POETRY BLOG - SEEKING HIGHER SOLITUDE

LETTERS OF DEATH

2011-11-24T17:36:00.001+03:00

The ghost is designedto scare

The hell out of me

Yet I have no hell inme

Though I scream

In terror

For the dead artist

Mourned at the shrine

In singled tears orwater

Falling off our faces.

Someone must fail

For lesser to succeed

Where others trail.

Pain does not allowdreams

And voice chords tearin a scream.

I remember the deadartist

And what he must haveendured

- The pain

All he had beenmisunderstood

- As mad

For him to only sing ofthe soul

And an empty life

And now this

- Death.

THE ARTIST IN SOLITUDE

2011-11-24T17:26:00.000+03:00

Life is the mentor ofdeath

A lonely artist callsit

Expensive solitude;

An encased peacefulness

Forever in a casket.

The artist dreams ofhis simple works

A creative wit twistedto arouse

A passion for art

That passion stillgrips him

Like an embrace ofdeath

Always seen coming

But never leaving

The unwanted weed, theunrewarding weed

In the grapevine.

I am nourished by poetsgone

And Platos

Whose voices echo

Across the river

With nowhere to go

And nowhere not to go

The artist shattered ina makeshift helm

Of a passion subdued.

I am not dead YET!!! - Plagiarizm

2009-03-08T16:03:00.005+03:00

I have been away from my blog for a while, i don't know when i will come back.

There are bloggers that plagiarize my works on their blogs.
I call it plagiarizm because they do not mention the source, hence indication that it is their ouwn works.

Dear Chaoticme this poem on your blog http://fatjoe.blog.friendster.com/2008/06/not-love/ was composed by poet mutiso and appears on this blog.

Also http://lynx-lee.blog.friendster.com/2007/10/love/ this was also composed by poet mutiso and not by lynx-lee. Always mention the source. Do not kill creativity!

Note: Anyone is free to use my works as long as they quote my blog or link to it.

an epitaph

2008-02-11T08:44:00.000+03:00

There is a brave heart

Rising within the dust

A whirlwind of emotions

Lose out

In the down turn

Of young poets dead

In the pages of time

Erased –

Though their works live on

Centuries and forever.

Secrets of the soul

Are cast in timeless gold.

The path less trudged is narrow.

The bush path is designed

In the beauty of art

Where imperfection is perfection

And an epitaph is a flower

Of remembrance,

‘I am dying young

Just like Jesus Christ’.

The spirit has vain hope

To recover a condemned soul

To be a poet is to be a fatalist

The final circle of futility

After a useful life has finally fulfilled

Its course,

‘To immortalize

A verse’

i could love you still

2008-01-11T12:45:00.000+03:00

I could love you still,
A thousand times over
Though you know I do.

I might get you still,
A million presents
Stuck up in my heart.

My eyes could give
You much more
Than mere looks if it could.

And my life would be
A paradise if you let it
Grow to discover.

But my heart is wedged, barbed and caged now
And neither could you
Set it free;
Unless the world waits
Until their thoughts freeze up into stone
And let the butterflies fly again –
They know better freedom
Fewer rules abide,
And none will tell them
"You did wrong"

ruined

2008-01-07T15:05:00.000+03:00

The mortal man
In his time of death
Cannot comprehend this unfairness
On how life has been short
And painful.
Why mourn over
A natural phenomenon,
Why dream of life everlasting
Yet what we have now is short?
All life is being plucked away
By the pruning hand of time.
Though we all want to live longer
For its own sake
We are all pointed to ruins and death
To a mother and her siblings
And to the father forever ruined.
Where is the source
When all laughter is stifled by eeriness?
I am in agony for being left responsible
Over matters inconstant
Over my life and others
Who form the rugged plains
Of my life.

back from denial

2007-12-21T08:32:00.000+03:00

Its not that I did nothing in November. Was quite busy, went to Europe. It was chilly but nice. Ok maybe too gray for life. Gray like horror movie gray and nice like xmas lights nice.

I may resume blogging January if solitude doesn't out grow me.

Did you miss me?

when love dies

2007-10-27T13:34:00.000+03:00

Into the evening there is a cloud
following the sun to a deep sleep;
you will not sleep like this
as peace. The nightmares will
flourish. And you will twitch your
limbs struggling to awake.

Deep into the night owls will not hoot
the sun is dead on the other side
and you will always be cold
a preserved cadaver postponing rot.

Never again will you sing to me
the love song.
There are so many already
in this irredeemable world; never knowing
how it felt
beneath the surface
of your breath
at the last gasp of death.

THE SWEEP - political drama

2007-10-07T09:45:00.000+03:00

I realised that I should give you a glimpse of my other hobby, being a playwright.

Location- somewhere in Africa

THE SWEEP

Scripted by poet mutiso

CHARACTERS

Setwe: mad man

Otulu: blind old man

Fwodu: graduate

Jitembe: medicine man

Warriors: voices

Protesters: voices

Place: Esebwa village

Ethnic groups: The Injina

The Lovureko

THE SWEEP

This country nurtured hope decayed,

The politician cruises on a 4WD guzzler,

The thief!

Feeling the base of his belly.

There is a slum in my heart

But I cannot relocate it to my foot

Nor hand nor back.

Its rusted tin makeshifts make my blood flow slow.

War has filled my heart with bullets,

Steel and blood cannot be swept away.

A bullet lodged in my head

Is another brain of the dead.

Africa my home

Africa my tomb.

SCENE ONE

Prologue

For a long time the Lovureko and the Injina in Esebwa village have nurtured an ancient grudge that has exploded into avenge without impunity.

This time, the Injina’s were caught unawares.

SETWE: (Early in the morning, on a lonely path from the village.)

I wanted to go with them,

I asked them!

Oh they refused; they refused!!

OTULU: (Coming on stage running)

What?

(Brandishing a walking stick)

What happened?

SETWE: (In a trance)

I can still see their angry faces

Their fierceness terribly enchanting

Their eyes, red, glowing, burning!

OTULU: You mean the Lovureko,

The raiders?

SETWE: They took with them Olorun, the best warrior in the village

All the elders...the women... our children.

All of them, see?

OTULU: (Nearly sobbing)

You mean no one is left in the village,

That they are all gone?

SETWE: No, no Otulurembwe, you and I, we are here.

They did not sweep us all.

Remember Fwodu?

Mmm… he still smuggles fish to Jitembe.

…And, by the way, what happened to your cheeks?

They look swollen and bloated like an overfed politician.

OTULU: (Swallows the insult)

Yeah, I roasted maize a couple of days ago,

And one got lost under my reed of a bed.

My walking stick could not reach it, but this morning, it rolled over.

It had all dried out.

I could not throw it though,

For it was like throwing my wisdom.

SETWE: Wisdom!

Working your worn out jaws for the sake of dry grains?

Wisdom in that block of a head?

I would rather be insane!

(Leaves shaking his head.)

OTULU: Yes you are insane,

You were a long time ago.

That was many years, when we were still young.

You started by pretending that you were mad,

So that you may avoid participating in the raids, or even hunting.

(He laughs)

You were lazy, and a coward!

Pretenders are worse than murderers.

You murdered yourself.

(He is shouting now)

You know why?

Because… because the madness stuck!!

Curtains

SCENE TWO

This scene occurs inside Jitembe’s hut. The hut is adorned typically as witchdoctors’, bones animal hides, and cowry shells e.t.c

Jitembe is a busy man, too busy to know that his village has been raided.

JITEMBE: (measuring the limbs of a fat toad.)

This is a real masterpiece.

Such a fat limb could send chills of its charm

Across the ridge of Esebwa and beyond.

(Staring at the limbs)

Who in this village can rival me?

I the only medicine man that reins.

OTULU: (Animated and furious as he approaches Jitembes’ hut)

I never did pretend I was blind,

It just came like flu.

JITEMBE: Otulu, is it you again?

Eeh… come in.

Now I have the answer,

The gods revealed to me your malady.

They say that you are a special case.

(Sadly)

They say that you have developed ancestral resistance.

OTULU: You do not know the beauty I see in my world.

JITEMBE: I know.

That is why you talk all by yourself,

Imagining that someone is listening.

Let me advise you old one,

No one really listens to your void mumbles,

No one ever listens!

Do you hear?

OTULU: Jitembe, I never listen to you and you never care.

So why should I in the whole world care

If no one listens to me?

Should I?

Tell me toad hunter; tell me.

FWODU: (He is heard whistling as he approaches Otulu and Jitembe, dangling a fish)

I have brought this straight from the river.

It has not even touched down.

JITEMBE: Fwodu, I can smell its rotten nature two ridges away.

FWODU: If you mix this rare species with a little of your antidote,

I bet it will make a potent concoction.

It is a royal among fishes.

JITEMBE: I do not want it, you smuggler.

FWODU: You still owe me the one I supplied last week.

