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.