Recreating Villages

The inner-city facets

These street lights, I doubt they shine too street enough

And those hips too, I doubt they sway too intelligently enough, for my liking

And I was told, the rest you forget, but lust you can’t

And there’s none left

Then tomorrow, it’s just another some few hours away

And I will spend it with a doobie between my lips, like a pulp science fiction of cigars,

As I scroll through Twitter timelines and Einstein’s space-times

Talking to strangers, and falling for some and writing for some

When it rains here, my future wife doesn’t dream about me

But before she sleeps, she plays my favorite song

And dances among infinite Sun Ra’s galaxies

Then with the morning, comes coffee and androids

It’s again back to the future

Market places for a cigarette smoke,

Psychedelic trips with a flat brain and nobody spoke

And then I watched my older brother lull his little daughter to sleep

And the woman of my dreams never dreamt of me

But she played a broken record,

Skipping where my favorite song played

Distant in-betweens

When I was young, my Mother carried me on her back

As everybody ran to the chief’s camp the evening when Tharaka men attacked

And the stars had started to appear, Venus, unoccupied as she was

I can still remember my mother’s smell that night

And she didn’t smell of flowers and loneliness like people had imagined of her

But of chapati and warmth that only mothers like her have

Primordial soups and gulps

My hands are full of things

Things that have intentions and meanings

And sometimes, Madlib plays between some of them

While some of the other things smoke Congo and Malawi Gold strains and nurse heartbreaks

And some never dream, because here, on my hands, dreams draw the insanity within

And right here is where cats like Johnny got their souls took, among these Dandora dumpsites on my hands

The traces of my palms reflects things that I can’t call mine

Where my soul smiles so beautifully at her own world

That has no space for me and my hands which are full of things

So the sunshine can’t be felt there

And everybody loves the sunshine

And boobs — like good music, and good music and other things

Finer things

My hands have finer things, like lacy fantasies and liner notes

Lips like freedom and play a little moog for me

Twisted like it should be

I’m just a soul, I suppose

….and other things that my hands are full of

Jimmy’s vinyl shop

Nairobi women, with the their cute vagina lips,

Sells me their moans for a fee, as they shoot for my heart

They isolate me from all human gestures with twinkles on their eyebrows

I only came here for the bass-lines as thighs

And, wildly, snares as areolas

Then my fingers got caught up in their pubic hairs before I had time to smell them

To smell their muskiness

To smell their powers

For everything their sexuality is worth

I only came here for the bass-lines and boobs

Then mapped my way through strangers’ facial lines,

Memory prints of my childhood and Tumblr porn

Carrying earth on my feet and saying stuff

Sometimes I wish I was a flirty cyborg

Working at Jimmy’s vinyl shop in Kenyatta Market

And when horns aren’t blaring, I’m reading a chapter of Ngugi wa Thiong’o

And pausing to re-imagine Kenyatta and Moi regimes and bass-lines and boobs

From the media tomorrow morning

My thoughts of you, learned about crowd control in Gestapo

Before the rose petals from the unknowingly future tears of the cheating lovers covered the remains of your memories that floated soullessly in Seine

My love for you, is the damp between your legs

And these Algerian walls and roofs that you hold so dearly,

As they leak of gun wounds and the intellects underlining Camus’ sentences with the breath cadences of their imaginations

We are the lovers that love loves to forget

When we dream of how home is supposed to be,

Wipe the dust off el-Kadel’s hut

Tell his mother to hug the treaties and hope, and hope that with time,

The blood that will water the shadows of the sand clouds won’t be hers

It’s like science, where the soldiers set foot never grew grass

But fly whisks and bodies that never had a chance of floating in Seine

And then we had our last first kiss, covered in hashish smoke and rebirth and death

Then loneliness and death

Then us

We had us

We had ourselves to mourn us

And cannons and Lalla Fadhma

Coconut oil euthanasia

I’m not a member of the beard gang

It’s just that my father died before he had taught me how to shave

And he never taught me how to climb totem poles either

Or how to dust off the vinyl off its perks

Daylight won’t find me on my mother’s bed

Wondering what my sisters hid about the girls whose innocence wore ski masks

And how the Internet would later teach them

About how they should respond to the catcallers when feminism became mainstream

It’s freedom, I presume

I said goodbye to my mother’s home this morning

The 7 am village bus nearly left me

As I was wondering why my beard still smelled of my ex girlfriend’s coconut oil

Is it because here is where I first dreamt of her?

Sext: Mlolongo and thunders

When you were young

Your mother’s lover came home late night

And they talked in whispers, about Mlolongo and thunders

And the children, millennial at their disposal

Carried names that would evoke 1963 like it was a mistake that it was

The children then became us before the future was mature enough to handle its troubles

“Let’s pimp our government to her nagging leaders”, the online radio announced one trolly evening

And let’s digitalize pussy for the future’s future reference

Let’s tell the minority stories through rebels, women with shotgun thumbs,

Carrying on their away-from-the-society backs protesting tweets and tears

And still, black lives have always mattered here,

When they hoist bodies in flag posts for jubilation

It’s another national holiday, tomorrow

And I think I will write to your sister, a sext, and her coffee shop revolutionary friends:

“sext: sometimes, it’s like the spaces that we create aren’t too empty enough to accommodate us, and our beliefs and fears.”

And she will hug the system like there’s nothing left

And touch her swelling belly, to reaffirm what’s left out of her Mlolongo and thunders womb

Before she drains the last drop, she will look out of the window and wonder…

Tea for pyros

There’s no enough tea for the strangers in the State House

The president said it’s because his wife, with natural hair, is having terrible cramps

Then he stirs his tea and suddenly stops…

It seems, he still has the Hague nightmares

But then again, his voters’ prayers seems to have worked

Doormats

My grandmother, whose teeth are almost gone, told me the last time I gave her 50 Kenyan shillings for half a kilo of rice

That the day I was born, my nose was shy like it was scared of the day my mother lost her virginity

She told me that my mother never let go of me

And she breastfed me until there was nothing left but air

And she thinks that’s why my mother’s womb went home

Rebirth

Her smile, reminded me of my mother’s vagina

And I sketched my emotions around it, like I’m being born off it

Then we talked about Show & A.G in ‘95

And when I left for home, I could only think of my mother’s womb

T�lX��WwI�s