JITEMBE: It was rotten.

FWODU: You preferred it that way.

By tomorrow you must pay,

But if you do not …

(Exits Fwodu)

OTULU: (Softly)

Why did you make me blind, Jitembe?

JITEMBE: Did you not hear me tell you?

It was the gods, they said …

OTULU: We had a feud over land.

JITEMBE: …that you could not be cured.

OTULU: Then there was this irritation in my eyes …

Yet I was seeing perfectly!!

JITEMBE: You had wronged the gods.

OTULU: Then you gave me black powder to apply in my eyes.

Black powder to ease the irritation.

JITEMBE: I just told you!

OTULU: (Pensively)

I never saw light again.

JITEMBE: You heard.

OTULU: It was the last reed!

(Pointing, mistakenly, his walking stick away from Jitembe)

You snatched away my vision.

You will pay for every single ray of light you owe me.

JITEMBE: Ahem

(And sneezes)

OTULU: (Turns swiftly, animated, angry)

You also took away my land you black magic wizard!

JITEMBE: (Shakes his flywhisk violently)

The gods are now angry.

They want me to cast a spell on you.

OTULU: If you are as powerful as you claim,

Why not use lizard tails to make yourself rich and famous.

Tell me Jitembe, I want to hear.

JITEMBE: Get out of my shrine; get out!

Just run to your hut and do not even try to look back.

OTULU: It is only those able to see

Are blinded from the truth.

I can feel the Earth tremble

Breaking away from reason.

Curtains

SCENE THREE

Fwodu sounded the alarm using the village chief’s horn. It was an urgent call to discuss the situation and fate of their village.

JITEMBE: (As he hears the trumpeting horn).

Whoever dreamt up a horn as a communication device was doomed never to awake from his nightmare.

(He dangles his flywhisk. Addresses the audience).

Just listen to that ear splitting noise.

Listen!

(The horn blows again).

Can you really tolerate that and later expect to hear someone whispering to you?

I bet you will not.

Listen again.

(The horn blows).

I swear to my ancestors that that is Fwodu the silly intellectual.

He is the loudest horn blower in the village.

That is why the elders prefer him.

With him blowing that horn, you can be sure it will be heard beyond the ridges of Esebwa.

(Musing)

I will attend the Baraza.

Maybe it is an aspiring member of parliament campaigning, and then I may get a tin of beans from him.

(Exit)

Fwodu enters the stage blows the horn once and sits on a stone as he awaits the villagers. Setwe and Otulu arrive and exchange greetings. Jitembe is the last to arrive.

JITEMBE: Where are the other villagers?

Four of us cannot make a Baraza, I thought …

FWODU: Please get seared so that we may proceed.

(Pause as Jitembe sits)

The main reason I called this meeting is to …

JITEMBE: You mean it is you Fwodu who has called this meeting?

Somebody give me water to drink.

OTULU: Shut up you sorcerer, I will not remind you that you have forgotten your amulets in your lair.

JITEMBE: A mans worth cannot be measured by the length of his trouser.

By the way, how did you know?

OTULU: I could always hear the rattle.

FWODU: …is to enable us discuss the fate that befell our villagers.

JITEMBE: Will someone tell me what has happened?

I can only see four of us in the village.

Will somebody tell me?

SETWE: (Whistles)

A whole witchdoctor does not know?

Jitembe, you must be a fraud.

JITEMBE: (Stands animated)

Just listen to the mad man.

He is crazy, crazy to the core!

Son of the crooked river, declare the number of cows you own, now that you challenge me.

SETWE: Even if I could have had cattle, the Lovurekos would have rustled them.

I do not chew thorns in my words, nor have I spat on your pathway

But I know, even in the village dance, I attract the most beautiful women.

JITEMBE: Hear! Hear!

You do not know how to address your fathers.

The white hair on my head is not grass.

Trust me, I have seen better days.

OTULU: The hair on your head is grass all right, especially the grass on my land.

The land that you grabbed!

FWODU: You are free to walk out of this meeting if it has not attained your standards.

And this applies to you all.

O.k. we shall begin by explaining where we were last night when the Lovureko attacked our village.

JITEMBE: Why is he bossing us around, has anyone ever heard of the word democracy?

Fwodu! I know you are one of them.

You went to the white mans school;

Where they write on flattened trees using rolling sticks.

We are not children; stop making rules here.

FWODU: I have never seen a blind witch doctor.

You mean you do not care about the plight of our villagers?

OTULU: You are insulting me.

FWODU: My apologies brother

It is this Jitembe; a lot of seriousness is required in this meeting to help us get organized.

We shall start with Setwe; where were you during the raid?

SETWE: (Stands, takes a small drum and starts to beat it without following a pattern. Stops, scratches his scalp as if an idea has struck his mind, laughs, beats the drum hysterically and sings.)

African fight African brother

African steal African brothers’ cattle

Colonialist come

He grabs African land

Brothers support each other to chase colonizer

Colonialist run away

Africans turn on each other

Fight over land

Kill each other.

Who was the enemy?

FWODU: Setwe! Setwe! … Setwe!

SETWE: (Turns abruptly as if awoken from a nightmare)

I was at the edge of the forest trying to convince the bees not to build their hives too high up the trees… see my back?

JITEMBE: It is swollen all over; you mean they stung you?

SETWE: They were such a mean lot.

(Sits)

OTULU: The sweetness of honey contradicts you.

SETWE: (Stands to demonstrate)

I ran very fast towards the village.

Then I met them!

OTULU: Who, the Lovureko?

SETWE: (As he utters the following words, a minimum of four extras pass armed with bows and arrows. They walk stealthily then perform a mock war, war cries and songs and then disappear backstage. Drums).

They had covered their faces, and decorated their shields.

Our villagers were tied in chains.

Then I saw Olorun, our bravest warrior, run with three spears lodged in his backside and fell.

They came to him and hacked all over his body.

Then they carried him away.

They did not know him or his mother; he did not know them or their sisters.

But they knew he was from the Injina tribe, and he knew they were the Lovurekos.

(Animated)

I wanted to go with them!

I asked them, but they refused!

JITEMBE: Who would ever want to go with you anywhere?

Even a fly will avoid you.

SETWE: They just shoved me aside, and passed.

FWODU: Next.

OTULU: Frankly, I cannot remember where I was at that moment.

As you all know, I became blind years back.

So I have forgotten the topography of the area.

JITEMBE: You mean even now you do not know exactly where you are?

OTULU: You do not understand.

Where I expect trees to be, I find they have been cut.

Grass has disappeared on the plains; gullies have formed on the hills.

Mansions have been built on the cleared forest.

Playing fields for our children have been fenced to build a hotel.

Roads washed away by rains.

See?

I cannot recognize any area or place.

Only my hut.

Does anyone understand?

FWODU: We do Otulurembe, we really understand.

OTULU: The other day, I nearly broke my ankle on a pothole in the market place.

Who is supposed to repair our roads?

(He spits)

The leaders of today, ha!

FWODU: They are the same leaders of yesterday who have hang on too long.

But why the laughter my friend, you seem bemused?

OTULU: No Fwodumare. Today’s laughter is mirthless, a mask that has cracked on my face.

It is a new way of crying for I cringe in sorrow.

FWODU: We are in this together Otulurembe.

Jitembe what about you, where were you during the raid?

JITEMBE: (Shakes his flywhisk)

Who does not know me, the great medicine man?

No one would dare touch me, let alone attack me.

As a matter of fact, I slept like a baby.

OTULU: Now we know the unpatriotic citizens.

People like Jitembe slept like a baby when the Lovureko sacked the village.

Jitembe, don’t you have any shame?

You thump your chest like a gorilla, yet you cannot stand up for the village?

He never even foresaw this disaster, foreseer indeed.

FWODU: The issue we are handling is very sensitive.

Let us avoid harboring grudges at all costs.

SETWE: Fwodu, tell us your story.

FWODU: Oh, I was just coming to that.

You all know that I had a grudge with our local chief.

He suggests that the law does not allow us to brew local alcohol.

That it is illegal.

JITEMBE: I cannot figure it out.

Does anyone know where the chief takes the brew he confiscates from Fwodu and his followers?

SETWE: Search me into the deepest recess of my misconstrued madness, my animosity.

My tattered self, tatters of Uhuru and its rotten fruits.

FWODU: Who does not know?

Very early in the morning if you look into the chiefs’ eyes, you see the unholy glow, red and watery.

I can bet on my beer jerricans that it is caused by hangover created by a million bells and rattles in a circumcision ceremony.

OTULU: Do not even remind me.

Last week he was barely able to open a Baraza.

ALL: (Laughter).

FWODU: He was always preaching about development projects, and of how committed Serikali is.

He promised us piped water two years ago, right?

ALL: Yes! Yeah!

FWODU: But what happened?

Only the Lovureko got piped water.

