Child-Soldier

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Theatre

                                                    A whopping round of applause! Standing ovation! Throw your lilies to the left side of the stage, then your roses to the right side and your love to the center and scream my name. Then laugh and say among yourselves, “She is a wonderful actress, just wonderful!” I would bow humbly to your praise. I would avert my eyes to your show of ecstasy and smile as though I am proud.

Then I would weep in my heart for your mockery of my life which I chose to share with you on stage. You see, my pleas were real propositions of anguish, my knees were really begging and groveling, my tears, my tears…I shed my blood on this stage.

But applaud for that is what you’re supposed to do.

And mock that which I really felt and shared with you…shared with you. I put all of me in there so you could feel my sorrow, so you could feel my anguish and need that is driving me to the depths of a black suicide. So you could understand.

But you say “She’s a wonderful actress, just wonderful.”

Why won’t you hear me? Why can’t any of you hear me?! Your applause would be the death of me.

Solipsistic Desires

                                                             I exist. Only I exist. Everything else is around me is dependent on the conception of my mind. For, it is only in my mind that reality and truth of knowledge are transferred to me. My five senses are most highly subjective and unreliable parts of me. For what may not be I can instruct with the power of my mind to tell my senses that it is.

So my mind is the one and only powerful existence of my being for it can perceive wholesomely. It deduces, divides, compounds, detracts all my ideas and perceptions and reality. It makes reality my reality. So my mind is the magic wand. What it conjures to being through my senses exists then for a temporal period of time, till I whip it away with a wave of my magic wand.

My mind is the genie with countless, formless, indescribable, unlimited store of wishes. It is but for me to request, that is when it conjures me into being…I can travel in worlds unconceived but now conceived, I can be all sorts of beings, I can reach for all kinds of treats. Stars, universes, planets and milky ways. Nothing is beyond me. I am powerful. I am unlimited. The magic wand. The genie.

What rubbish. What enticing rubbish.

And then I realized…

                                                 

Smooth thinning figure walking down hallways of transitions. Sipping the wealth of other nations from a dirty cup. I coughed it out. It was not the same but it was the closest I was ever going to get so I put it to my lips again.

Straighten those tight, nasty stubborn curls that swirled in perfect circles around my face. Straighten those goddamn things so it doesn’t really accentuate my thick lips and fat cheeks and too small eyes and flat nose. Straighten it, goddammit! It was not the same but it was the closest I was ever going to get.

Squeezing, shimmying skin into body condoms and waist accentuators and then into tight jeans. Hide the extra fat on my huge backside, a passage from the generations, and flatten those uselessly huge balloons of a chest. Under wrap they would go. Let me burn off the confounded dark skin. Bleach it! Bleach it! Burn it off till it melts away to a milky cream. It was not the same but it was the closest I was ever going to get.

Pain for Beauty. A huge price to pay for that perception of Beauty but it was said to be Beauty so I would pay it! Sacrifice for the magazines and the movies and the illusions of distorted identity.  This Beauty was not in curls, or huge backsides and small waists and curved bodies. It had to be thin and blonde and…

And then I realized… I am African.

PARADOX

                                           She’s sleeping with him.

I was the only one who stood behind her when everyone accused her of being a thief. And she’s sleeping with him.

Guess who her accomplice is? The one who accused her.

But such is life, the craziest of paradoxes. You’re not okay with it. No one else is but it still occurs.

I fucked his best friend.

 Though I know that without him life means nothing, would collapse. I fucked his best friend. But such is the paradox of this fucked up world. You try to stay away from it don’t mean everyone else is too! That’s why the good people get hurt a lot the time. The bad…they’ve just realized it is the medium of existence.

Lies are the one way you live through this world. The one with the upper hand is the one who knows the truth and has no need to divulge. But it’s crazy annoying to watch a lie staring unblinkingly into your eyes when you can just slap it in the face with its hypocrisy!

But such is the way of our world. Telling the truth would only mess you up the more; put you in so many knots you wished you endured the lie.

So he sleeps with her. And I fuck his best friend.

