100

A complete and comforting number, I think; a good place to stop, or else to go on. This is my 100th blog post and I’m writing in a halo! I would like to say thank you to all readers, comment makers and co-bloggers who have held my hand along the way from poet-exclusive to ... now, what genre do I write?

Thank you, Maya, for starting me on this in the first place. Thank you, readers in Ghana. Thank you, readers in Kenya. Thank you, readers in Canada. Thank you, readers in the UK. Thank you, readers in South Africa, Germany and the US. Thank you, everybody. I’ve made so many wonderful new friends in blogosphere (my laptop accepted the word!)

In these 100 posts, I have written on many topics, love poetry, sob poetry, praise poetry as well as creative nonfiction on: free night calls, miniskirts, song birds, beads, driving habits, the lazy self-employed, the case for an extra day of the week, national Friday wear, phone manners, rain art, my grandfather, the Accra Mall, football, ogling, national heroes, class pretence, check-check, sexism, crazy crushes and infatuations and living life to the full.

I plan to make a few changes to this blog (no early announcements, though). Plus, my little milestone is coming as bloggers in Ghana get together in some form of collaboration. Happy days, yay!!!!

The Battles of the Ever-Broke in the City of Accra

The block we work in strikes a pose on the Independence Avenue (the emerging finance centre) of the City of Accra. I like to enervate the air-con, shift the glass windows out of the way and delight in the shamble-shuffle of feet flogged too long by life, the half-price chatter of passersby, the half-volume drone of new vehicles and the full-bodied squeakiness of battle-worn tro-tros. I glean no less news in this way than by listening to Joy or Atlantis or the Beeb. I shut down my mind and laptop for the day, at half-light, not long ago, when I heard a racket outside. I poked my big nose out, and sniffed trouble as a horde poured out of a stalled tro-tro with its hazard lights blinking. As different conflict centres broke out, I saw a nursing battle-axe untie her carry cloth, lift her nursling off her back with one arm, dump the baby on the pavement and dive for the jugular of the driver’s mate. Another woman rushed to gather up the tot in her arms (and she could have sneaked off with the child). As I shut my window to that world, the prevalent shouts were about toffee change. So little money to kill another (or disown a baby) for, in the City of Accra. The depth of the poverty scares me.

Joie de Vivre

Now won’t you let lambent life seduce you, heart and soul, with her plentiful pleasures, while bashful breasts refuse to surrender to her flirtatious fondling, but, rather, make excellent and noble plans for telescopic tomorrow, even as Time the puppy is snatched spitefully from their very grasp?

Oh, won’t you exploit your full seventy explicitly in every single, silly second; build drivel dreams, whore the world, luxuriate in friendship, and conjugate the one thousand verbs of sex?

Now, won’t you calmly smile when death swings her big rug and snuffs a life close to you, conceited that if you go right this moment, the only raw regrets are those felt by the people who lustfully lose (and miss) your company?

The Poetry Scene in the City of Accra

I’ve been staring hard at the poetry scene from the outside for a while now. It is teeming tadpoles with staggering talent. There are divers hangouts in the City of Accra which are nothing loath (or even hankering) to have the studded poet-dom hold the limelight for fifteen sonorous, syllabic minutes apiece, binding listeners with lyrical spells. There is also a couple of artsy, foppish meets in private homes where attendees bring their own (or bare-face adopted) poetry.

But the live performers who are oozing with charisma! They memorise and let spray ten minutes of alpha beta magic. I just wonder why they have the street-rap swagger, self-praise themes and opposite-person bashing. And the words fall out ferocious and convulsive like they are slashing a villain standing unseen with menace before the poet.

A Sudden Flare of Lightning

I am cooking carnal heat for a woman I shouldn’t be. We’re much too allied for intimate intentions. The fervour didn’t come stealing over me; it struck me gelid in a sudden flare of lightning.

The air crackles, and tiny sparks dart helter when her fine-featured face creeps close to mine, and we stray there quite a lot (maybe I should just smack her lips with no reaction time for her, and break the spinning spell, but what if one choc leads to another choc?)