OTULU: For us the river is nearer than the taps, so we shall stay the way we are.

We shall continue to drink from the same cup with cattle.

Hear with our ears then close our minds

Listen to the sweet words of promise but not dream it

For there is always something for us

Something of nothing

But survive we must.

JITEMBE: It is a fact. It happens to the littlest of Esebwa village.

FWODU: Just like you I ask for my fish payment but you divinely say ‘come back tomorrow’.

JITEMBE: No my son, I only speak the tongue of the ancestors.

Though you graduated from the university, I never bewitch you so as to be unemployed.

I never mismanaged village finances

I never dug potholes on your doorstep.

I am just a poor ancestor-fearing citizen.

OTULU: You are too self-centered.

Why not sing the songs you want others to sing?

Just like the Prime Minister, you think we venerate you because nobody revolts.

But I tell you like a storm a revolution is building in my heart; and my heart is greater than any ocean.

For now I may seem to be busy trying to fill my perennially empty stomach like everybody else.

I have no time to dwell on democracy and potholes.

Within these words you will find the wisdom of the aged, of those who have seen the sun rise twenty thousand times and can still see.

FWODU: I remember the time I fell in love with the village chiefs’ daughter, oh what success?

You know I wanted to marry her, then obviously the next step was for me to be appointed the village headman; but my undoing was to consult Jitembe.

(This part is a flash back. It excludes both Setwe and Otulu).

FWODU: Jitembe the great medicine man, I have come to seek the truth from the Oracle.

(Drums are heard as he bows)

JITEMBE: You are in love young man.

FWODU: But either love or I is blind great one.

That is why I have come to seek the way, show me the best path to follow.

JITEMBE: Love might be blind but it can always find its way out.

Yet you will always be trapped Fwodu.

You will have to appease the gods first, as we all know; love does not brew in one pot.

(Drums sound as Jitembe chants incoherently; Fwodu produces a cockerel for payment. Jitembe completes his ritual of rattling bones, shells etc).

For you to win the heart of the chiefs’ daughter, you have to at least win the friendship of the chief himself.

Eat at the same table with him!

FWODU: But …but I am too poor to even dare to cross his path.

JITEMBE: When he laughs my son, laugh louder than him.

When he scratches his bulging stomach, scratch yours more sophisticatedly.

FWODU: Look at me Jitembe.

Do I have a stomach to elicit a second glance?

It barely gets a daily meal.

JITEMBE: That is where you go wrong my son.

Use your head and your ambitions will be fulfilled.

Your mind is not a desert but it is a flowerpot blooming with ideas.

(Fwodu proceeds with his narration to the group)

FWODU: My friends, Jitembe deceived me.

He made me believe that to evade village tax would prove to my peers that I was rich and had influence with the local authorities.

I imagined they understood that the basic concept of corruption was to be a big fish.

SETWE: Yes I remember, the scandal spread through the village like bush fire.

Especially the way the chiefs’ daughter turned down your advances.

(Mimics)

‘My father will never accept you as his son-in-law, he says a person who smuggles fish and evades village tax cannot feed two mouths’.

ALL: (Laughter)

FWODU: I still haven’t told you where I was last night.

ALL: Tell us!

FWODU: I was in the middle of the communal plantation.

JITEMBE: Yes! I knew it.

Maize cob thief.

I bet you were roasting maize!

OTULU: Give him time.

FWODU: I was brewing this new brand of Chang’aa.

I used sugar instead of molasses.

JITEMBE: Now this is our man.

Where is it?

FWODU: It is in my hut of course.

SETWE: Go fetch it, this meeting of cows and a chicken has run my throat dry.

Of African killing brother

Of African stealing his brothers’ land.

FWODU: When the village goes back to normal, you will all have to pay me back.

Exit.

JITEMBE: Wait up; I will help you carry.

Exit

OTULU: (Pensively)

The stomach has become our brains.

We abide by its dictates, till we sell our souls.

Curtains

SCENE FOUR

The same group of people but now seated around a pot full of the local brew all drinking their share.

OTULU: So what do we do, attack the Lovurekos?

FWODU: Exactly.

JITEMBE: Hey, are you crazy?

How do you expect this bunch of morons to form an army?

Who among us can confront them?

SETWE: I will go.

I will attack them at night.

They have taken our people to a foreign land, where what they breathe is dust and pungents’.

What they eat is dry air.

And in their hearts what do they keep?

They keep anguish and despair I tell you.

What is left for them but sheer pain of the heart, of the stomach, of all …sheer pain.

Why did they leave me behind?

I asked them!

They refused.

FWODU: Jitembe, you will go.

JITEMBE: What difference will it make?

Even if I wear my amulets, I can only dance to the gods.

SETWE: (In a trance)

Yes, they will come again.

They will sweep all the corners of the village.

They will sweep us all.

(Drums beat as he dances vigorously. The drumming stops abruptly but he still dances then falls)

JITEMBE: But we have a government.

It will protect us.

FWODU: It is more complicated than that.

The Prime Minister is from the Lovureko tribe.

We did not vote for him, therefore, he cannot protect us.

He can only protect his people.

SETWE: They say I am a mad man.

They say Jitembe cannot dispel evil spirits that have grabbed plots in my head.

But why, for stomachs sake, did my local Member of Parliament give me a tin of maize meal in the last elections?

Did he expect it to sustain me till t he next general elections?

Who is mad, him or I?

People of Esebwa Village, vote with your stomachs.

Vote with your stomachs I say; and bargain well for a bigger share of the national cake.

JITEMBE: What about the police, the people in blue?

They will protect us.

Yes! Service for all.

FWODU: Learn to consult your oracles before making groundless assumptions.

A hungry dog cannot protect a hungry home.

I think the brew is getting into you head.

JITEMBE: I drink for the sleep.

When a bee circles yet I do not receive clients, then I must drink.

Most of us do not have the luck of a chameleon, and the economy is bad too.

In my dream last night, I saw yams coming towards me.

But when I reached out to grab them, they …they started shaking.

Then I sat back laughing looking at them.

SETWE: The great sorcerer has spoken.

So, what is your philosophy great one?

JITEMBE: Simplicity is the best alternative in life.

OTULU: Hypocrite! Most of the people I have spoken to, before I die, have proven to me that you cannot claim wisdom just because you are old.

FWODU: Listen to the message from the Lovurekos.

Even if they are one of us, we have to follow their ways or live in a political nightmare.

OTULU: I can now see the truth more clearly.

Our ancestors have spread it out for me to see.

One day the big fish shall be pulled out of the river, and then it shall choke in the fresh air of democracy.

JITEMBE: But who shall pull the big fish out of the river and drag it up the cliff?

OTULU: You and I, the power of the cheering crowd.

(Slogans and shouts are heard in the background, e.g. Tumbo must go! Tumbo must go! Then screams, gun shots and stampede).

They will never sweep the masses off the streets.

Their brutal force will be weakened by our togetherness, but innocent blood will have to be shed.

This transition will not be an easy one.

Let us not despair.

Determination is not a foreign object; it is within us!

Curtains

THE END.

music is the composer

2007-09-27T12:17:00.001+03:00

To me music is…the composer being deeper than the soul
singing with all the passion on earth.
no one ever feels so joyous… so depressed
the ultimate emotion.
The artist no matter what art form, reaches
where no man has gone before
differently.
No man can translate the emotion of Vincent van Gogh
when he painted a portrait of himself
emotion after emotion
like god on the seventh day
everything was perfect, is perfect
Except the hand that drew it
or words that created it…

some day

2007-09-22T14:59:00.001+03:00

absolute emotion

2007-09-15T14:13:00.000+03:00

Your emotions are a storm
I could not contain
And soon I will be lost to bear
Within the mist of my life
I capitulate and hate you for being so bold
Then you detest me for being so cold

Being in an act
A role left unplayed
For no fruit will come out of it.

Losing you is deep
As hate gives me creeps
And neurosis that I walk about

Aimless like the dust drifting

Into noses and roses
Settling nowhere.
I am losing you
Like you lost me.
Love is not an investment
But a fatalistic indulgence
Where loss is an end in itself.
In the beginning I was led
Into it with serendipity
And utter innocence.

the last poet

2007-09-05T16:48:00.000+03:00

I have used wisdom hence

But when the hour comes,

To sink into the dust

To blow with the wind,

I will respond.

And a child lays down dying

Somewhere of famine

With the fire of life

Ebbing off his glassy eyes

An artist yet to grow

The dead artist before he blooms.

Still the art of life is alive

In the fluttering butterflies

In the thudding rain across the hills

On my eyes and what I see

The art of creation

Where life is a continuation.

There will be no last poet

Until the last man walketh upon this Earth

Versing muses of how the world

Has been laid waste

And an ode to the souls

Emerging from the cracks

Of bare Earth.

on the deathbed

2007-08-28T10:03:00.000+03:00

On the deathbed
A symbol of love
You felt me so much.

