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.