Nairobi 2012, Something Medieval

Africa. A beautiful continent in continuous chaos. International media houses brand it as a place of fluctuating horror. Tourism agencies sell our land and wildlife and sunrises and sunsets to rich folk who come to the Dark Continent in search of exotic holidays and escapism. Their two week holidays in the world that is our lives. I love Africa. She’s my home. But I hate elements of her. The truth remains that she is a beautiful beast who will charm you one moment and drink your blood the next. Sometimes harsh truths need to be told, especially in hard times. Every once in a while we need to shed light on the darkness to see what demons lurk there so we can work on exorcising them.

Nairobi, 2012
The interiors of our cities and towns are crusted with an almost post apocalyptic inferior infrastructure. When it rains, the sky drops on our heads. Fallen trees lie on roads like accidents waiting to happen, exploding transformers, no electricity, anarchic road traffic, no traffic lights, no water drainage systems, substandard road lighting, potholes so deep that you’d think they’re the tunnelled gateways to Hades. People abusing each other, cutting each other off, scratching cars. All civility washes away in a Mad Max world. What you don’t realize is that you’re not in traffic, you are the traffic. The rain will always fall and the people will always swear. Tempers will rise like the waters.

Nairobi doesn’t look like a Camp Mulla video. No, she doesn’t.

The sewers overflow and the gutters are ripped open as thick amalgamations of human waste float by into stagnant swamps where disease breeds. The rivers are clogged with paper and plastic and other toxins and people drink from and bathe in these rivers and I don’t understand why LifeStraws are not handed out in bigger capacity. Complete chaos circulates our cities. Flash floods take lives. Road accidents take more lives. We can sit in our homes and cars and romanticize or criticize the rain but we haven’t lost anything but time. Think about the homeless, think about the slum dwellers, think about those who lose their entire livelihoods because our government cannot create or maintain a stronger architectural infrastructure to support them. We must be thankful that we don’t have earthquakes or other major natural disasters in Kenya. We simply wouldn’t be able to cope. The natural disasters we do have are called politicians. Wake up government, wake the fuck up. Our people are dying. They’re suffering and they’re drowning in rain and the absence of hope.

Governmental agencies privy to the drug trade in our air and shipping ports turn blind eyes. They all get a hefty cut from the profitability of addiction.
There are more bars than schools.
More brothels than universities..
More casinos than jobs…
Our coastline is riddled by pirates seeking treasure or blood. Our animals poached for ivory and meat sold in the far lands of Asia. Our air polluted by hundreds of thousands of substandard vehicles which are not roadworthy. Our borders let in millions of refugees. How can we walk if we cannot stand? Homeless women get raped by horny, drunk men. They’re left pregnant and helpless on the streets forced into committing prenatal murders. Our prisons are overcrowded. Fifty lie where five should. Our health care professionals strike in the streets for better wages and equipment as people lay dying in their hospital beds. Hospitals should not be graveyards for hope. Jobs are rare as the economy breaks. The most powerful currency is bribery as corruption clogs the pipelines of progress. We, the masses, kept dumb and uneducated so we can vote for fools based on our tribes instead of fundamental humanist values. Millions of shillings meant for education systems disappear into the pockets and stomachs of fat politicians. Initiatives by powerful people that rally support from the individuals of this country are soured by stories that the grain is contaminated. Surreptitious deals are finalized in ornate hotels by politicians in expensive suits. Deals between devils that will cost us the soul of Kenya.
We don’t ask any questions.
Presidents come and go, people stay.
We never ask any questions.

Formerly communist Chinese capitalists bringing about an air of neo-colonization. We got railroads from the British, we’re getting roads from the Chinese. We pay with our independence.

Our police force brutally beat up innocent people and humiliate them in front of their neighbours and children. We watch on television. Askaris beat street kids with whips while police beat them with rungus and threaten castration. We watch in real life. Our police people never forget to ask for bribes. A cultural phenomenon. On the other end of the spectrum, our police officers have no cars to get to scenes of crime. And if they have the cars, they have no money for fuel. Our policemen are underpaid to put their lives on the line for us. They’re relegated to tiny government apartments which house five families where one should live. How can we ask them to protect a country that doesn’t care about them or their families? Would you?

It’s hard to believe that this is Nairobi, 2012 when the all the desolateness and dilapidation mentioned above screams of something medieval. How can we plan for Vision 2030 if we can’t take care of Nairobi 2012?