In retrospect
Looking at you now
Knowing you never fulfilled my need
Never could
Created in me more than a loss.

Why you left
Without a reason, without a hint
Will kill me too, ever so slowly
And nothing will ever sate
This condition.

Did I bother you so much,
Because I was an open book
And couldn’t pretend?
Did I adore you so much,
That the sweetness got saturated?

The homicide of my years
Never forgiven, never prosecuted
Was the only loss I knew.

The hurricane you wrought
Devastating my heart
The flood of my tears, will never dry.

Now solitude is all I seek
My only friend, my only solace
A great feeling of control
Of doing nothing
For at least I know it will always hurt
Both ways.

what is love?

2007-08-18T08:23:00.000+03:00

What is love
If not a mirage
Beckoning you
Then quickly disappears

What is love
If not a whiff
Of something delicious cooking
But suddenly burns out

What is love
If not a road
With many diversions and no pointers
Yet you have to trudge on

What is love
If not a lie
With promises of paradise, then dies
Beyond the receding horizon

What is love
If not a mirror
That cracks when you peer
Beyond the plain reflection

What really is love?
Is it a beckon that you cannot resist?
Or is it just a thought that disappears
When you decide not to think?

the soul a deeper mystery

2007-08-15T15:45:00.000+03:00

Mystery does not dwell in the stars
Fate nor hope
Does not lie wither
Nor does destiny abide without.

The soul is a deeper mystery
That lies in your eyes
Fate comes with time
And destiny is within us all...

ethnic cleansing

2007-08-13T12:00:00.000+03:00

You have butchered
Our fathers and brothers
But their blood is our strength.
You have defiled
Our mothers and sisters
But they have drawn the strength of your men.

You have destroyed the innocence
Of our children
But they will live to remember
Your evil ways.

You have slaughtered us in thousands
But you cannot finish us all
Our seeds are scattered
All over the mountains-
We shall multiply
And fill the valleys again.

You have destroyed our villages
But you will never dampen our spirit.
It is in our hearts
And our hearts are strong.

I know we shall sing again
In songs of joy
I know we shall sing again
In songs of victory.

shooting the breeze

2007-07-31T12:02:00.000+03:00

As I shot the breeze
Under Uhuru Park groves,
The people upon the grass
Were appalled by doves.

And up by the Nyayo Monument
I heard a broken heart cry
Tears of lost moments;
He said, "Love is tragedy-

I tried to empty the ocean
Into this tiny hole I dug,
But we all drowned
In so small a hug.

I tried to breathe in
All the air in the world
But I swelled and burst
For love cracks like no gold.

I tried to simply love
With all my heart in hope
To see another dawn
But it hangs in tender rope.

I tried to relearn yet unlearned
To retry yet untried
The smooth road of life
No longer smooth to ride."

Days stretch tearing the sky
Eyes crack with dry tears
His heart seeks the lost love
Passing through empty years.

no, maybe yes

2007-07-30T11:30:00.000+03:00

No. I will not be carried away by love
I might lack the ability
To face the sun; day in day out.

But I grow, flower and dry out
Then let others bloom too;
Or I just sway,
This way and that way
Like a stalk of corn
Everytime the wind breezes.

***

Yes. Do not see me too young
More naive than you 'd imagine...

When I say yes,
It is just that I am afraid that no
Would give me nothing in the end
But an empty house.

it was not love

2007-07-29T15:43:00.000+03:00

It was not love at all
When I felt within me a fireball
Rising.
It was not hate neither
Though I dare yet.

You wanted more than a fire
It was to you
More of a mechanical passage
To a greater realization of mere needs;
Like life, and marriage
Happily ever after.
But for me it was a spur of the moment-
And any other time it rises again
Like a storm never subdued
Till spent.

When you dreamt
I was awake fondling my thoughts
On how foolish I have become
To be so spent.

We are both victims of something different
Stagnating as we reach out
Aging while at it still
Never reaching the summit
Never bonding the molecule of our thoughts
Till the end of time.

tears of god

2007-07-23T09:21:00.000+03:00

White floating mass reverberated

A great chest heaved and throbbed

Gales of wind gushed within
Twirled and swayed Baobab
A broken lightening pierced through a lone cloud
Tears of God flowed
Painfully
To mans damnation
And said,
"Thine son Emmanueli
Shalt not re-die for thee"

masturbating a dream

2007-07-21T15:25:00.000+03:00

I have always believed,
I could never live without you
The pain I went through
Missing you all these years
Drinking everyday, hoping
It would replace you
And warm my heart.

I still feel drunk
Though I do not know
If it is the alcohol or you.

My thoughts always used you
As an excuse
To be melancholic, irascible and drunk
Everyday was a struggle
A new dawn was, to me, sheer luck
For I could be dead so easily
I can even think it and it happens.

What I always believed in was wrong
Wasting all these years in solitude
Wasting all that money on alcohol
Stressing my heart with heartache
For you could never only love me.

Even so even if you could
I would be so ecstatic
For a dozen weeks or so
Then all will be like normal
You will get to be less special,
It would be all normal…
The quarrels, the fights
And me going back to the old self.
Drinking every day to help me forget you,
Being melancholic,
Finishing off the beer half drunk
On the eve of our wedding.
Masturbating a dream
I have already lived.

political poetry pulls me down

2007-07-14T15:17:00.000+03:00

Let me call this Month depression month. I have just realised that writing political poetry depresses me a lot or maybe I have just been low lately. BTW you have no idea.

I now know why our politicians use top of the range 4 wheel off road vehicles. They do not want their bones to be broken by one billion pot-holes from Nairobi all the way to Kakamega.
Dear politician, SHAME ON YOU! Am serious the road actually has ONE BILLION POT-HOLES.

The only good news comes from our neighbouring country. The road from Arusha to Dar-es Salaam has less than twenty pot-holes; yet it is a longer distance.

OK lets just call this month a political poetry month. I know you will hate me for only posting politics; but that is what is selling now in my country. We shall be having an election this year so bite me.

POOR KENYAN

I can see you
Staring at a cheap payslip
Worrying over retrenchment
And the scorching sun
Oh our dams!

In mitumba clothes
Mitumba cars
On third rate roads - pot-holed.
Unmarked.

Budget speeches, tax rises
Over priced solar panels
But cheap generators - for what?

I can see the sun rising
Scorching garbage.
The moon setting
On river road tarts.

Are you zinjanthropus
Or pundathropus
That you cannot say,
'No it is enough'
You cannot say,
'I pay my taxes'
'I need returns, answers!'

Guns on the highways
Guns in the gutter
Who is the carjacker?

I can feel the dance
To happiness in your veins
Waiting to swallow survival
While the stomach awaits satisfaction
And you cry,
'Do not ration the air I breathe
or the ground I tread.
But ration my demise
My rot!'

Kenyan Kenyan
Tied like a knot
Twisted right over the head
To see the back
Smell the sweet past,
A rumour of a better future
Like a lamp post
On rationed life.

Poor Kenyan
Poor Kenyan
Wake up and VOTE

honourable minister

2007-07-12T15:06:00.000+03:00

He sings the tune
He dances to the tune
The sycophant
Buys votes
Rigs votes
Wins.

A phone call congratulates
A bank loan
A tract of land
Sits on borrowed chair
Borrowed shoes
Borrowed time.

Favor falls
Public rally loud speakers
Disown him
Pens shoot towards, de-writes
And the radio announcement at one p.m.
That red carpet no longer under his feet.
The board summons
Unearthed corrupt dealings
Then,
“I have ‘peacefully’ retired
To my village farm”.

I was away, sorry

2007-07-11T12:30:00.000+03:00

Ok i never say goodbye, apologies. Was on a two week vacation, went to Nairobi, felt the heat of Kenyan politics. Kenya is possibly having an election this year, maybe the last week of December; nobody knows.

All I can say is that I will veer more and more towards Kenyan and African political poetry.
I can assure you that you will not be bored. I am so inspired now, politically speaking, so brace yourself for lots of political poetry. BTW Kenyan politics entertains like a soap opera, quite dramatic; if only it would translate into development and jobs? Anyways it is a good grief...

LEADERS OF TOMORROW

The last ten years,
Or thereabouts,
I was told,
“You are the leader of tomorrow
you are the future saviors
of this country
you the ‘YOUTHS!’”

But I say unto them,
“You the old guard in politics
Wallowing in peasants wealth
Obese’d by grabbed land! Grabbed land!
Listen to me,

I am the leader of today
Step down for the young blood
That post is truthfully mine
Retire honorably
I am the nations rejuvenator
Stop hiding behind your guilt
I am the voice
The voice of my motherland!

