{"id":14534,"date":"2022-12-13T00:42:09","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T22:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=14534"},"modified":"2022-12-17T00:42:25","modified_gmt":"2022-12-16T22:42:25","slug":"poems-by-johnpaul-simiyu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=14534","title":{"rendered":"poems by Johnpaul Simiyu"},"content":{"rendered":"

Requiem For A King<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I first stumbled upon Martin Luther King Jr.,<\/p>\n

I was black.<\/p>\n

My mother was not in the kitchen.<\/p>\n

She was out in the garden hanging our sheets,<\/p>\n

white sheets that made the poles that looked like eyes, and arms.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have an answer to a burning question, ma.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her eyes flew open when I said burning<\/p>\n

and she unpegged the sheets and arranged them on the ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere, much better,\u201d she whispered.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe I\u2019m black,\u201d I told her as we headed into the house.<\/p>\n

She stopped near the wooden steps, plucked a flower of different shades<\/p>\n

and forced it into my coarse hair.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere, there, my black prince. