Dearest Martha

I hope this missive finds you in excellent health. I hope you find yourself frolicking for no other reason than mere curiosity and the brief joy that comes with its satiety before the next barrage of whys assails your brow. It is a strange satisfaction, the wanting to know, and often it seems the true joy is to be found in the seeking, competing and playing all the parts that you can and waiting with the patience of one who delights in the falling leaves for the universe to respond.

The leaves are falling now.

Life is strange Martha. It is a force that cannot be ignored. You can put the gun down, you can let it be, you can be the last man so far away from the town and you can be free. To go to the woods is to be a part of a grand history of man, he who has taken to the trees. That is what it means to be free Martha. To climb the branches to the highest seat and yet still descend with humility.

I know there is so much you could say to me. You have said, "there is only what you will" and I have wondered and cowered in the ignorance of the part, perhaps I do not yet know how to play it. I am apart now Martha. I can weigh so much and still I know it is not enough. The scales of one can only weigh one, the rest is as it is, only as one can be.

I have taken to the trees. I want to know what life is.

~

Better were I sad than bored. Rather cry than behold the deeds of man and ignore the sounds behind the wall, fall, call, echo, over the concrete bellows. Stay out!

Year of the bastard dragon and the samurai

I’ve been thinking, how best to walk amongst you this year and be okay with myself and the rest of you. Last year I strolled around as God; I know, I may not have looked the part but trust me, I was wielding thunderbolts and only 'Martha' stopped me from unzipping my fly and drowning you-all in another biblical deluge and if I were your God, all of you, hell I would run into the lab screaming STOP! Stop it now, this thing you’re breeding is going to eat everything, kill the power and let’s go play some golf.

I don’t know if its age or maybe the things I’ve been imbibing but increasingly it seems like the world is doomed and it will never come close to the utopia you’d imagined as a child. No pretty spaceships, hover-boards, time machines, teleporters and people who minutely care about each other, oh and ‘dude, where’s my flying car? Huh? You lazy incompetent sack of evolutionary dregs.

I’ve been in me parents’ house for the last year, technically it’s been the sum total of 5 months but I’ve had the chance to observe them. My dad is retired and my mom just left her twenty-something year bank job recently. They’re old but not as old as they would like to think and one of the things I can’t help but notice, especially in my mom, is a creeping fear of the world. My dad is mostly content to listen to BBC, watch TV and ridicule the politicians (opposition) while sipping his pint, he’s always been reserved but on occasion he’ll let it slip that ‘ this is madness! You young people don’t know what we’ve been through or what’s good for you. You and these Besigye things.’  

 As you grow older, the temptation to cement views, habits and other mannerisms is overwhelming; it offers a certain kind of ‘security’, knowing that things work and will be done in a certain way. Unfortunately, the tragedy of every generation is that the next one almost always discards the former’s teachings or at least finds them wanting, discredits its rules as too rigid and backward and generally takes a piss in their flowerbeds and vegetable patches.

My dad is convinced Bes is nothing but a ‘sick’ bitter person who wants power at all costs. The fact that he used to be Sevo’s personal doctor in the bushtime irks him so much, he can’t believe the guy could turn around and ‘snake’ his gango like so. As for the rest of the opposition, fuck em all, at least I think that’s what he would say if he wasn’t too polite. My parents though generally don’t understand ‘what the kids want’, meaning me and my siblings because we’re never short of drama. Fleeting marriages, unqualified wannabe geniuses, inadequate parents and obstinate buffoons, some of us refused to graduate, citing the sham and inadequate instruction received and deploring the idea of a behind the desk occupation when the whole wide world is out there. There are those of us who can’t take the intrusion into our personal lives and so we resort to being as elusive as that damn train of thought I was just on. The rest of us won’t even say a word, content to leave everyone guessing as to our motivations and aspirations. Of course, all we want to say is ‘it’s all alright; you don’t have to worry because it’ll all turn out fine.’ But it’s the parent’s job to worry, despair, remonstrate, threaten and finally give up and just watch, hoping that you won’t sell their last shred of dignity for a quick fix around the corner with Misty and triple nippled Jasmine.

Anyway, I’ve been slowly aging, in my head, setting myself in certain ways that I think will serve me well in the years to come and make me strong enough not to crumble in the face of fucking unrelenting life. Life is senseless, in its actuality it’s force acting on matter, period. The lumps of flesh that we are are moved by the force of mind to undertake actions that we tell ourselves have meaning behind them; that my smiling at you means that perhaps I’m partial to you and will watch your pint while you go take a leak but fuck you! I’m going to drop some laxatives in your bottle and keep you occupied while I chat up and make off with your half-wasted girlfriend, why do you think you keep going to the loos?

