A journey to eternal bliss. Great wasn’t just her title for being a third generation from me. Great was her title for the way she lived her life and when it mattered most, how she swung with the wind. She had unlocked the secret to life, effectively making everything in nature subservient to her needs. Great were her ways that flowed in my grandmother and my mother and onto all of us who claimed her as the root. I could feel the oneness like branches of giant Baobabs feel their bulk stump. Great was her journey just beginning and great was the loss we just bore.

Great lessons are being taught everyday around us but it seems little sinks in. We have become hardened by the silver tubes in our homes continuously splashing images of negativity. Africa weeps, Iraqis die and these sequential persuasions feed our souls, stripping away our humanity. I mistrust all the talk about solving these problems while they only seem to spill over. I desperately hold the hope that I myself have not passed that point of being bereft of any form of erudition. Everyday, men are being snatched away from all around us, to a sanctuary secure, where the living cannot penetrate and still we cast doubts to meeting the Great One. Deluded by worldly enjoyment, we’d rather keep this one eye closed to these truths and the other on our amusements. Hypnotized in this state of distraction, our appointed term reaches us effortlessly, plucking our feeble web. If there was only one lesson sufficient for men to learn from, it would have to be death.


All these thoughts came flooding when as we lay wreathes of flowers on her grave, a spotless white spider crawled unnoticed from underneath one of the large leaves and disappeared under another. I thought to myself what a parable. The spider in her own world believes her web to be secure and indomitable. But all it takes is a baby’s waft to destroy it. Have you ever thought how God views our world?