The voice of reason is beckoning,
You cannot resist.
The pull of the soil,
You cannot defy.
PLEASE GO!

in memory of p.w.w.g, my dad

2007-06-20T09:25:00.000+03:00

DAD IF YOU COULD BE

If you could be
To erase my errs you would
And match the colors that I, confused mix
Undistort my life with your linear
No longer would I mourn,
Missing you, fatedly
Your demise would be nothing
But the wind, unaffecting yet
Affectingly good.

A decade has heightened the loss
Of a shepherd to a flock
I am now abandoned
As a wanderer
Lost in the vast wastelands of life.

preacher man

2007-06-19T14:25:00.000+03:00

Preacher man of our town
Traveled many ridges unidle
Yet nothing did he own
Only but a clutched Bible.

With beards of sweat
And the scorching noon sun,
Burning his face with hate
But... Listen to him my son.

Never is his voice hoarse
Never does his spirit lose glimmer
But always high on his horse
Even as the sun gets dimmer.

By his teachings many converted
All linked to a tender rope
And with their misgivings averted
All went home with joyful hope.

poetry my love

2007-06-18T10:25:00.000+03:00

Once beyond the sky
The stars shone,
And the moons light
Only seen at eventide
For a long time I thought
Of writing to you a poem and succeed.

To think, I tried on what I’d do
On this little globe, then,
I imagined the inspiration I got
From the nice people was stronger,
Their support great.
Then to god I did pray
That may he see for me
Where the sun couldn't,
And do cover for me
What darkness couldn't.

The wakemorn breeze had a welcoming sensation;
The tweeting birds, only added the sensation,
The sharp morn rays
That hit my soft skin
Only tripled the sensation,
And all around perpetuality,
A serene atmosphere ruled.

I wish that,
I could always write a poem
That reminds me to smile,
Teaches me when to frown.
A poem that knows
How to flow with you,
Or just, let you flow
And drive you crazy sometimes
A time or other keeps you sane.

O poetry my love
Poetry in the sky,
In the birds that fly,
In the people and the voices they produce.
In the leaves, and
The breeze that triggers it
Within and without.

O poetry, it that flows
In the veins of those who compose,
One, two and more poems,
In the hearts
Of those who recite it
And music to the ears
Of those who listen.

Poetry understands you well,
Does what you want
And never forgets.
Poetry my love,
My intimate friend
Who keeps the most secrets
Enchanting with a tingling sensation
Of MAGIC!
To the troubled soul,
The Tormented Soul.

ripe seeds i did pluck

2007-06-16T09:17:00.000+03:00

Today ripe seeds I did pluck

From the stars in the mushy clouds

Then I did plant

Deep into earth’s heart

Floods came overflowing the banks

Sweeping young seeds off the shore

Yet I still remember

Landforms dancing with the breeze

Dew forming on grass blades

The leaves on its branches

Touching my back

Pulling me closer

To touch the sun

I still remember

The landforms on yonder

Landmarks of trees

Guided me home

That shelter from the cold

Releasing the hold

Of life.

when you smile

2007-06-11T13:04:00.000+03:00

When you smile

Kilimanjaro falls on its backside

And Mount Kenya cries into springs,

For it cannot have you

And the Nile loses direction

Going south,

Yet you will always be in East Africa.

ted global?

2007-06-06T12:57:00.000+03:00

Am not trying anything funny, but it seems that the major media sites are not reporting anything on the TED Conference in Arusha, Tanzania.
I have searched everywhere, wikipedia, bbc, cnn,.... nothing. Nada.

In 2005, the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference was amazingly reported by bbc's Jo Twist and Kevin Anderson; when following the proceedings, I felt as if I was there.
Check this amazing reporting.

- Leading brains take on big ideas

- Technologies 'to aid the poor'

- Time to switch off and slow down

- A future full of hopes and fears

- Universe 'too queer' to grasp

- Pushing for the next giant leap

- Climate changes on carbon trading

- Call for rethink in aid policy

- Eco-designs on future cities

- Funds sought to help free media

The only place you get the info on the TED proceedings in Arusha is from the bloggers who have been invited at the conference. And what do they report about, they post photos of themselves smiling, or describing how the venue has been amazingly designed, how the musicians danced to the beat of the African drum...
Why are there some real reporters in the venue?
Ok I am glad to have read some two lines on a blogger who tried to highlight Bono's idea on reducing poverty and the other guy who says that Africa needs more entrepreneurs.

I know how to reach the TED website and can watch the presentation online etc, but some of us do not have the time. We needed some good reporting on this one. Where are the creative bbc guys or even reuters?

Every year, a TED conference inspires my philosophical nature, Charles Dawkins presentation at TED in 2005 was the best! and after.
So I decided to go to Arusha and get some new insights and pretend that I was at the conference. Nobody even knows the venue?

Oh hell, I am going back home.

the last letter

2007-05-28T13:49:00.000+03:00

I am quite glad having seen that poetry bloggers really do draw attention. Many thanks to Global voices online for the nice post on blogging African poets. It also brought to my attention some quite excellent poets and poetess' in other parts of Africa. Nice!

THE LAST LETTER

“ I have risked my life for my work and for it I have lost my reason” Vincent Van Gogh

Innocence is like angeldom
But it was destroyed when fulfilling
The cosmos concept, as it was walking, half dead,
In and out of discontented lives.

It is only when one is dying
When drowning with no hope of survival
That one discovers the worst secrets of the sea
And why he should not have dared to swim.

But once wet always wet
Even if the sun will dry away the fact
The feeling is still embedded within the soul.

Oh walk away, Oh walk away
Never trade your life to the mercies of the cosmos
I hope you find peace in solitude
And heal the unforgivable deeds.

I no longer hold my breath
For life is more like a jungle
Where the mind is lost in adventures
Too deep to ignore.

killing the rat

2007-05-25T14:23:00.000+03:00

Last month I wrote a poem a rat, this is sadly part II

When I killed the rat,
It was not because I feared plague
Or dirt per se.
It reminded me so much
Of my loneliness…

The tiny rat left home alone
During the day as I go to work
It, falling asleep
On my utensils never used in months
Chewing on the newspapers never read
The ferocity of it all
A continuous drudge with no cause
Sniffing at the walls, my shoes, my pants…

How could I be this bored,
Like a rat waiting for destiny to dictate its future?
It reminded me so much of me,
Never wanting to leave no matter what I did.

I killed the rat, not knowing what else to do.
I just could not bear to live with another image
Tearing away through life,
Plagued,
Gray and dirty
Chewing through my junk
Looking for life.

come to me

2007-05-24T15:04:00.000+03:00

Come to me,

When the moon dances

On your sparkling eyes

When longing –for your beauty- Pierces my heart

Like a thousand arrows,

Come to me.

of land clashes

2007-05-14T12:41:00.000+03:00

I might be mistaken but it is quite saddening to know that in kenya, people still kill each other with bows and arrow; that communities still clash just like in the olden days and still fight over land and cattle. I suppose it could be political, the coming elections etc. but a reality check informs me that this is quite embarrasing.

I will be wasting alot of blogspace trying to get to the bottom of all these attacks, burning of houses, killings...

Land clashes has been used in Kenya as a political weapon before, it is being used now. Happy?

VISITORS OF THE NIGHT

They moved stealthily,
Through the thickets,
Like the shadows of the unknown.

They were not welcomed,
Neither accepted but they came,
Not boldly, but with covered faces,
And painted bodies.

They didn't knock,
Nor open they broke through,
That's what they liked,
It was their pleasure.

They entered like thieves,
But they never stole property,
They stole bodies;
Stripping your flesh leaving naked bones,
And dust.

They? Who were they?
They were them
Send by who was after us.
All... we don't know.

It's them that destroyed our property,
Filled our habitat with scorching fire,
It is them that left us homeless.

They were immoral to our women,
Brutal to us men,
Merciless to our children,
Heartless like cold shadows.

They abandoned us,
We saw no hope
For the future.

They went into the night,
As they had come from the night,
After a night of terror.
It is them the unknown
Them, the visitors of the night.

memento

2007-05-12T08:49:00.000+03:00

You left a scar, in my heart,

Hard to conceal.

Though I feel saddened by this retribute

I know to self-console more calmly

For the hysteria of love

Beckons greater hearts

Which lay concealed within the catacombs

Of this mysterious creation…

We call it life

I call you my love

A deeper mystery best described

By the setting sun, the breezing wind.

You knew, then, how I felt

More than this, with greater emotion

Fatal to simple hearts;

For we explored wider expanses

And fulfilled our wildest dreams

Whichever way we could,

Always.

in the waiting bay

2007-05-02T10:33:00.000+03:00

In the waiting bay
I was already waiting
Even afore I arrived.
It was already late
Even afore it arrived,
Missing me
Me missing it
Each of us departing
Before reaching the final destination...
Not waiting and not leaving,
Never there.
It was just a hiccup,
I learned to forget

the first time...

2007-04-29T08:59:00.000+03:00

Whenever I see something new and awesome, a poem is born.