I’m tired of being gentle with you. I have come to think that you’ll never learn until you feel that fucking steel run through. Yes. I am going to stab you, in the back, in that ever ballooning beer belly and your fucking crotch too and then I’m going to kick you in the shins and watch you bleed and cough your innards out.

I like Bes. I think he’s one of the bravest bastards to emerge from the stupid lazy ass swarm of filth you call your political class. When the rest of you are too fuckin scared to throw a pebble at the people you think are robbing your future, he’s out there being pummelled by hired thugs and acolytes, no less paid with your fuckin money. There are people out there with the IQ of a polythene paper bag, who are no doubt convinced that there is only one way to do things and if you set yourself up against it, then you’re the enemy and must be defeated by any means necessary, it is the legacy of a militant ideology. If the most successful thing you’ve ever done is fight a war, you’re bound to love the battlefields more than the rolling green hills and domesticities of ordinary life. For you, the child flying a kite is a frivolity that should be limited and all you would teach would be the sharpening of the blade. But peace is harder than war because right now I want to carry my blade and cut you to fucking bits, the you that believes men are meant to be led, that would put itself above them, I want to see you bleed before me.

Bes is not perfect, in fact he is of the same mould as those he seeks to supplant and though he may not achieve this; his victory has been the moral one. There was a time when not a single voice was to be heard in earnest opposition to those who raised themselves above you and so they went about their business with little to hold them back or in check and the ideals we nurtured at the start were taken to the back room, raped and eviscerated, splattered on the walls, bloody handprints the tell-tale signs of what once was. She lies bleeding still, Liberty, and though you’ve raped her day and night, her spirit remains, strong and true. Now she wields the sword and you who would have her in chains shall pay your due.

The other day I sat down with you and wondering how to better your lot, you asked how best to free yourself. It’s all rotten you said and you embarked on an aimless tirade meant to display your skill with the words. “There is no one to lead us,” you lamented, having exhausted the depths your intellectual façade could approximate, the fog of indolence clouding your vision you opted to turn your head and look the other way. ‘I shall wait’ you said, until a hundred seasons have gone by and the fruit lies on the fields, putrefying and the vigour of youth is gone from your bones.

Your spawn shall eat you from within the womb, if you should attempt to pass on your half cooked ideas and beliefs, all of them foreign to you. You think you have seen war, famine, pestilence and death but when they come, there will be no pity in their eyes and your wails and cries of anguish will call the carrion birds to feast on your gouged out eyes trailing in the wake of my blade. I know you can hear them, just beyond the wall, the one you built around your little world, the one you think will scare them off or hold them back. The spikes on the top, they will rip out and thrust up your anus, again and again until your guts flow out and soil the marble floor and then they will burn it all down and leave no trace of you or your line.

He who wields the sword must be prepared to cut and he who cuts knows that it is only himself that he fells, bit by bit until there is nothing left but the sword. I shall wield the blades and all that grows to choke the head of grain will be cut and if you should stand in my way, I will cut you too.

I shall be gentle with you though, for I love you and would rather spend the days with you coaxing the land to bring forth what is our just reward and the nights lost in the tenderness of your embrace. I shall sheathe my blade and remember that these are the days of peace, the days of the free and everything can be, but I cannot forget that I wear the blade.

Now!

I am at child's play
The beginning of the universe at the start of each day
Yesterday is gone and tomorrow far far away
I have only today to say
HEY!

There is no formula for the imaginary things

Bliss is here :)

If you want to be happy, be.
.......Leo Tolstoy

Geisha Love

You can avoid being a neurotic if you stop obsessively analysing what you imagine to be your character: never mind your faults, stop moaning about your complexes, do not pour out confessions about what you can and cannot do, like or desire. Treat each meeting with a person as an independent event. 'A geisha is always ready to produce pleasure with out considering her own needs.' Put aside personal ambitions and the expectations you have of yourself. Learn to be a geisha by being, first of all, a geisha to your own body; look after it, cook meals for yourself when you are alone as though giving yourself a treat; look after your mind by feeding it with poetry and music. Avoid creating an excessively rigid idea of your desires. Look upon yourself as an amoeba, floating through life, dividing: do not be afraid of losing your identity. Or look upon yourself as a collection of electric light bulbs: do not put all the electricity in a single bulb or it will explode; allow your energy to circulate freely through the many sides of yourself. The looser, the more open and limitless your identity, the better. Treat your emotions as a garden needing to be kept tidy. Be generous, and that will stimulate new resources within yourself, new ideas. Follow the 'laws of nature'. It is up to you.

