Girondin

Beneath his starlit eyes

All passions burn so cool

Smiles a lot, slow to speak

Mellow voice, mellifluous

He is a tone of brawn and braw

But he’s naked to the bone

He wins his hearts in serenades

And a smooth je ne sais quoi

Girondin is cast in steel

That no fire can hope to melt

His mystery flows beneath the floe

A halo crowns him like a charm

He stalks the wildest fantasies

And stirs the songbirds to a tune

He’s on, he’s off, he’s flittering

Who can hold bold Girondin?

(S)Pin(n)ing

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

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’.

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.

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!

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 clichés 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.

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.

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.

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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?

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

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.

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...