I did not know, the time we met
That it would end this way
I'd not have sung this long duet
Or walked to meet halfway
I did not know true love could die
Unlike in fairy tales
I would have sliced mine like a pie
And boxed a piece with nails
I do not know the way from here
Or if I want to go
Today, the sun did not appear
Tomorrow, it will show
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Silence
It is the music of the trees
In the drone of the balmy breeze
It is the stretching of the hills
And the tears the sky sadly spills
Thunderclap in breaking hearts
The unseen tail of poison darts
It is the picture of the sea
The still before the storm we see
It is the depth of the deep black
hole
The massive ice caps in each Pole
It is the cosmic dance of stars
And the sounds of life on Mars
The great allure of muted minds
The need to see behind the blinds
The presence of stark loneliness
The blank before each ‘I confess’.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Finis
It rose and then it glowed
Was hot and enragé
Turned cold and blazed again
It grew and flew away
It struck a light and shone
Was swept up in a swirl
Tailspinning in a trice
It mellowed and refined
It set and gave a sigh
Was far from growing old
The time had come to go
It crept away to die.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
PatrOItic
Rubbish teacher. How can a person luring kids to a TV programme say "patroitic" and expect me to let my child watch? I've seen too many kindergarten teachers destroy our kids' speech and pronunciation with 2 decades of undoing to correct. Are teachers at that level not probably the most important? Patroitic? Idiotic!
Friday, February 17, 2012
Do You Know Certiorari?
Three lawyers and I found ourselves in a suite
with building engineers. For a spell we forged ahead swimmingly, while jousting
over fair laws and shear walls. Then, the convener careened into construction clichĂ©s about ‘fixes’. To tease us, mystified advocates, one engineer made a grand old
show of explaining ‘fixes’ to us. What did I do? I fixed him with a fast-fetched question: Do you know Certiorari? He waved his hands in his pride-peeling
pickle and did not veer my way again.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Struggling for Sovereignty with God
One virtuous man of the cloth, who sees some
of his peers jaunting downtown with a raised skirt, has chided them to put
their skirt down, walk with cultivated control, and stop struggling for
sovereignty with God. I like him. See the report here.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Delivery Boy
Go embalm your still-born face in a cadaver fridge. When I showered you with a healthy tip, your fetid face fluoresced to life. I spoilt you just to prove to you that you are a slave.
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Saturday, February 11, 2012
Street Sweeping in the Harmattan
I’d only assayed the third layer of dust cemented
on their skins when the traffic lay on me. As we moved on, we huffed extra soot
to thicken the puff swirling around them. Their eyes did not look down. They looked
bright and straight ahead, maybe a little irritated. They still had to take
their brooms out there in the hard-nosed Harmattan.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Bleak Benighted Bonehead
We suffer all styles and stripes in our
universities: the unlettered, the unread, the untutored, the vacuous. But what benighted
bonehead would bob and bounce at a UG admission letter to the Bachelor of
Political Science degree in the second semester? I hope find you a place in
that uni.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Anger Waiting for a Cause in the City of Accra
Two young men snatched a phone in broad
daylight and bolted. One slipped away; the other was bagged by oh ten thousand ‘petulants’.
They hurt and hammered the hangdog with sticks and stones and switches until
their gall seemed to peter out. Then, a jobless Beelzebub fetched a grubby jerrycan
of grimy engine oil. They soused him slick with the stuff, and made him glug a gallon or two.
Friday, February 3, 2012
Smiling Monsters after Dark in the City of Accra
Man Mountain, hanging like a treacherous cliff
over a forlorn length of the shadowy Spintex Road in the mini-principled city
of Accra, why are you counting on a lift from strangers with that tarzan torso just because you can smile?