The offing aches and throbs when she’s pushing precious paces away. And I wonder if I have no taste to have her, though the tortured heavens tumble. It’s just a fleeting, teasing thought, and I haven’t confessed to her as yet.

The Quality of Clarity after the Rain

A candid, cache-sexe clearness clothes the draggled ether, pickling pure the heavy-hanging haze and dense-dangling dust between the moist monsoon downpours.

Over the continent, it thins up the elements, enriching the open-air excellence, heightening the sweetness al fresco and stropping the naked intensity of the light at night.

Across the thermic Atlantic, the limpidity sails at Mach two over macroscopic miles and draws the far-off horizon nearer to the shore. It showers ice crystals, shimmying the reflected cheesing on the cool, clear surface.

Flung in the air, it melts the translucent layers of hydro-nitro gas, lights a fuller flame in the sun, and splashes an extra bowl of milk in the visceral vat of the lurid moonlight.

The Weavers of Magic in the City of Accra

They animate a mini lifetime before first light to limber and oil up their looms, twines and bobbins. They have clicked a thousand carols, sinewed unending pretty patterns and woven vivid tales in devastating tapestries by the sonic crack of dawn. It is guiltless gluttony to stop and picture-feed on them if you’re not in a hurry, or simply to play your music sotto voce, as you drive past, roll down your window, prick up your expectant ears and audit this most original orchestra.

Friday-Night Flirting at the Equator

Three pixilated girls flooded into the tavern in 60’s dresses and skittish excitement, licking cone ice cream in showy scoops, and letting their tongues hang out and linger a trice too long. They were lip-pouting and lash-batting at the crooner, one another and I, because I got to looking at their hats which didn’t fit quite right; they read my signals wrong.

The titillated tenor skipped away from his bandsmen, and triangulated to the tantalising trio. He picked out his interest – the slim one in the short, straight, cerise frock, swaying high above her long, boyish legs. She irrigates him with irradiating smiles, play-acting on his absorption, touching her heart in mock awe, beaming brighter.

Suddenly, they have to go. Lady-in-Red flicks a little, frisky wave at her smitten fascinator, and glides lightly out of the saloon. The crooner sings through Guantanamera, drops the mic and exits in leaps and bounds. One hour later, as we end our courtesy date and slide out, we bump into Crooner and Red Dress coquetting at the bar. Taking a keener ken, the misfit hats are off-key wigs! :-)

How I See the World Lately

Kwaku Ananse and his two kid brothers have two Valencia oranges to ration among them. Gloomy with the thought of divvying up equally, he finagles immediate intrigue, and starts working on an imaginary enemy.

He says, “But why should they give three of us only two oranges to split up?”

Ananse’s brothers are clearly clueless on his rabid ranting. Who is the fictitious foe?

“But I am your big brother, and I love you!”

The younger two are perplexed aplenty. The world is more likely than ever, these days, to distrust you if you speak of love.

“You take this huge one, and you, this lovely-looking one. You see I’ve given them both to you, and I, myself, don't have any.”

He carries a long, crumpled face, and volte-faces away from the two new, sole owners of the fleshy, tasty fruit, with head hanging low and drooping shoulders. He takes two slack steps and quickly turns around with fairly rehearsed grace. His eyes have gone dark and cloudy.

“Oh, won’t you give me just half of yours, and you, half of yours, pweeze?”

Confused about his earlier kindness and his present whimpering, each gives Ananse half of his prized possession. The crafty cur saunters away with one whole Valencia orange.

Gizmocide

She’s perched perky until the sun sinks, cutting ceaseless clicking sounds with her crystalline cuticles on the QWERTY. Every now and then, she electrifies the still air with her candied voice on the desk phone. Or she gleams in smiles and wiles at whoever walks in.

She commands, and chats with, the glowing LCD in the assured vocals of an e-expert, and fires urbane banter with me, while we wait for my pen drive to check in. She flirts, she sparkles, she menaces!