Would you confront a hungry, frustrated, underpaid cop wielding a Kalashnikov? No? I once did when he hit a little street child in front of me. He sneered and said “Silly Indian boy” in Kiswahili and walked away. Some protector of the law, ey? Beating on a child. Over the past year, I’ve sat with beggars in town on dark nights and talked to them about ways in which they can change their lives. I’ve bought them food, given them small amounts of money and large amounts of good intentioned advice. I’ve met twelve year olds addicted to sniffing glue and committing thievery and it breaks my callous little heart when they won’t listen to the words I say because they’re too used to living in a certain way. Or because I come from a different background. I’ve spoken to destitute prostitutes, one of which actually broke down in tears and told me about her three year old daughter and the abandonment of her husband that led her onto the street corners. These are our people, not just people of that characterize and populate the dark parts of our streets. Not just people who are there for you to ignore. If we don’t extend our hands to help them, they’ll just become marginalized parts of the grey walls.

I only mention these things because in the past I’ve been accused of commentating instead of providing solutions. And a big part of the solution is to keep trying to change things in the small ways you can, whether that entails talking to a street kid, donating to charity, visiting the slums, educating yourself to the way other people live, challenging the government by means of civil disobedience and open dialogue, telling stories, using art and creativity or something as small a thing as not hooting or swearing at someone in traffic. Unless they’re stupid and deserve it. Because, trust me, there’s an astonishing amount of infuriatingly stupid, inconsiderate people out there in this world of ours.

I don’t have much of an intellect but I have an abundance of passion.
I don’t have much money but I can spend time. So should you.

The City that Once Caught the Night

Nairobi roads get darker as the sun burns the blue sky black and I walk the streets as thousands of faces just orbit around the planet of my head like furious, expressive little moons. The gravity of a bench pulls me into it and I sit and watch the suits and the dresses with their briefcases and purses and their shiny boots and sharp heels go in and out of the gluttonous office buildings. Hetro, metro, trans, sapio and homosexuals filling up the suits and dresses that cover up tattoos and needle marks. They just keep climbing corporate ladders and jumping off with the parachutes of their umbrellas. A society of strangely intellectual sociopaths swarming around the fiction of religion, politics and love.

A lone messianic poet stands on a street corner and creates a perfect pathos with her words. Her sibilant syllables come dribbling down her chin and accumulate in little puddles around her feet. Pools that she’d readily drown in if she could muster up the courage. People walking by tease her and throw trash into her open guitar case. She pays them no heed, like a flower ignores the darkness. If she wasn’t so beautiful, so talented and so humble then maybe the people passing by would be nicer to her. But people like being bad to nice things.

The sun heats the clouds from atop and the sky starts to melt and the grey starts dripping and I find myself writing in the rain and reining in the right. Water dies as life thrives. Around me, the plants keep growing and the wind keeps blowing and we’re out of pesticides and the plants just keep on growing and the wind just keeps on blowing and pretty soon there’s going to be a hurricane of aphids and they’ll destroy our plants and then we’ll suffocate.

Night falls but the city catches her. I see the predators and deviants come out, their eyes aglow with lust and their saliva dripping with addiction. I sit there looking like a murderer and just kill time, because humans actually think they’re powerful enough to kill time, as I watch the currency of sex being exchanged. Sex and sustenance will see the human race create. Sex and sustenance without culture and restrain and philosophy and respect and morals and beauty will see the human race destroy.

Night falls but Nairobi catches her. The serial shoppers come out to buy materialism we move between continents on large flat surfaces floating on the oceans. Dressed up people come out to eat things that once lived to eat so that they could eat them in turn. Put a man in the wild and the animal will eat him. Put an animal in civilization and the man will eat it. And at this moment, I’m somewhere in the middle.

In the afterglow of luminescent thoughts, my mind begins to burn and I pry myself away from the bench and find my way to my shitty little apartment.

I know She’s there.
She is.

I look into her eyes, those twin ash grey pools of melted cloud that lay under the small, delicate cliffs of her brow. There is light in her eyes, darkness in mine. The morning’s evening. Dragonfly wing tattoos on her naked shoulders and wild hair twisted into thick cables that anchor me to her. She knows what I want but she cannot give it to me. I know what she wants but I cannot give it to her. So in the bubbles of our frustration, we become the paradox with two backs. And when the bubbles burst, we live out our whole relationship in the ten second pull of a rubber band. We fall, we stand, bruised and abused.
We like.
We lust.
We love.
We live.
We mate.
We create.
We aggravate.
We instigate.
We hate.
We tempt fate.
We die but the ghost of us lingers, invoked by silly memories of first dates and little trinkets of stone and silver that contain dripping sentiment. And just like that, she flies away. Flies away on her dragonfly wings.

