Friday, March 2, 2012

Finis

It rose and then it glowed
Was hot and enragé
Turned cold and blazed again
It grew and flew away

It struck a light and shone
Was swept up in a swirl
Tailspinning in a trice
It mellowed and refined

It set and gave a sigh
Was far from growing old
The time had come to go
It crept away to die.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

PatrOItic

Rubbish teacher. How can a person luring kids to a TV programme say "patroitic" and expect me to let my child watch? I've seen too many kindergarten teachers destroy our kids' speech and pronunciation with 2 decades of undoing to correct. Are teachers at that level not probably the most important? Patroitic? Idiotic!

Friday, February 17, 2012

Do You Know Certiorari?

Three lawyers and I found ourselves in a suite with building engineers. For a spell we forged ahead swimmingly, while jousting over fair laws and shear walls. Then, the convener careened into construction clichĂ©s about ‘fixes’. To tease us, mystified advocates, one engineer made a grand old show of explaining ‘fixes’ to us. What did I do? I fixed him with a fast-fetched question: Do you know Certiorari? He waved his hands in his pride-peeling pickle and did not veer my way again.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Struggling for Sovereignty with God

One virtuous man of the cloth, who sees some of his peers jaunting downtown with a raised skirt, has chided them to put their skirt down, walk with cultivated control, and stop struggling for sovereignty with God. I like him. See the report here.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Delivery Boy

Go embalm your still-born face in a cadaver fridge. When I showered you with a healthy tip, your fetid face fluoresced to life. I spoilt you just to prove to you that you are a slave.

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Street Sweeping in the Harmattan

I’d only assayed the third layer of dust cemented on their skins when the traffic lay on me. As we moved on, we huffed extra soot to thicken the puff swirling around them. Their eyes did not look down. They looked bright and straight ahead, maybe a little irritated. They still had to take their brooms out there in the hard-nosed Harmattan.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Bleak Benighted Bonehead

We suffer all styles and stripes in our universities: the unlettered, the unread, the untutored, the vacuous. But what benighted bonehead would bob and bounce at a UG admission letter to the Bachelor of Political Science degree in the second semester? I hope find you a place in that uni.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Anger Waiting for a Cause in the City of Accra

Two young men snatched a phone in broad daylight and bolted. One slipped away; the other was bagged by oh ten thousand ‘petulants’. They hurt and hammered the hangdog with sticks and stones and switches until their gall seemed to peter out. Then, a jobless Beelzebub fetched a grubby jerrycan of grimy engine oil. They soused him slick with the stuff, and made him glug a gallon or two.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Smiling Monsters after Dark in the City of Accra

Man Mountain, hanging like a treacherous cliff over a forlorn length of the shadowy Spintex Road in the mini-principled city of Accra, why are you counting on a lift from strangers with that tarzan torso just because you can smile?

Thursday, February 2, 2012

The Village Fool Lives Long

Years ago, while crawling back to this smothering city from a country cruise, my team mates and I gained on a hamlet as the day lit out. The family was back from breaking rocks, bones, pods, grounds or whatever hard work they did. The evening feast had been finger-licked. Father and mothers, siblings, dogs, cats and birds huddled together in a close circle to ululate an uncouth song. The father fooled, frolicked and tripped the light fantastic in the middle. The women and children egged him on. Stress almost kayoed me today at work, and I remembered that simple, solid scene.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

African Marriage Doesn’t Need the Church

Imagine my holy hang-up when a parish prescribes principles for neo-nubian nuptials: dwindled dowries, laundered lists, ‘liposucked’ linguists and alcohol alternatives. Church, stay out of African marriages. You have your own mysterious matrimony. We can pray without the Paternoster.

Friday, January 27, 2012

Songs That Seduce

Scores of songs have seduced us silly by stirring us from soothing slumber, and sucking sweetly at the heartstrings in the ensuing twilight-zone spell. 