But when she’s done downloading the data from my doodad, she ejaculates it cold without pomp or preparation. And she’s just committed gizmocide! I get cracking back to the office, careworn to find out if my virtual info is, perhaps, immortal.

Driving to a T in the City of Accra

I looked languidly on the latest instalment as it unfolded squat in the umbra of the Police HQ. The callow caitiff was in fine flow controverting the cyclist cops to the point of perishing the thought that they really saw what they thought they saw – a traffic transgression.

The violated victim veiled his Factor-8-deficient face with his hands, in disconsolate disbelief. Betwixt plaintive cries, he’d part his fingers to take a peek at his damaged caoutchouc car.

People who drive in Accra do not know fault, will not accept mistakes, and will obfuscate fact with aggression and mob-attracting sabre rattling. Why are we so dishonest? So are we honest when we’re not driving?

Are Telenovelas for Women? Really?!

I was given to take on trust that maudlin telenovelas were a fantasy flight for weak-willed women played false by their possum-playing men; flapping wings to a magical land tingling with romantic possibility, fervid formication, all the lovely things their men would never be. I was made to empathise that, being un-soft and semi-pure to the more refined rarities of life, men esteemed these dainty distractions as weak wasteful nothings.

Gladly gaining home on cruise control from hell-frazzling work this evening, I acquired a thick throng pupating around a tiny TV set somewhere open air in the 37 zone. The light, fluid traffic allowed me to glide to a trickling pace to range the secret spectacle. The men outstripped the women, and they were narcosynthesising on “Second Chance”, a teledrama about love, betrayal and souls playing hopscotch from body to handsome body.

Making it Rain Suicidal in the City of Accra

Somebody’s kindly jetting in Phat Joe and Sean Kingston to stupefy the City of Accra. The concert tickets are aviating between GHS70 and GHS100 (read $70 and $100). Stupendous! I wonder: would the rates be that interplanetary in NYC or London? Local artistes will play with them, no? How much of the astral takings will our own galactic Ghanaians be earning? Am I the only one who appreciates that while Tinny, Samini and Co. run excellent stagecraft at live events, these huge hip hop stars with sizzling music videos flop feebly on the stage?

Sexist Sex Laws

Anwar Ibrahim – a man I’ve almost venerated; victim of peccant political arch-foes; mis-tried, mis-convicted and sordidly shamed for sodomy. Now fresh allegations of base buggery have crept out of the public rectum against him. In his defence, he has set up an ancient law. What stupid, inane law requires four witnesses to prove a sexual offence?

Hasn’t sex been a private show since Adam and Eve daringly displayed sexual paradise in an open garden under an apple tree? Except for opiate orgies, doesn’t group sex almost always mean gang rape? Who would ever get four willing witnesses? Anwar may be innocent, but he’s not playing fair by invoking this law.

Will the gang of four who raped or sodomised you testify in court for you? I may forgive Anwar, but such a donkey law only encourages rape and sodomy – that is awfully crude! I don’t care if I have trampled on tender toes. And I hope my withering words are a piping white rod in the a**h*le or hymen of those who support such a law!

Self-Respect

Today, I elected to pen paragraphs on self-love. I relive a solid ipse dixit I lumbered upon as a nosy teen. Spurning its wise path, I only sing sob songs for my pighead. It teaches and learns its own life lesson. Sadly, I can't dig up who cut these dazzling diamonds:

Be too self-respecting
To lavish the love of the whole heart, soul and strength,
Especially where such a gift is not wanted,
And would be despised.

Pot Parade in the City of Accra

They range their varnished vases in open stretches and regular symmetry - the immaculate infantry on parade. The stunning shapes and dazzling colour coats take the watcher’s breath away! Every time I drive by, I crawl to (irritate the driver behind me, and) leer lovingly at the ovals and cones, pyramids and globes – my visual breakfast for the day.

One hundred tasty servings of cream crustaceans, turquoise turtles, emerald eagles, cobalt cauldrons, bronze fish, purple monkeys, gamboge balls, tangerine hills and ivory plinths. I wonder, I marvel.The splendour takes me, every single time!