Her eyes always On mine always Off looking at the city that once caught the night.

The Beach

The beach is a long sandy snake that lies lethargically by the ocean. I sit on it. On the beach. Cross legged. Holding sand in my hand. Letting it fall into the other. Grains telling time. Little grains that build mirrors. Mirrors that are just clocks that tell the time in the measurement of decades. I sit here. Cross legged. Like an awkward inverted frog of sorts.

I think thoughts of changing things. I think about the past a lot. More than I should. We all do. I think that the past is still present in the past just as the future is the present in the future. This moment, this envelope, this cocoon, this force field, this time capsule of now is a repeated singularity. I sit here cross legged like an awkward inverted frog of sorts. A meditating frog on a sandy lily pad. I sit here and I understand that fascinatingly deep contemplation with an open mind and accepting that you many not like what you find, on the introspective islands, breeds understanding.  I try to think more but the tide flirts with me.

The tide flirts with me, coming closer then pulling away. My flirtatious wet muse of the ocean licking the earth with her blue tongue as she telepathically communicates with her lover, the moon. My flirtatious wet muse…the one you all abuse. Abuse with your waste and your metal and your toxins and your poison and your spears and your oil and your apathy.

The beach can be my home now. Igloos of sandy solitude can weather sound storms in silence. I hold the sand in my hand. Letting it fall into the other. Gravity makes the grains tell time. Gravity makes the grains tell time to keep moving. Time listens.
Black-green seaweed frolics in the shallow water like Cthulu’s babies ironically playing catch.
Palm trees stand in frozen, silhouetted explosions. Like the trail of a sluggish firecracker.
The rocky cliffs in the distance are patient stones of memory waiting to be thought about and thought out.
Fancy girls wearing little trinkets catch my attention. My eyes eat up their every move.
Their smiles radiate atomically.
The beach can be my home now. I have salt and sand.

The smell of the city is gone. The combined stink of people and their excrements, gone. The carbon monoxide fumes from industry and transport, gone. In its place is the liquid scent of voluminous water. Voluminous water stirring with wind and gravity, concocting its own natural mysteries.

I’m away from the stammering jack hammers hammering away. Like industrial machine guns pounding the ground. Destroying to create. The clinking of construction was unbearable. Monster machines digging at the earth to build compartmentalized buildings while I try to move out of rent controlled apartments.

I think about biology. About organic life. I think about the blood flow through blue-green veins. Circulating through the most intricate ecosystem of all. The body clock of biology, counting down with red heart beat clock ticks. I think about the egg of each pregnant belly. About the potential of each little procreation. I think about the egg of each pregnant belly while I sit there on the beach. Cross legged. And the realization that everyone’s evil dawns upon a darkened mind. I realize that even good deeds melt away when the halo drops to become a noose.

In the night sky above, the graveyard of shiny things that I often mention sparkle. Lying stars illuminating us with their dead light. Daylight is only darkness made bright.
Logical day is only one hemisphere facing the sun.
Mythological day is only the metaphysical particles of Hyperion’s will.
Night is us looking into forever.
The sand in my hand drops into the other.
Each grain meshed together forms the illusion of fluidity.
Gravity pulls time.

Time pulls away at my time on the beach.

A few words on Religion and Politics

If tomorrow you were to awake into a dystopian world where a cataclysmic governmental decree stating that all religion was to be abolished and that anyone who was caught practicing or preaching religion from the ancient books or worshipping idols would be publically chastised or put to a violent death, what would you do? Would your faith overwhelm your logic to force you into creating small secret sects to worship the Great Gods fidgeting anxiously in their pantheons awaiting your prayers? Or would you take to the streets with your oh so meaningful placards and chants in an attempt to shake the core conscience of a business minded government? Perhaps you would listen and obey the letter of the law and go cold turkey on the drug they say religion is?

On the other hand, what if you awoke once upon a dear day to hear the high priests or each religion peacefully but persistently preaching for all mankind to stop following and taking part in politics? What would you do in all your transitory wisdom? Would you listen to the reverends and gurus and imams and just quit your political principles and philosophise on problems purporting to more purposeful perspectives? Or would you rebel? Would you challenge the churches and temples and mosques to fight for your right to impose your opinions and attempt to govern the masses like money minded madmen?

What I suppose I’m trying to say is that both religion and politics breed fanaticism in pools of power play. Religion plays its card of blind faith while politics promises a blind lady justice and before we know it, it’s the blind leading the blind into the brutal arena of society where one gladiatorial political party fights another and where one religious dogma attempts to undermine another.

