Paradise lost

Staring at the blank mirror

All I see are past failures ogling

Mouths soft with muffled laughter

Lips stained from mining sadness

out of wells that swell with ghosts

dance in the gripping night heat

They twirl in frenzied motion, and glare

The way one looks on, condescendingly,

at a friend trapped in a web of his own folly,

Warned many a time,

with the sticky mess now growing arms like thick tree vines that bore into loam,

Grabbing at everything in their path,

strangling earth,

then eating the blue sky,

which now cries out red ants that pool the surface of crust and spit and air.

There’s a long-lost awareness.

Paradise is lost, a throat choking under the weight of fire

That sweeps through the gut and arrests intestine, belly and appendix

Makes a meal out of rectums that dispel tears, oh so long and painful and swollen

For I failed to prepare for the future.

What it held for me slipping in my grasp as I chased lofty ideals

Instead of working hard at what stood in front of me.

These eyes now house a dainty figure

A caricature of what could have been

A being that could have scooped respect from tulips and chrysanthemums

as they lay dotted in human minds.

Oh, the sting of lost time!

Staring out in blank space as I crawl out of my shack behind the river

That sang songs of emancipation when my infant cry pierced its lull.

Now I eat into the fog that streams out the surface

I see an old man by the river, languidly staring as he cooks meat

Barely moving his frail body in the sweltering heat

He beckons me closer, moving with an elegance that seems extraterrestrial

I near with a sadness that burns my chest

That pours out like a violent tide as he grabs me violently and hugs tight,

With a strength I could never have expected from his tiny frame.

Handing me mangoes along with a bowl of cooked beef

He speaks firmly in Pidgin

Son, you’ve married trauma

But have to give yourself space to heal

You can heal

You can heal

I still myself and respond

Old man, I’ve wandered lonely streets and eaten sun as it loomed over my head

Now all I see is the cool of night singing over me songs of death and torment

Trauma is a beast that stabbed me at the navel

Made a meal of my body and mind

Leaving me wasted beneath a sky boiling up and through in blood

Oh, that I could go back to yesterday

Oh, that I could be free again

I have known trauma

It has known me

We cradled side by side as I entered Pokuwaa that night beneath the baobab tree