The Papaya Fruit Girl

In the sea of sellers of anything, she flared her loveliness in my view. Too pretty, too dee-lee-cious, to stride the sour streets. Too sweet in eyes and nose and oh her lips to schlep diced papaya; swaying on her head, swaying to the beat of her body-full of  ‘S’ shapes in its strut-n-swirl. The flask woman behind her – bland, sun-blistered battleaxe – she didn’t stir a single whisker of my heart. Silly, sad me: pouring pity on the flower, sweeping scorn atop the bug. But beauty is such a disabler! Oh that stimulating papaya fruit girl on the sunny streets of Accra. Will I see her tomorrow too?

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

The Sentry and the Squatter in the City of Accra

In the city of Accra, at genteel Ridge, at 9 am, a man in hermetic jeans was looking to leak his liquid privy into a drain. I shuddered to see him crook his legs to enable him to sag the seat of the asphyxiating denim for release.

Not quite ten metres away, another man in a white caftan was squatted over the same poor drain, doing similar business. I thought I caught him cast a disgusted glance the way of the standing man as if to ask which lowlife would hang his dispenser out on broad-daylight display.

I was desperate to stop and correct the squatter’s delusion that he was the better man, but I had to hurry to the office to go spend a penny.

All About the Head

His head was save-me-Lord uncomely - hardly humanoid, neither miles near any familiar fine-formed fruit. So, in a football match Ghana was bossing, why did he have to diss a Tswana boy's head in public?

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Senegal – No Football Lions

Twisted, rangy sinews, a sixty-minute engine and sharp snipers will maul a second-rate skirmish, but not a six-match contest. Your problem is seeking to admit yourself into the Pride when you’ve only roared once.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

If I Don’t Speak Up Because It Didn’t Happen to Me

Any State that treats the fourth estate with the third degree because it sees them as the fifth column is crude. It’s that simple. In truly democratic countries, the ‘security’ job is carried out like infra-red light. Not in Ghana! We run it like fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

Because of our hairy history of railroading our impotent institutions of democracy, any bloke in boots, a beret, a big belt and a badge – never mind whether they’re even private security – demands deity-deference because they can slap-slap you to Paga, Pluto and then Purgatory.

Paradoxically, the most disciplined and brightest security outfit by far in our democratic sparks has always been the military.

So when Ghana’s national security enforcers advertise their brawn like a neon billboard right outside a court of law, you’d expect their civilian masters to pull the leash and put them in the doghouse.

Why should our shadowy moles unleash their cloak-and-dagger 'yawa' on the streets and sow insecurity in the deepest hearts of the lamb they’re sworn (?) to protect. This week, they pummelled a girl journo and rent her clothes to dishonour her. If she was taking shots of an unfolding public scene which they resented, why not simply arrest the offending camera. And even that...

Monday, January 9, 2012

Selective Memory

"My educational colours didn't fly in Ghana because too much rotates round raw rote memory." Daily discourse I hear which dampens my day. I often roundhouse-kick the brainless regurgitation in our schools on this blog, but it is dishonesty when you vomit verses from King James Version to varnish every vowel.

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

Friday, January 6, 2012

Shoes from the Loo

The droplets on your shoe
Say you’re just from the loo
Hands unwashed, knowing you!
Even if you didn’t poo
Your hand’s a microbe zoo
And I won’t shake it too

Thursday, January 5, 2012

New Year Resolutions

New year; he launches out to sea
No last look at the fungous wreck
Which cast him here many monsoons ago
In no time, Big Wave sweeps him ashore
He’s read the flotsam books back-to-back
The seasons, the reasons, the nano and the bio
Conquest and empire – he knows it all
But he does not know where he is
The little legs pattering near his hut
The warm smiles where his food is fired
Even the blithely breathing body in his bed
He does not recognise them any
Next year he will try again
And push out to find his hidden Home
But Big Wave will fling him back
Won’t build a house or town or school
He won’t colonise this place
He’ll try to leave again and again.