When I flew to Mwanza
The first time,
I fell in love with it...
But I found someone already kissing it passionately
Stuck together
Like a rock
Stuck together in eternity.
Who could ever hide this secret,
So monstrous by the bank of Lake Victoria,
Under the shadows of the sunset?

after the war

2007-04-25T14:00:00.000+03:00

After the war –desolation
Our bodies are hacked
We dispossess different forms
Some lack a hand

A leg

Both limbs

Never could we say our last prayers
We lacked our heads
Hacked
A gaping hole
The soul escapes.

the end

2007-04-11T09:08:00.000+03:00

by dawn I will be gone
to the other place;
where I’d rather be alone
in a lonely house of worms
where I will be gone by dawn
to the other place...

a rat

2007-04-04T16:06:00.000+03:00

I woke up with feelings of emptiness
Yet I had company…
There was a rat in my house.

There is a lone rat in every heart
Scavenging off the leftovers
The broken pieces too hard to forget
Too embarrassing to show off
Too pungent to ignore.

I am a rat,
Always looking for a place to hide
Always looking for something valuable to gnaw at
Fill with holes all beauty
All mementos.

I am a rat, lost and dirty
Cobwebs, dust and junk fills my abode
What is my worth if only what I attract
Is rats to my house?
What is my worth
if I have lost My will to fight
off obscurity, the silent death I cannot evade?

Deep inside, you are a rat too
A toothed rodent with no destiny.

always beautiful, never lonely

2007-04-03T10:03:00.000+03:00

Lifting up,
In the pit of my stomach
Scared,
I died.
Then I thought of god and endings
Wondering if ever I will come back down, alive.

Behold such beauty
The clouds lined up
Like wildebeest migrating
Through the savanna
And the Kilimanjaro, the lone king
Ruling over the world
Silver crowned just as I
Saw it, earlier on Google Earth!

When flying at night
I saw stars below
In cities
And the moon was like the sun
So bright.

The ocean of clouds
Took another meaning
Moving in bits
But always moving, together. Serenity.

Clouds are always beautiful
And they will never be lonely.
The Indian Ocean was so calm, from above
With different shades of blue.
Funny though, that when boarding the plane
I thought of death as the final impact
Funny though that when in the sky
I thought of me a cloud
Light as a feather

Never lonely,

Always beautiful…

love like no other

2007-03-29T14:44:00.000+03:00

It was like my heart never
Did once break;
When I heard that smothered voice
As enchanting as Kilimanjaro.

It was like I never vowed
Never to fall for another her
Or to perpetually abscond
Another love of my life as solitude.

Life seems so innocent
Like china never shattered
Everything as perfect.

It was like I would never regret,
Once I was so smitten
It was like I would be in love, forever,
With her.
That we would share it all
Till the end…

It was just the beginning
Of fate
The same heartbreak
Though more tremendous
So much like ground zero.

losing my creativity

2007-03-28T16:50:00.000+03:00

I have lost my creativity in haste
Through the whirlwinds of life
While I grasped other lesser aspects like hate
Letting art plunge into rife
To find new masters of waste.

Just like I,
Art has gathered dust
And turned brownly shriveled
Undiscovered unmatched
Yet useless when ignored
Or when as it lacked inquisitive minds
For emotional adventure.

But it was not altogether lax
Sometimes it was taut and snapped
Letting the floodgates open
Roaring at the mercy of spontaneous minds
-Fatalistic people like I
Who manipulated it
Once created a perception as better
As its own form
Or otherwise more or less complicatedly sweet,
Like the mountain in my heart
And the ocean in your eyes.

poets, whores, creativity and drunks

2007-03-24T11:05:00.000+03:00

Readers of poetry have always failed to distinguish the poem from the poet, the persona from the writer. Forget about the poet, look for the persona

Poets, whores creativity and drunks

Us drunk poets
Are like whores of thought
Our own words defile us
Leaving us wasted and in ruins.

It is the alcohol that keeps the noose
From tightening.
Letting us linger between life and death
Until the next sober moment and overwhelment.

Why do I seek solitude
Yet write about heartbreak and melancholy?
Ask this poet why he plays god
To the words he writes.

What really attracts us to whores?
Is it their shocking beauty
And a figure that puts your wife to shame?

People might not know
But alcohol saved me many times from the real death.
Though it kills me everyday;
It’s better than being dead
Being rotten and nothing.

Are you scared now?
You used to love my poems
Do I shock you now?

Lately I have been reading s**t poems
From s**t poets who compose obsenities and explicit adults only poems full of f**k.
They write that I am a s**tty poet too,
That I rant on and on about heart break and solitude.
It is not art, he says.

They just want to be different
To sound different from the love lorn poets
Avoiding the pitfalls of insanity

Yesterday I overdrunk again,
Thinking of my lover 1,000 miles away
Is this why we never married?
Alcohol, she has always been good to me,
Though expensive and cold
And a terrible headache the next day.

And you my lone fan
Inspired always and full of adrenalin like superman
Buoyed by the magic of the poem
Inspired by the miracles in split second phrases
- I will survive!
You will take over the world some day
With your thoughts and ideas
Your dreams will someday give you the rush, life.
And I will never write another s**tty poem as this...

Poems are gods written by devils
I will always drink to quench the other thirst
I will always be wasted and out of breath
I will always compose poems creating gods.

the crave

2007-03-21T09:12:00.000+03:00

I could feel it seeing your surging lips
Scarcely dry scarcely wet
I could not prove otherwise
If you had been kissed
Between business trips and hotels.

the thuggery

2007-03-21T08:50:00.000+03:00

And my greatest fear is like all-
Heartbreak
And the other melancholy
It is not the fear of rejection
Or over submission;
But the agony of waiting for a call
For a thousand days in an hour
And her not being faithful-
A perpetual agony of another man
Kneading her chest.

And I hate it all…
The thuggery
The mere vandalism of my girl.

i needed you then

2007-03-11T11:34:00.000+03:00

To have this presence
Appeasing acknowledgement without thirst
Is strange.
But I feel nothing now
though you are still so... divine... more
It is lost feeling now.
Then, it was enchantment
Its magic was real... alive!
But it went away like all else that goes
Now I see you and feel nothing
the subconscious died on another life
On the other side of my crave
Sated by indifference...
Healed by time...
I needed you then.

my will

2007-03-10T11:53:00.000+03:00

If before my time, I die,
The day I was born, I curse;
And if more than my years, I live,
Too tired to die will I be.

To rest in peace, let me
For tired of me is my body
To where I go let me,
For to where I was destined I am.

My body I leave you,
And with loam you cover it,
Ashamed of seeing you are,
The body I left you.

My body I have been denied,
Left to wander in the unknown;
If buying it back I could,
More than willing will I be.

Now that we are asunder
To the worms I leave you,
Let them feast on you,
Because I too feasted you,
On what I swallowed.

I go for I came,
Because everything that comes, must
As some things go and
Never return,
Never expect me back!..

great poets are blogging out there!

2007-03-04T13:08:00.000+03:00

Today I am quite excited and almost breaking out of my shell; though I won't.
I was just browsing poetry on the web and other blogs of note when I suddenly stumbled upon alcoholic poet's sad poems. Alcoholic poet can trully write amazing poetry, though terribly painful and full of melancholy and then some. Life's anguish can fuel our creativity to the point of being called a genius, but what good will it do? It all ends in despair ultimately. Life is full of grief. Nothing is true in this world, a heart breaks 1000 times in a life time, nothing is true in this world; only poetry and nature.
Dear Softer Maniac (alcoholic poet) never stop writing that stuff, maybe its the substance of your being ...I guess.

1. IN LOVE AGAIN

The thunderbolt hits me
Again
The pain is like
A needle stuck in my heart;
This feeling is not new.

And I am more stupid now
Withal the hard experience of the past
And now this stunning beauty
With a soft face
Has yanked my heart
From its veins and arteries
Because I am in love again,
And will lose this game.

2. MY HEART IS A CENTURY OLD CASTLE

My heart is a century old castle
Lost in ruins.
She squeezes in; entangled
In the webs of my old feelings.
I dirty her with my dust … her dust
Which she came with in her castle.
Are two castles worth a mansion or a ruin?
The webs will tell… the dust will tell…

3. NEVER MEANT TO BE

It was never meant to be
On land or in water
On a thousand seas of death
And the water
Killing me with its chilly cold
Of a life
Never meant to be.

4. THE HEART BREAK?

Will it be the same, the heart break,
The smitten eyes
The love of your life?
It is lost feeling now,
As always.
All will end like then.

what is art?

2007-03-03T11:20:00.000+03:00

The other day I came across this post carolina to kenya which had a comment that "it's my hope that lots of you will encourage Poet Mutiso to continue blogging poetry on a regular basis."