Thursday, February 2, 2012
The Village Fool Lives Long
Years ago, while crawling back to this smothering
city from a country cruise, my team mates and I gained on a hamlet as the day
lit out. The family was back from breaking rocks, bones, pods, grounds or whatever
hard work they did. The evening feast had been finger-licked. Father and
mothers, siblings, dogs, cats and birds huddled together in a close circle to
ululate an uncouth song. The father fooled, frolicked and tripped the light
fantastic in the middle. The women and children egged him on. Stress almost kayoed
me today at work, and I remembered that simple, solid scene.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
African Marriage Doesn’t Need the Church
Imagine my holy hang-up when a parish prescribes
principles for neo-nubian nuptials: dwindled dowries, laundered lists, ‘liposucked’
linguists and alcohol alternatives. Church, stay out of African marriages. You
have your own mysterious matrimony. We can pray without the Paternoster.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Songs That Seduce
Scores of songs have seduced us
silly by stirring us from soothing slumber, and sucking sweetly at the heartstrings in
the ensuing twilight-zone spell.
The Papaya Fruit Girl
In the sea of sellers of anything, she
flared her loveliness in my view. Too pretty, too dee-lee-cious, to stride the sour
streets. Too sweet in eyes and nose and oh her lips to schlep diced papaya;
swaying on her head, swaying to the beat of her body-full of ‘S’ shapes in its strut-n-swirl. The flask
woman behind her – bland, sun-blistered battleaxe – she didn’t stir a single
whisker of my heart. Silly, sad me: pouring pity on the flower, sweeping scorn
atop the bug. But beauty is such a disabler! Oh that stimulating papaya fruit girl on
the sunny streets of Accra. Will I see her tomorrow too?
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
The Sentry and the Squatter in the City of Accra
In the city of Accra, at genteel Ridge, at
9 am, a man in hermetic jeans was looking to leak his liquid privy into a
drain. I shuddered to see him crook his legs to enable him to sag the seat of the asphyxiating denim for release.
Not quite ten metres away, another man in a
white caftan was squatted over the same poor drain, doing similar business. I thought
I caught him cast a disgusted glance the way of the standing man as if to ask
which lowlife would hang his dispenser out on broad-daylight display.
I was desperate to stop and correct the
squatter’s delusion that he was the better man, but I had to hurry to the
office to go spend a penny.
All About the Head
His head was save-me-Lord uncomely - hardly humanoid, neither miles near any familiar fine-formed fruit. So, in a football match Ghana was bossing, why did he have to diss a Tswana boy's head in public?
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Sunday, January 22, 2012
Senegal – No Football Lions
Twisted, rangy sinews, a sixty-minute
engine and sharp snipers will maul a second-rate skirmish, but not a six-match
contest. Your problem is seeking to admit yourself into the Pride when you’ve
only roared once.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
If I Don’t Speak Up Because It Didn’t Happen to Me
Any State that treats the fourth estate
with the third degree because it sees them as the fifth column is crude. It’s
that simple. In truly democratic countries, the ‘security’ job is carried out like
infra-red light. Not in Ghana! We run it like fireworks on New Year’s Eve.
Because of our hairy history of railroading
our impotent institutions of democracy, any bloke in boots, a beret, a big belt
and a badge – never mind whether they’re even private security – demands deity-deference
because they can slap-slap you to Paga, Pluto and then Purgatory.
Paradoxically, the most disciplined and
brightest security outfit by far in our democratic sparks has always been the
military.
So when Ghana’s national security enforcers
advertise their brawn like a neon billboard right outside a court of law, you’d
expect their civilian masters to pull the leash and put them in the doghouse.
Why should our shadowy moles unleash their
cloak-and-dagger 'yawa' on the streets and sow insecurity in the deepest hearts
of the lamb they’re sworn (?) to protect. This week, they pummelled a girl journo
and rent her clothes to dishonour her. If she was taking shots of an unfolding
public scene which they resented, why not simply arrest the offending camera. And
even that...
Monday, January 9, 2012
Selective Memory
"My educational colours didn't fly in Ghana because too much rotates round raw rote memory." Daily discourse I hear which dampens my day. I often roundhouse-kick the brainless regurgitation in our schools on this blog, but it is dishonesty when you vomit verses from King James Version to varnish every vowel.
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