--------------------- An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin.

Happy New Year

It was an okay year. I mean, last year; it was alright.

I spent a good amount of it in your homes, as a friend, drinking or smoking buddy, guest, invited and otherwise, acquaintance, forlorn stranger, charity case, homeless bumpkin, that guy who has grass, banange the list is endless but I spent it with you.

I gave up my place of abode at the beginning of the year, the walls did not love me anymore and spent the days hatching plans with the roof to smother me while I slept and nights glaring at me with peeling paint malice and contempt. I could not sleep. The doors would let me out no more but led me down endless corridors where the clocks always struck the hour of darkest night and the paintings came alive. Bronze horses galloping, drums beating, evil eyes laughing, sharp teeth chattering, and long bony fingers peeling off my skin.

So I left and returned to my mother’s house.

I was ashamed; somewhere in my head my ancestors sat before me and tut-tutted. I was no longer worthy to be called your friend or brother for I was just another lazy motherfucker.

Still I deigned to walk among you. I could not be alone for it meant that I would slowly but surely perish, perhaps not in form but in substance I would be less here and more there. So I walked about and saw you from the other eyes and learnt that man is a lonely and scared creature, that all he does is to quell the silent despair that lies deep in his heart. All alone out here, he gathers to himself everything he can find and would tell the story of his life by the mounds of dirt he piles, one on top of the other.

I learnt that you still believe that to have a care is to be weak and in hardening your heart, you fell and lost one.

I remembered what it meant to have a home, to catch the trailing bits of the love you once knew as a child. It is no more now, the one without a price, perhaps it never was but I knew it once and it is still somewhere deep inside of me. I will give it to you, if you let me.

I walked abroad unafraid of you for I was God in my world, and I weighed and measured and found you in need. I saw your fear and felt it run through me and knew that you’d rather it was not near or something you could hear. So I kept quiet and let the cacophony of feigned laughter, disdain, and rage wash over me.

I walked to the forest to find the wild man who went to live a deliberate life and beneath the fig tree we shared fruit. He called me a wild man too, said I was very much him, true to the wood with nothing to prove.

And then I sat with you and broke bread, told you what I saw in my mind’s eye but you did not hear. Your voice louder in your head than shrieking Valkyries drowned out all that did not please. Still I sat, and waited for you to return and listen. I sit still.

I will not give up. One day you will truly know me and then I shall have no fear and you will not be afraid of me too.

Happy New Year people in my life; friends real and imagined, family lost and found, love known and unknown.

::Hold Fast::

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage.

A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.
He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
.......................................................................................................................... GK Chesterton

Sing a sad love song and bury me in the sky

I passed out on Sunday night, not due to substance abuse (albeit three Guinness and sherm smoke) but one of those unexplained moments when your body gives out. It’s happened to me once before, sometime in 2003 when I was with Jorge and Roger in Ntinda. We had just arrived in town from a trip to Hoima and having been seated for several hours I got out of the car to yawn and stretch me limbs. I opened the door, stood up, stretched my hands ready to embrace the full splendour of life and ZAP, the lights went out. I came to several seconds later, sprawled on the dusty pebbled ground, nervous laughter and concerned glances all round and brushed the incident off, putting it down to the exhausting trip.

The human body is frail; though when you are young and healthy you tend believe otherwise but the truth is that it’s matter and succumbs to entropy. I think one of the things that stresses and depresses people when they advance in years is that creeping realisation that your body is giving out on you, most times (you think) before you’ve had the chance to do much with it. I don’t fall sick often but for the occasional bout of the common cold and have always been reluctant to visit the physician but in the most dire of circumstances. In fact, I have always had the concept of medical bills and how high they can be at the back of my mind. When I was younger and my medical bills were the responsibility of someone else, I learned how heavy a burden that could be and I came to bear the notion that unless it’s a matter of life and death, I have no business troubling anyone with that ‘ka slight twitch of the pinkie’ that happens every now and then. As for life and death, if I’m conscious then it’s time for saving my ass, otherwise kwaheri world.

So there I was, standing over the saucepan of potatoes, fork in one hand trying to tease that nice big potato onto the plate in the other when the lights went out. Last thing I heard was the plate fall and shatter and then nothing until I came to, a minute later, lying on the kitchen floor with the saucepan of potatoes between my legs. For a minute I was terrified, scared of the fact that if it had been more serious I would have probably lain there until the mourning. Then I fully came to and started wondering where the consciousness goes in such moments; I mean, you’re not here but for an empty husk and you’re not there for there is no memory of the other place. So where?

