My Favourite Hang-Out in the City of Accra

You have no end of choices from tiny, hip-hugging chairs around a short, round and wooden table, cushion-crowned, shiny-steel-legged, tall barstools and cosy couple-booths of glass and wood, with open facades and soft, comfortable leather (but straight-back) couches which accommodate the walls of the inner room. The closed end of the inner room displays drums, organs, guitars and microphones, the soul of Wednesday and Friday evening Happy Hour.

The glass door to the anteroom swings open to the bar. It’s like a balcony of a very little house, with crystal drinking glasses are hung in the open windows, and black, blue and brown bottles and silver and black dispensers stand on the bar-top or wall shelves. Little yellow lights descend softly from above the bar and reflect off the dangling glassware and the big mirrors which plate the walls behind the bartenders.

The inner room of the saloon is dimly lit from its green-blue-red-and-yellow glass-dome part of the ceiling. It’s not for certain whether they were seeking the cathedral effect or some gothic sentiment seized the designer when they got to that part of the ceiling. There are two TV sets in the tavern; a smaller screen is fixed to the end of the anteroom, and a huge screen stands at the end of the inner room.

On football night, working people pour into the quiet, little scene with colour and sound. The sneaky suspicion is that they aren’t really enamoured of the beautiful Bloody Mary or pleasant Pina Colada. They are waiting out the homeward traffic which has jammed as thick as seeds. You can’t get to Tema, Sakumono, Adenta or Achimota or any middle-class estate in the City of Accra before the Champions League match begins. And this bar is such a beautiful and cosy place.

Mystery Mores - Poetry

there is something
i have done,
i could never let anyone know.
might shock your blameless mind,
and send you to hypocritical highs.
a deep regret for doing
it at all,
soaks my soul
for thirty dark daily seconds.
but not doing
it at all,
and missing
the secret thrill
it brought, and brings
me every day,
may then have been the bigger sin.
the pull of mystery,
will not excite,
the way true knowledge will.
so as i think to it again,
my deeper guilt should run,
for not concluding
this affair
at much an earlier age.

The Women in Jacket-over-Friday-Wear in the City of Accra

It’s Friday again, in the City of Accra. The women, fetchingly invested, are graceful goddesses on their knees – irresistible! These days, they’re meticulously making up and wantonly working out. But that is scant reason for all the glam and glitter.

It is the maddening manner in which they do up in their fancy Friday wear. Artistic African fabric made up into creative clothing; long curvaceous, flowing skirts, missing the enchanted city floors by half a whisker. There’s the happy reason, I think.

The lengthy fluid lines, the mirage or truth of perfectly formed, longitudinal legs and the tight, girth-hugging wrap is all such amazing art. The lines cascade into open, flirtatious wings and tails; sweeping here, sweeping there, capturing the eye of the lustful looker. Solid statuesque, but the body-magic is not complete!

Each pulsating torso is beautifully bundled up in a winsome jacket in black or grey or other colours. It finds fine form and figure from flowing over well-toned arms, throbbing bulbous bust (carefully parted, here, not to hide or hold back candid cleavage), firm or rounded belly (who cares?) slim-fitting or love-handle waist, and terminates in wild imaginings around the swinging hips.

Modernity and style are running wild on Fridays, in free and flagrant femininity, in the City of Accra. Who is working is not watching. Who is watching can’t be working! So who’s watching, and who’s working? :-). Truly and honestly pleasing charm!

It Finally Rained Hard in the City of Accra

It’d been threatening for many weeks now. The rain tumbled down on the City of Accra in the dead of the night. The pendulous switch between the suppressed, distant hum, the sharp, roof-top rap and the warm, enveloping drizzle hiss, strummed narco-notes on the strings of the reposing mind. It shoved wake-up time backwards, for rainy dawn is an enticing woman (or man :-)), and cloaked the breaking daylight in gloom from falsifying folds of gravid clouds.

The grief of the rain always clears the air, literally. I could see the nearly empty streets for many miles ahead . Very few people had braved the morning’s chilly mantle. My hands desired to stretch and touch the glittering life crystals that rendered vivid every colour, shape and sound. The breeze was crisp, and it hung lightly in open space, as the first kisses of golden rays were weakly blown by the cloud-concealed sun.

Central Accra rudely shouted “Good morning” with a shower of muck on my windscreen. Snapping out of my other world, I saw banks of mud, rushing rivulets, yawning composts of dead leaves and twigs, and filthy cars – flagrantly filthy cars. My febrile fear came true, when Joy FM confirmed that the City of Accra had suffered floods and damage in many of her thick and bulging parts.

But it’d been threatening for many weeks, really. The rain is beautiful, the rain is ugly, the rain is as where you are, in the City of Accra.

Dusk from a High Building in the City of Accra

The dusks are calm in the centre of the City of Accra. The one-thousand-strong throng is long gone home. The suffocating streets are now airy, free and semi-deserted. But it is not the ground I cast my writer’s eye to. They sky is playing seductive sport with the sable sky and a razzle-dazzle of lights: blue, gold, red and white.

The birds are surfing on the twilight breeze in kindred pairs :-), and settling on highest trees or masts. Suddenly, it hits me, that there are more trees at dusk in the City of Accra than at high noon. They sway here and there in that pleasant, salubrious green which you’d imagine for a rich country or an earthly paradise. The ocean stalks the shore, a quiet but menacing blue; intense, watching, waiting to pounce!

Everything that moves is aroused in an easygoing, rhythmic flow; birds, trees, cars and the sea; buildings, humans, lights and the sky. It is close approaching a natural balance, tasted, loved, smelled, felt, only touched from the rarefied air of an upper floor of a high city-centre building.

Security my Donkey

Heritage Tower, Ridge. The tallest building in the City of Accra? I have fascinating yarns about pretty, forbidding women in its stodgy, deviant lifts, the queer nasal taste of unwashed humanity and the loathsome car park.

There, a shrimp of a security guard jumped over a dwarf wall (almost his height) near the ATM, where I was standing. In utter disbelief, I preached “I didn’t imagine you would do that!” The insane imp thought I was applauding his Olympic feat, and encouraged me with gold-medal vanity, “You can also do it.”

Of course, I was struck speechless. What do you say to a dwarfish dunce you have employed to keep thieves away, when the villainous employee is showing them the easiest way in? I realised he had to have come through the unending chaos of cars behind the violated fence. I hurried off to try all the doors of mine, taking my time terribly in order that he’d see my intended insult.

Then, I crept up the stairs into the building, counting every step in turn like a true gentleman should.

The Hunger Strike - Poetry

This comes from the collection SERIOUSLY SPEAKING, the last collection I was working on until I hit an almighty writer's block. Enjoy :-)

The Hunger Strike

sitting alone,
with clenched fist
on chisel cheek,
glaring gamely
into the distance.

wondering:
if last month’s
midnight snack
tasted half as good
as you screamed,

why didn’t i see you again?