Home

                                                                      We were hungry, so so hungry. It felt a little better to just lie still and stare at the oppressive dark walls and watch formless shapes dance teasingly in the dark changing forms from purple to the black of black against the scratchy white walls and explode into dots of black undecided shapes…but we were still hungry.

For a month living in the darkness of poverty…empty bowls of humiliation and nothingness…nothingness in its squared form. Goodness, were we hungry! The rice was stale on our dried sore tongues. The proteinless stew…Goodness were we hungry in a huge huge mansion with formidable walls and four gates and three huge buildings, beautifully decorated by glasses that saw into the Accra lights, a dead lawn and towering trees dropping dead leaves and cobwebs and faeces and feathers and…Goodness, were we hungry!

Home was a house sitting on dead earth holding on to glories that are dead and gone…lost in the dust of the years gone by…

                                                                                                                    

The Silver Screens

                                                                 

“Let’s go and play. Mummy and daddy.”

No, lets dance.

“But I want to play mummy and daddy!”

But I want to dance!

“Okay, let’s dance”

Two toddlers grabbing their undeveloped bodies and moving to no rhythm in swirls that they had seen over and over on the silver screens. He held her tight just the way he had seen that white man do and tried to look at her with as much passion. She tried to look as graceful as possible. So graceful she would be the savvy beauty with the black mole above her upper lip, on the right side of her face. Then he would love her.

She felt him begin to love her when his hands slipped to her bottomless bottom and held tight just as he had seen it on the silver screens. He pushed her on the wall and they kissed, slobbers, but passionate just as they had seen it.

 Then they took off their clothes and did it just as they had seen it.

The Devil’s Advocate

                                              

 What if there was no meaning to all of this?

Let life become the myth of Sisyphus. Let us be cursed to push a boulder up a hill for it to roll down and we start the whole process again. For Eternity. Instead of boulders let me give us school, let me give us jobs, let me give us spiritual aspirations to push up the hill for all eternity. Let us pursue the numerous things we pursue; food, a better life, wealth, spiritual divinity, comfort, love – these and many more various forms of Happiness.

Now let me erase the possibility of Happiness. Happiness is just a distortion of our senses a wicked,  mischievous deity planted in us. Thus, it is a pure illusion, never has known existence, never will know existence and is not in existence. Now let us push the boulder.

Why is it that you have stopped? Why are you staring at me? You have got a boulder to push to the top of this confounded hill, so push! Your eyes are staring, black as night into this black world. Shades of black overlapping each other in intensity. A coldness sweeps around us that you were not aware of before. But it has always been there! You chose not to feel it but it has always been there!

Maybe I should have kept you in the bubble of your highly distorted illusion, and then this confounded boulder would move!



My Egyptian Prince

                                                    

“My body is like a temple to me. I don’t allow just anybody in.” His beautiful lips formed sensuously over the words. His thin face stared down in humility and earnestness and seriousness…Oh! He was beautiful.

“I saw you and wanted you. I knew you were mine even though you were with someone else.” His caramel coloured fingers, long and smooth stretched down his thigh to his knee and his eyes, sharp, almost pretty, eyes still stared down at his fingers. My heart raced a beat at the sincerity of his beautiful voice which said these wonderful things and made me feel like a butterfly on a rose…hmmmmm. He showed me the tattoo of a part of Egypt on his shoulder.

Then he sang. Soulful in a tenor that kept going higher with the patter of my heartbeats and low with the fatal pauses. He sang his love for me. Sang his wait for me. Sang his yearning for me. I was beautiful. His eyes, staring down at his fingers placed on his knees in humility. As though he was struck by the beauty of Venus.

I loved his voice. He took himself so seriously. It was adorable.

Then we talked and talked through feelings and philosophy and poetry and Africa…I was shattered by our connection after just a day? We talked of books and ideas and religions and hopes and thoughts. I fell in love. He stared hard at his fingers still clutching his knees.

I could not bear it any longer. I moved to him and kissed him. I let him make love to me. I fell asleep by his side in exhaustion and satisfaction. His eyes were to the wall, shut intently. In the morning I left with a smile on my face. I left without saying goodbye.

He was my most beautiful liar.