By Wisdom Mumera
The lights of the city
Have darkness in me they fail to enlighten
Under their stares I remain
A priceless artifact, stuck upon a bemused sanctity
For their failure to understand me.
A walk through their neon lit passages
Always abandons me at just the point
When the blue of dawn is mellowing into white
And everything retraces steps
When the man inside discovers
Outside the self, the world is an insane prophet.
Red Straits
There is a satisfaction that I feel
When I see you and tell myself
That one of these days I may rack up the crumbs
Of my courage, season them into life
With granules of manhood
And approach you with budding petals of love.
I even smile to myself at the thoughts
Since they are still a private enclosure
One in which during lazy days, I walk around in
Pasting together jumbled pieces of life with ‘what if’s’.
What if money was a sky?
Watching over everyone with the same expression
And when it rains, flooding all our lives.
What if courage was a departmental store commodity?
Carefully arranged with the enticing label staring at customers
Ready for anyone and everyone with need.
What if love itself was a puzzle of only two pieces?
Lost in the vortex of many faces
But divinely oriented
To magnetically draw towards their purposed destiny.
The gilt edges of life ultimately wear out the illusion
And wearied, I flop out
Resigning into the cold facts of my being beyond you
By virtue of whatever it is
That threw your existence onto the reverse side of my ability.
I have held up your smile at night
When sleep has pushed me to persecute myself
Searching for the tiniest flicker of your recognition
Of what my eyes would have tried to convey to you
Across the abyss of fear, distance and weakness.
But I haven’t been able to read anything
You remained a high tower of mystery
Cresting above the modesty hovels of my simple life.
Last attempts
Without faith
Nude,
Without divinity
The atheist knelt at the altar
Spying extinction just beyond another strenuous breath
And sought for special recommendation
Into the Pearl Gates of Peter’s
By uncanny virtue
Of unbelief
Without frontal assault
Upon the cross.
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