People, I am really touched that I can be missed and that though I live in solitude, someone actually enjoys reading my stuff. Interestingly most of us bloggers have day jobs; most do 9 to 5 but I do 7 to 7 most of the time. Mostly I only get to blog once or twice per week. Due to the realisation that this blog is important to me and my readers, I will try to poetry blog more...

What is art, if the creator
Can so skillfully insert a worm
To eat up a work of art
So skillfully made,
So delicately sacrificed to creativity
And love to the soul?

Am I an artist?

a dry season in literature

2007-02-28T17:32:00.000+03:00

East African Literary Icons are so full of Literary Rhetoric that it maddens me. They have perpetuated a bland arguements since the seventies. Those guys wrote classics even before I was born, but hey, what did they write after the Big Thing? You write a novel in the late sixties and it receives rave reviews and critical acclaim for more than 3o years just because no one seems to have written a good novel or poetry ever since the eighties.
Some say they will only write in their mother tongues while others say East Africa is a literary desert.
I say they are the ones drying up our land like drought, eating away at our Savanna!
Maybe we put them so high and forgot about the upcoming writers who are still struggling in the rat race.

ONE DRY SEASON TOO LONG

One long dry season
Heralds my loss
My wasted years
Hung
On a pitiful wall
Marked with faded chalk
Shredded and inconstant
A distortion.

Drunken by self knowledge
I feel entombed
The picket fences
Bruises my tattered conscience.

Brideless I plead for tolerance
From a lustful world
Encroaching on my sustenance
Drying the source
Upon this mountain
Killing the valley below
With thirst.

Hopeless, I plead for mercy
Because one dry season too long
Has starved the land.

MOURN, THE AFFECTIONATE LOVER

2007-02-25T12:50:00.000+03:00

Stillness seizes upon me
It is time to weep for beauties lost,
Of favorite laughter.
Pain and anguish
Sets upon the body and soul.
Weep for the shattered promises
Of fondness gone unremembered
Weep bitterly for the lover that is gone
And for my heart in losing her
Mourn, the affectionate lover
This heart does not cease to break!
The full moon drizzles
Upon her masked face
That lovely beauty lost to me
I feel only the craving of my being.
I am debased and out of place
I wander and wander about the land
Knowing not which way I should go.

when you left

2007-02-25T11:52:00.000+03:00

When you left,
It was like I lost
A part of this world,
A chunk truncated into infinity.

The waves tiding by the sea
Is loneliness,
Without action of sunbathers and surfers
Towards its end.

It could have been romantic
Coast to coast
If only humanity entered
The precincts of the waves

When you left,
An emptiness I cannot comprehend engulfed…
Yet you were a nothing
Just a speck of dust in a sandstorm
Sweeping Kalahari with a gale of hell.
But I was swept with it all.
Something so small
Has such massiveness
I cannot comprehend yet.

loneliness beyond...

2007-02-04T17:04:00.000+03:00

My dream,
The greatest in the world;
My hope,
Could be the least;
My wish,
To attain a dream.

A poet am not,
I just do but mix words, phrases
And make them rhyme
A few sprinkles of imagination
I do add,

“A frowning cloud that cries
evoking the electric eyes
of thunder god”

My heart cries for you
To read this poem, Again and again
Though it has no rhyme...

my quotes...

2007-01-31T17:32:00.000+03:00

"There are no secrets in this world, only stories"

loves weary might

2007-01-30T13:10:00.000+03:00

I am still on retro, posting poems that I wrote when still young. This poem is one of my favs because I was inspired by dead poets of the west. Who else could write ''betwixt" on their poems if not those guys...

LOVES' WEARY MIGHT

Betwixt us is a wall
If ever there be one friendly door,
I shall come and be with you.

Betroth I do from me to you
To enable us share the inner warmth
Withal loves’ weary might shall rise.

Behold the shining stars above,
Plays upon your face, redeeming
My ecstatic feeling growing within.

girl song...

2007-01-08T14:54:00.000+03:00

This is one of those poems that when I read, gives me a hint of rhythm and a chuckle. I wrote it while in junior high... those days when we were still young and shattered nearly fading away.

MOMMA DID TELL

Momma did tell,
If with boys I play,
Kwashiorkor will I get
With a distended stomach,
And back pains.

That their cassava is heavy
With poisonous starch,
And we should not taste
For we are not of age.

Those boys are rough
They will hurt us,
And I will be sickened
By their tightened grip.

That they are wicked
And we, fragile
And them, mischievous
Withal their bad motives.

That they will take us
Into the dark forest,
But momma never told me why...

the fear of love

2006-12-17T13:26:00.000+03:00

I have felt disinclined
To pursue a beauty so marveled by all
The fatality of love
And ultimately the art of hate
Draws too much beauty to waste.

To abandon adventure – the lure of romance
To live through boring days and drudge
Is not fear.
All experience no matter how sensational
Is vain.
All life no matter how rewarding
Will be lost ultimately.

Yet to evade anguish and justified hate
Is no end to grief
To dream is nobility
And with it comes duty
Living according to nature is slavery
So much confusing is life.

FATAL ATTRACTION

2006-12-16T16:42:00.000+03:00

FATAL ATTRACTION

Nothing can be so good ever
Without one having to pay for it
Or initially destroyed what lies within it.
Beauty is as far as the eye can see
And the less it chooses not to see.

The eye is just a tool
To heighten the sensation
A diversion of higher senses;
Like the mind,
And its ability to say no
To an attractively perilous pastime.

mad like van goth

2006-12-09T17:18:00.002+03:00

GOD WAS MAD LIKE VAN GOTH

God, protect me and my madness
And I will revere, I still do, your smartness
Forget ethics, forget me
Remember ‘fatalism’?
The lectures you and I loved from philosophy class?
Fatalism and haughty irascibleness
In our university days!
Academic toils that were unfruitful
-Joblessly speaking.
And now I marvel at you
Lacking a congregation –being jobless
Like any other Kenyan
But we still tarmac, you and I,
With worn out shoes
And beg from relatives
And idle within homesteads –
Who is your relative anyways?
Is it Jesus Christ
The son of man betrayed by Judas,
Or Gabriel –the guy you called upon
To deliver a message of a son, born?
Why did you sacrifice Jesus
To heartless men you created?
You better had used creativity
To amuse yourself and posterity
Than delve on a fatality
That loses itself in time.
You have aged like I,
I have regrets you have yours
Now let us wait for your sun to rise
But mine I have not yet created
Call me superstitious
But I will say
You plunged within your own creation,
Like Vincent van Goth

the last poet on earth

2006-11-16T17:30:00.000+03:00

Blogging poetry and a few commentaries on world issues has always given me the rush.

But as life goes on it gets bussier, and our day job becomes more demanding, promotions, responsibilities that engulf us to oblivion. What I mean is that I will blog less and less. The time is not there anymore. I will make sure, though, to make a post every week at least. Or I could be lucky.

THE LAST POET

I have used wisdom hence
But when the hour comes,
To sink into the dust
To blow with the wind,
I will respond.

And a child lays down dying
Somewhere of famine
With the fire of life
Ebbing off his glassy eyes
An artist yet to grow
The dead artist before he blooms.

...Still the art of life is alive
In the fluttering butterflies
In the thudding rain across the hills
On my eyes and what I see
The art of creation
Where life is a continuation.

There will be no last poet
Until the last man walketh upon this Earth
Versing muses of how the world
Has been laid waste
And an ode to the souls
Emerging from the cracks
Of bare Earth.

letter from Iraq

2006-11-11T16:32:00.000+03:00

When the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq, and eject Saddam H. from his dictatorial grip to power, it is like he inserted his nose in a heap of camel dung. Historically Iraq has been known as a hornets nest which even George Bush senior could not attempt to stir; during the 'Desert Storm' operation that repelled Saddam H. forces who attacked Kuwait. They could only go so far. The underlying simple reason was that, if he topples Saddam, Iraq will disintegrate and remain divided for a long time. It was believed that though Saddam was a dictator, he was the only one who could Keep Iraqi's together; through fear of course.

Currently GWB is not fighting the former elite guards of Saddam Hussein, instead both the US Army and the Iraqi police are actually being confronted by a disoriented people. The Shiites who feel that their time for payback is here. The Sunnis being put on the defensive and being given the load 'Saddams sins' to carry, makes matters even worse. The Kurds, all they want is their own state. And now the Americans!
It all boils down to a continuous conflict of blood and terror whether Saddam is hanged or not.

"I am not a supporter
of Americanism,
I am more or less attracted to its perils"

Why Saddam should not be hanged, yet

After the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam from power, the best strategy now is to find a way of reconciling the Iraqi's. One of the ways to do so is not to hang Saddam. History has taught us that when two major groups of people in one country , live in animosity because one group commited crimes against humanity to the other, the best solution is to strive for repentance to the harmed and forgiveness. This is not a good time to hang Saddam because the psychological idea currently is that it is another way of punishing the Sunni Arabs. It has been erroneously taped in the minds of the Iraqis that any ruling against Saddam is seen as a ruling against the Sunnis.
Any war, no matter how noble, destroys more than creates; and though it might have honor, it also has an underlying moral dishonor.
Maybe that is why we need a different ideology in the US altogether, to foresee this healing.