On thinking about it some more, I realised that my body’s been doing this for years, the passing out I mean. There are times when I’m taking a leak, especially when I’ve been ‘tying’, and I feel myself go woozy for a few seconds and then an incredible rush of life and energy and aaaaaaah! It’s close to ecstasy and probably death. Thankfully it’s never happened whilst playing ‘hide the sausage’. It does however remind me of my mortality, and makes me think of what would happen if it were serious. Then I realise that I need somebody else to care about my body because oftentimes I don’t respect it that much. I once had a monologue where I threatened to toss it off a bridge when I was done with it and it calmly threatened to give me ‘Pirellis’ and throw me in ditches if I decided to binge on the finer things. I have learnt that we need other people to take care of us when we can’t do it for ourselves and that that is a very huge part of why we attach ourselves to others, why we are bonded to family and the closest of friends, why we came down from the trees.

I love my body and know it has a weakness for the things material and that I should not let it get carried away with them but it is still only flesh and will wither and die in time. I do not desire to hasten to this end but I know it is always close, never as far off as we like to tell ourselves. Apparently, so I heard some professor or doctor say, we don’t like to think about it often because of the paralysis it would induce in us, the knowing that the end is never far off would apparently cripple us to the point of inaction. It has always been on my mind since I truly became aware of it and I guess it has crippled and killed a few wants and desires in me but if anything, it has helped me act with a singular purpose for I know that it is a brief story I live.

Not to worry though, if you have any affection for me and fear that I will leave you here, a little less than you should be. I desire no such end, not to hurt in anyway but only to love, to care, to give a damn and I know it must start within my soul and to be honest, the story was begun long before I got here and I am but a brief chapter in your book of life. I walk in when the storm comes, to tell you that the thunder is but the voice of God, the fierce wind her infinite mercy and the darkness will be gone when your eyes open to the new dawn. And then I walk out, the chapter closed, my story to you told.

I want you to promise me one thing; that when I walk out, you will sing me a sad love song and bury me in the sky.

Never Saw You Coming

I am the lonely
The ones who slip away
I am the secret
The words we dare not say
I am the promise I'm about to break...again

I am the leader
Who cannot find the way
I am the preacher
Who somehow lost the faith
I am the begger reaching out my hands...again

And I never saw you coming
I could never dream of running
I have never known such love before
My God, you come, come and breathe your breath in me
Steal away what's left of me
Til you are mine and I am yours

I am the lover with no one to hold
I am the seeker with an empty soul
I'm everyone who's ever lost hope

And I never saw you coming
I could never dream of running
I have never known such love before
My God, you come, come and breathe your breath in me
Steal away what's left of me
Til you are mine and I am yours

Fall like stars on my shore
Still you are so much more

And I never saw you coming
I could never dream of running
I have never known such love before
My God, you come, come and breathe your breath in me
Steal away what's left of me
Til you are mine and I am yours
...........................................................Bebo Norman

Beyond This Mountain

Dear Love,

I’m chasing after you no more,

I’ve done this too many a time before and my feet are sore. 

This path has been long, arduous and forlorn; 

I don’t want to go on.

Is there more to this life than you

Must I forever seek to not be blue

And yet find nothing to erase the hue 

Is it true that you always come through 

If the heart that patiently waits is open and true

Am I a fool to believe in you

I want you no more, 

I’ve cried too many a tear and this heart is broke. 

The promise you made when first I awoke

Is buried in the night of past and all I have is this yoke. 

I shall dine with you no more.

Do not let yourself despair, 

For you’re always in the air 

And all is fair when the banners are raised past the hair

And your name across chests we wear

I will miss you

I will remember you

I will speak fondly of you 

But I must leave this path to you.

Farewell love

May you forever reign in the heart of the dove

And all that shines bright above

Goodbye love
.....................................................RCK

Epitaph

Even such is Time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days:
And from which earth, and grave, and dust,
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.
.........................................................Sir Walter Raleigh

Aurora

The loving night is spent
Arms tight around the pillow; lingering scent
Here comes the light, shadows away to dispel
Visions and dreams to dissipate

Hold the night
Hold me tight
Heart fraught with care and strife
Would know more of sweet delight

Night is fled
Dawn kisses face
Morning dew on lips, tender touch, soft caress
Open mouth, open heart; gentle sigh, lost in space

Dawn is broken, 

Darkness is fled
Heart that was broken

To the lights seeks to bend

------------------------------------------RCK

Introspection

If you can help it, don’t visit your skeletons too often.
--------------------------------------------ScotchBiscuits