I’m no expert on the matter but I feel that the fundamental elements of religion and politics have become lost to many. Religion is not what you were born into. It isn’t the beliefs you were brought up with or the theology that holy books hold. Religion isn’t something you’re only meant to turn to when you’re desperate or in need or diseased and dying. It shouldn’t be about what society or community determine you should do. What it should be is the belief in following an innate feeling of oneness with a force that’s older and wiser than you. For God’s sake, it doesn’t even have to be labelled. See what I did there? No? Okay.

Politics too. The entire purpose of politics is to build an empire where society can thrive in attempting to create generations of utopianism. Politics is the villainous language of governments that places us under hypnotic spells where we become enemies out of nothingness and we’re drawn into the world of bribes and the bourgeois. We fight and kill and rape and pillage and ravage lands with war and commit genocide and burn the planet and the synonymous stench of death seeps into the breath of politics. Portly politicians provide promises aplenty in poisonous tongues and we’re coerced into listening not because we’re gullible but because we’re desperate to believe in something and that the world can be a better place. But then we get caught up in trivial arguments and the community of humanity is thrown aside for the society of community.

And we remain answerless. So these are just a few words on religion and politics. Not that contemporary applications of either deserve these many.

Of course, these are just the opinions of a humble, hopeless traveller. But until the atheists and anarchists rule supreme, let’s just be nice to each other, shall we?

Broken Dreams

The dreams of an insomniac are broken. Fragmented, like a cut up photographic film and stuck together using the glue of lucidity. The less you sleep, the more you daydream and even those daydreams quickly become either too colourful or too grand for you to believe them much. Surreal sensations and Daliesque distortions start to squeeze your mind for all the brain juice that’s in there. It’s like you’re living in a cartoon but without the added benefits of immortality like Wile E. Coyote or Sylvester the Cat have. But at least you’re not a vampire struck with insomnia. See, there’s a bright side to everything, but the vampires don’t like them much.

All of a sudden, you’re trapped in this purely pathetic pathos of your own. Time slows till still seconds stretch and you can watch them drip between the ticks on the clock like melting cheese. Then time quickens and you lose a day in the pocket of night and you have to wind up the watch again. And in those moments you realize how much clock faces like to be watched.

Then the thoughts start. First they come, one by one, politely a’knocking at the door. So you peep through the key hole of your mind and watch them knock and bang the door and curse at you and go away. Then they come in twos, the perfect salesmen to the animation of your life. Because that’s what thoughts are. Salesmen selling you their ideas. But insomniac thought-salesmen are dangerous because they sell mind-poison. And besides, you’re too tired to want to entertain them in the dome-home of your head. So you ignore them, you push them away with a quick dosage of social media or a book filled with superficial crap. But these thoughts, well they’re persistent and persistence breeds innovation and soon you have a fucking army of thought soldiers with their morbid idea-spears, set in a phalanx formation, marching to the door. And you look through that keyhole to see this avalanche of demonic, mnemonic morbidity approaching your door and the wooden beams you’ve nailed it shut with wont hold anymore and then they’ve got you enveloped in their twistedness and you’re done for. Sleep becomes naught but a dream.

As I write this, I’ve slept about ten fidgety hours out of the last ninety six. My mind is weak with work, my left eye burns like a piece of red hot coal has been stuffed in the cradle of my eye socket, and I seem to over-think everything I can get my head wrapped around.  I don’t understand it but it’s happened before for longer periods of time and it will happen again. The worst part is that I’ve been unable to write for the last month or so. I try but I burn the words in my mind before I get them down on paper or screen. Quick witted metaphors become long-winded, wordy paragraphs that scream mediocrity.

I wouldn’t wish insomnia upon anyone but I’m pretty satisfied. Want to know why? Because soon the hallucinations will begin. And that’s when the real fun starts because that’s when the ghosts of long dead imaginary friends start to come back to haunt me. And therein lies great conversation.

So goodnight, dear readers. Sleep the drugless sleep of silent minds.