The possible 'solution'

I believe that the way forward in the Iraqi conflict is reconciliation the South African way , there is no other peaceful way out. This is a situation where a tooth for a tooth will lead to much bleeding for tens of years.

A neutral party should be brought in, possibly the United Nations, who should mediate this healing between the Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds and also to include the foreign invaders.

Conclusion

Saddam as a person deserves any punishment he gets if only to pay for his ruthless and murderous deeds, but this is not a good time to hung him. The Americans achieved their goal of ejecting Saddam three years ago. It is now time for them to let the Iraqi people and the world's community to take over from here; especially to curtail this perpetual grave scenario of bullets, bombs and blood.

Comments are welcome :)

HOPING TO SURVIVE

I am hoping to survive
To see the world clean
For I live a time
Of population and pollution.

I am hoping to survive
Great bombs and nuclear weapons
That shall burst my eyes
Engulfing every inch of the world.

I am hoping to survive
This war of man to man
That shell lead to extinction
Of all living things.

I am hoping to survive
Many catastrophes in nature
'Cause I inherited life
From natures own mercy.

I am hoping to survive
Great tribulations of man
Those that we see come and go
Before I finally reach my destination.

the grief of writing

2006-11-08T10:06:00.000+03:00

When the pen fails to glean
The contents of my mind
It does not portray emptiness
But a clog of thoughts
And ideas waiting to erupt
On virgin plain papers
With no thin red line.

The power of creativity is no end to grief
It just dissembles passions
With no abode;
The writer is still left restless
Unsure of the myriad of meanings
It will portray.

if my heart is wood

2006-11-04T15:20:00.000+03:00

ANGUSTIA

Into the darkness that I waded through,
Suffocating and deep like a trough
Of sorrow and grief;
Oh, you would not believe.

You have heard my screams
From beyond the concrete jungle
A soft man used to a breeze
Unhurt but shattered and died
Twice over afore this
Like a thousand deaths of a coward.

Within my heart I break
Never to withstand the gale of a heartache
And another pain will find me dead
For my soul is still vacant
And I do not own my faith.

It is of no importance
If my heart is wood,
If my heart is stone;
It was made to shatter,
No matter how it breaks!

halloween and the shadowwe

2006-10-29T10:47:00.000+03:00

I hear that in the States it will be Halloween or something related to death or the undead.
It reminds me of one of the most compelling novels I have ever read; HAWKSMOOR by novelist and poet Peter Ackroyd. It is written in the style I have used in the poem below. I have read hundreds of novels but this one was the most enthrallingly scary novel I ever read. It is based on the 1800's when great architecture was used to build churches using cemetaries as the foundation. The shadowwe is deeppe...
Ackroyds approach in weaving the story line is damn creative.
*( I am in no way advertising the book, I guess it is out of print or something...)

AGONIE AS THEN

I feare the way the shadowwe forms,
Darting and deeppe,
Against the tonguing flames.

Betwixt me and the shadowwe
Is a ghoste
That calls unto me
Calls unto me
Like a zombie I responde
To the beckonne that pulls me
Into the shadowwe that I feare.

Pain is deep
As love is deep
But the agony of death
Shakes my frame to root
And I cannot say no
I cannot say no!

My agonie shatters thee
And I am lost in the emptinesse
Of eternitie.

now that she is gone...

2006-10-23T15:35:00.001+03:00

I AM AT PEACE NOW OR SO IT SEEMS

Nothing has ever been so attractive
As she, more divine than the sunset;
Numbing beauty making one have no use
For roses and waterfalls-
If only she be
Here instead and replace

The rainbow. I have been
To the highs and lows
Of a greater sensation
As this; and I have felt fulfilled if
Only for a moment in eternity. Now

That she is gone, beauty
Has risen into things; their unknown
Marvels rediscovered. The hills and valleys make
More sense to me now, in my
Converse I no longer
Stutter or forget my name. Now
That she is gone, I have learned to adore
The birds and my discovery –nature
Is a trail of the beauty of life.
I am at peace now, or so
It seems.

the greatest lie ever told

2006-10-16T15:18:00.000+03:00

One of the greatest lie ever told is that green house emissions are not related to global warming; and if so the green house effect is too small to elicit debate.

Some scientists have even been paid to come up with theories to refute very concrete facts regarding the ozone layer, global warming and … the fury of mother earth defiled… a kiloton worth of a hurricane x2. Please people, the world’s climate is changing due to human factors.

One of these countries and a big economy as such, has refused to recognize the Kyoto Protocol. The point is that the world’s temperature has increased by around 1°C. That is enough to bring devastating changes on Earths climatic conditions. What more proof do you people want: - Africa is experiencing unprecedented longer periods of drought followed by short heavy rains. The North Pole is melting! No wait, the hurricanes will come stronger than ever, let’s see if you will build a Great Wall of China to stop it; because you cannot stop it can you? Snow falling 6 inches, still wondering why it is happening today after more than 150 years? Ask the governments which continue to protect industries that pollute our environment with impunity for the sake of more profits.

Payback time is around the corner and it will cost these governments five times of what they are protecting now, communities will be lost, big cities will disappear, and the world will fill up with more water. The time for Kyoto is now. Let us act now in order to save the deterioration of the climatic conditions on this crazy Earth; it has already hit us on the face, wake up. Does anybody care?

THE EASTERN PROVINCE

In this land I have seen life
And abundance rejuvenated.
In natures fancy sweep
Whatever was hitherto flaccid and lowly
Could truly fly.

In the perpetual circle of life
Comes abundance and comes want

In this land, I have seen want
Like dry shrubs once green
And the gray grass simmering under scorching rays
The dust filled my eyes
And the hot air, I could hardly breathe.

The land across the hills once unseen
Covered by mead, marshy and forested
Now stripped bare
The hidden soul of the land
Exposed by the harsh dry sun.

What is exposed across the hills is famine
What is covered yond is lure
Though we live it
We might never know.

No poem today?

2006-10-11T10:27:00.000+03:00

Hi all. I am in the process of integrating visuals in the poems I post to make it more in sync with the thoughts or images passing our fancy as we read the poems. I had overlooked putting photos or drawings because I thought that I will only post three poems. Most bloggers started blogging as a joke but many posts later you realize that you have a serious audience; specially the silent readers who pass by, read a poem, and move on. I have also received requests from magazine editors in a couple of countries who want to use my poems. All these necessitate me to update. It will take me a while plus a warning letter from my boss but it is worth it.

No poem today? Hmmm... You tell me.

Dancing Poems

2006-10-06T12:09:00.000+03:00

While writing the poems below, I felt like they were dancing. I got this dancing feeling of freedom of some sort.

AN ENTICER

Time flies by

She talks with the voice
Of Ondeiek-ti-achiem bird
Drifting slowly as a leaf
To the ground
Like a playful child I jump to it
Catching the words with the fingers
Of my ear -sweet rain -
As I rejoice with my heart softly.

Time flies by

Grabbing my heart within it
To far lands;
Beneath the valleyed plains,
Above the rugged highlands
Landing on the sand dunes
For a costless flirt
A love consumed in Sahara.

Time flies by.

*

Come to me,

When the moon dances
On your sparkling eyes
When longing –for your beauty- Pierces my heart
Like a thousand arrows,

Come to me.

*

Once he tasted this honey pot
And tasted, tasted; tasted and tasted
Now he has tasted the hundredth time
Yet he feels he must taste again.

*

My butterfly
Let us sit by the riverside
Then give me your ear
Let me whisper to you
The lifecycle of
A drop of love
Let me hum to you
The lullaby of love.

*

were you dying?

2006-10-01T10:40:00.000+03:00

WHEN I SAW YOU AGAIN, WERE YOU DYING?

When I saw you again
Many many months later
It was like I shot myself
, again,
On the foot
No more old scars
Many fresh wounds
And the fight to the death.

When I saw you again
Your eyes, my eyes
Were a melting pot
The background noises of civilization
Were silent for a while
Waiting for us to break the lie
But it could not break.

The noose was tightening
I could not breathe
My eyeball whitened out popping
My dangling feet jerking
Like a dancing football player
Yet she was there dying.

When I saw you again
And looked into your shifty eyes
I knew the war was over
That alone meant that I had lost the war.

Even as I fired words to you
Prodded you with shots of queries
You said we shall not talk now
Thus my defeat.

When I saw you again
Everything had changed
Life was drained off it all
The fake greeting, the photocopied smile, the truncated laughter…
When I saw you again,
Were you dying?