Becomingness

Every one ought to hold fast, not his faults, but his peculiarities, so as to retain more easily the becomingness which is the subject of our inquiry. We ought, indeed, to act in such a way as shall be in no respect repugnant to our common human nature; yet, holding this sacred, let us follow our individual nature, so that, if there are other pursuits in themselves more important and excellent, we yet may measure our own pursuits by the standard of our own nature.
-------------------------------------------------Marcus Tullius Cicero

The King and I

Back in the early 90s, when I was in primary school, I was required to watch the 9’oclock news and give my mother a report when she got back home. Bbale Francis was the king of night-time news and invariably he started the bulleting with “President Yoweri Museveni…”  There was the one TV station back then, so there wasn’t much choice in the matter and I had to sit through Sevo opening this hospital, cutting ribbons at that ground-breaking and generally dispensing advice to his fellow Ugandans to engage in small scale industry before I could catch a glimpse of Shaka Zulu, Riviera or Herr Derrick. I was aware of a couple of things back then; that my mother’s generation had seen some dark times and that Yoweri ‘son of Kaguta’ Museveni was the greatest man in all the lands of Uganda.

Several lustres later, and I have come to learn a couple more things.

Rosemary makes the news seem so delicious; I'm sorry Mr. Bbale Francis but we be moving on, you should be proud to have a more than able successor.

The religion of father and mother is not gospel truth. If there is one thing our parents have tried to make us understand and appreciate, it is that the peace and security we have enjoyed thus far was bought at a great price and we should never take it for granted. In this spirit, they have had us believe that there is no other Ugandan who can lead this nation but the great ‘son of Kaguta’ because, well, he’s the only one who can control the military, oh and look, we have peace.

All violence is borne of fear. The so called revolutionaries who started the ‘liberation war’ of the 80’s were moved to such actions out of nothing less than fear. Afraid that a corrupt and murderous regime would consume all they had built, all they were, they took up arms to answer that violence with, well, violence and when affected in your cause, it can have many rosy names; cue freedom fighters, security operatives, revolutionaries, sons of liberty and the many coats, caps and flags it has donned in the service of man. Fear is natural, it helps the species survive but when it grows to the point of phobia it becomes the worst of man. Our parents’ society was characterized by fear to the point of eroding the ordinary senses of virtue, pride and dignity; survival was the order of the day and man became beast, base and violent. Yet in all this, as in all the histories of mankind, there were people who still held sense good enough to know and show that, complete surrender was not and never is an option. Their names are forever lost to us and all we have left are second rate heroes who extoll their valiant yet violent feats louder than the village fool. ‘Twatera emundu.”

We are the unfortunate children of a weak society. Our fathers were never strong enough to stand on their own two feet and if we should follow them, we will hobble into our graves to be mocked and forgotten as the sons and daughters of Kaguta. No people should be beholden to their heroes as to sit by and watch the very thing they fought for soiled and destroyed for their want of wisdom. Any leader must know that his primary duty is to guide and inspire the next generation and his greatest triumph to see a stronger, wiser and better leader succeed him, and thus is the lack of a suitable ‘heir’ the greatest failing of the king.

Poet's Heart

I wrote to you somewhere in south Australia
a poet's heart in the eye of a hurricane
I struggle with finding words to sing these days i said
as if my thoughts are waiting in the wings
for the stage to clear

and you in your elegance and humour fill the room
your love and your concern
your anger at the injustice of man's narrowness and fear
I thank you for being here.

You wrote of love from the coast of Mendocino
a poet's heart crying a fighter's tears
the children of your body spread out across this earth
like messages written across time,
measuring the years.

And you in your elegance and humour fill the room
your love and your concern
your anger at the injustice of man's narrowness and fear
I thank you for being here.

I heard your songs reach out to California
a poet's heart locked in the Coeur d’Alene
of the old men and the booze singing out the truth in lives
of forgiveness and loyalties to friends,
constant as the endless railroad ties

and you in your elegance and humour fill the room
your love and your concern
your anger at the injustice of man's narrowness and fear
I thank you for being here.

So here we are joined finally by our words
all poets’ hearts close though far apart
i remember how you said that language is a knife
that spreads what we feel across the dry crust
of someone's heart.

And you in your elegance and humour fill the room
your love and your concern
your anger at the injustice of man's narrowness and fear
I thank you for being here.
-------------------------------Kate Wolf

Suit Up!

Once upon a time

I wanted to love. I wanted to be love. I wanted to know all there was in the world of man. I wanted to know your name, the one you whispered to the night and gave your dreams flight. I wanted to worship, to believe in god and bow in awe of all that I beheld.