The Streets of India

The Streets of India are alive with the constant cacophony of incessant sounds. Car horns, police sirens, stuttering motors, the clip clop of donkey hooves, cow moos, dogs barking, people shouting, spitting and bargaining. They all form the symphonic syllables on the silver tongue of tarmac that is the road. The noise attacks you in incredible decibles that would put the legendary Irish banshee to shame, leaving the traveller unable to focus on any one particular thing for too long. He catches fleeting glimpses of life between the buildings. A man frying little delicacies on the sidewalk. Another with matted, oiled hair pestering anyone who looks like a tourist to come into his shop always saying, “Looking is free” with a customary, painted smile stuck to his face and a sideways nod of the head. A child with a naked backside squatting over a pavement ledge, doing his business. Pedestrians dodge the cars with dances of amazing agility almost as though they’re articulating the telepathic kinetic poetry necessary to survive the street life. The smells of a thousand frying foods suffuse into the air and plan little invasions on your nostrils. There is art and music in every other shop. Wallpapers of proudly posted paintings cover the wailing walls. Various stringed instruments play dead, hanging from little hooks in the display windows. Ostentatious sarees, a thousand bangles of any colour on the spectrum, finely cut suits and an array of designer boots dress the confused mannequins in the fashion shops. Rugged Bollywood actors and beautiful, seductive Bollywood actresses shout down from advertisement billboards selling things that people don’t need.

Eastern Westernization is no match for the West. While Easternization has only gone as far as effecting industry and technology in the West, Westernization has decimated Bollywood into a culture of soft pornography and questionable fashion. And the kids, well they like to follow the trends of Bollywood.

The street itself is a melting pot of strained activity seasoned with colourful and emotive melodrama. A confused and conflicted cinema of contradictions plays in front of us. There is happiness in frowns and sadness in smiles. The ground is a carpet of thick, vermillion spit mixed up with dog and cow dung. Walking around, you can almost always catch the whiff of strong ammonia from where someone urinated recently.

In stark contrast, colourful kites sprinkle the pollution torn skies. Colourful kites anchored by smiling children with big dreams. Dreams that soar in the pollution torn skies.

Millions of substandard cars fart out exhaust fumes of carbon monoxide which envelope the cities like a large, dark phantom of pollution just waiting to suck away all the oxygen from the industrious Indians below. The screens of smog are thick enough to play a projection on. But there is no need for fantasized projections when you’ve got the zeal and entertainment of the Indian people right in front of you. Their little idiosyncrasies are what define them as a people and prove to be equally frustrating and amusing. As is normal for any culture.

Late after Lord Surya lets the sun be eaten up by the smoggy horizon, the streets begin to wind down. Beggars, cows and dogs share the dominion of the dark on the now naked streets. Neither disturbs the other as they’ve come to an understanding of their very own, a pact of solidarity in solitude between those left to fend for themselves amongst the leftovers of the day. Quick, black shadows play in the orange light of the sodium vapour lamps. The traveller can hear the elongated vowels of soft Indian songs playing somewhere in the distance, serenading every living creature to sleep. A million people’s dreams float together above the cities in a surreal fog that creates a force field protecting them from the evil of otherwise idle, dormant minds.

The streets of India inject the elixir of excitement into dull hearts. They sweat with passion and all life is respected. They are forests of static rock and moving metal that the wide eyed traveller must be careful whilst crossing for there are many dangers that lurk just beyond the periphery of the third eye. But if these dangers are breached, the traveller will uncover the greatest of little treasures for he will find himself in the incredible and indulgent streets of India.

Words

The darkness, it’s easy to find when you’re not looking for it,
this calmness of the retina not being intruded upon.
Its oppression is a relief.
Life has become stumbling by the light, simply resting in the night.

I find it hard to step backwards because we were never intended to,
otherwise evolution would have had us have eyes behind our heads.
Passionate youth soured by taught wisdom,
wisdom distilled by the cheap whiskey in my personalized shot glass.

Days just wasted watching other peoples lives,
whether it’s out the window or on the televison.
The imprint of my backside on the sofa,
proof of my dissension.

The warmth of the oven is the only warmth I’ve felt in a long time.
Windows showing me a world of motion
I’m always behind the windows,
always behind the windows, watching.

The television volume turned on way too loud
To drown out the sound of no one
Smiles, smiled for keeping face
This pretence of a smile makes my jaw hurt.

Hearing life behind the walls of my apartment,
hearing life being made behind the walls of my apartment.
Another child being constructed by the will of an evil god,
comes kicking and screaming into this world constructed by evil men.

There is hope yet,
buried under the great mountains,
somewhere in the salty teardrop oceans,
We won’t find it though because we think stone and water is ours.

Pray to the space aliens, pray to the strippers, pray to your football team.
Pray to the cows, pray to the earth, pray to the arts.
Pray to the crossed wood, the book, the fire.
Pray to the internet.

We’ve become slaves to our own futures.
This is not natural selection but industrial.
We’ve become criminals of emotion,
to survive in this professional quagmire.