Street(side) Manners in the City of Accra

You must not take it with a grain of salt – Maya was present at this misadventure too! A ‘big lawyer’ and a young lady hanging out at Melting Moments. It is a neat bistro at Labone, sublime at nightfall, lit in ochre, not too brightly or too softly. While sitting tight for our fancy frittatas, we took the time to delight in the gloaming crowd.

She was a middle-aged white woman. She bumped into the disarrayed metal furniture, bleeding from the nose and mouth. She froze at the mirror on the wall on seeing the blood in her girlish face. First the blood was there, streaming, drip-dropping in the wash basin. Then, it was all gone! Sorry, that was on the Hallmark channel which we were watching –frittatas yet to come :-)

The lawyer’s lady was in a forgettable top and a flair, fawn, sparsely sequined skirt. It was long, but scant excuse for her to sit with her spindly legs splayed wide apart, her back bent and her lips almost lapping the platter on the tiny-top, high-leg table. I craned my neck half-expecting to see dog biscuits in the dainty china.

We struggled between the devil of the horror flick on TV, and the deep blue sea of the barrister’s Brummagem. A thin, pretty waitress whizzes by, and the hateful Hoyden raises her head. What next? “Ssssssssssssssssssss!” The hissing caught the waitress’s attention (wouldn’t it?), but it also startled everybody else.

They herd out noisily through the french window, to the mini car park. So, he drives the big, chartreuse Honda Accord glittering beside Maxine. Cool! He showily beeps it open, and flings his door outward, not caring. It catches my poor car on the flank with a grating sound. Horrified I am, but I remain timid in my seat. I’ve had enough of them!

Farewell to Reema

I knew HER!
Loved HER!
Respected HER!
Prayed for HER!
Took pride in HER!

AND I WASN'T THE ONLY ONE!

Death!
Wretch!
Thief!
Cheat!
Tyrant!

YOU NEVER PLAY FAIR!

Check Point Charades in the City of Accra

And then the road dives into a vale, together with the black woods flanking it on other side. There’s nothing to see on the opposite lane. No cars, no lights, no people. But my line only inches ahead by the treble minute.

I have not seen them yet, but I know they’re there. It is past 10 O’clock. A bold night suggests itself. A restless driver behind me swerves out of the queue onto the jagged, hard shoulder. He meets my eyes with a bright-eyed smile, and burns up the dirt sidetrack. Another car follows. And another.

My turn comes. It is a bold night for sure. There are three of them standing silhouetted in the headlights.

“How is the evening?”
“The evening’s over.”
“What did you bring from town?”
“I’m coming from work.”
“On Friday? What work…”
“…I’m a lawyer.”
“Ei! You look young-o. Small boy lawyer. You know we and you lawyers, we are brothers.”
“Charlie, your brother is sleepy-o.”
“And your brother is cold. Won’t you give me something small for tea?”
“Here, take this. Which tea woman will come by now, anyway?”
“Oh, they come-o. Carry on, my Lord.”

Like most of them, he does not know he just addressed me as a judge.

They are not searching the cars or looking in faces. As I coax Maxine (my car) forward, I scan three cars parked a ways off the road. There is a half dozen people standing around, lips chattering in sync. As Maxine cruises past, they stretch their arms with open hands towards their captors. A bold night all round.

Badly Deflated Bums on the Beaches of Accra

At the beach on a beautiful, sun-kissed day, the fine sands always appear brighter under other people’s feet. Blankets of it stretch for endless mega-miles, and take on a deeper silver-white on farther eye-sweeps.

When you and your friends are having a kaffee-klatsch kick-about in your borrowed Black Acre, a litter of dipso-wino, liver-labouring louts leave their own wider White Acre to sandcrash on your game.

Scarcely knowing who they are not, what sordid substance they so lovingly abuse, or what embittered hopelessness has hijacked their heathen dreams, I surrender beloved Black Acre to them, and go for a pacific promenade with my lucky limbs still lithe and lissom.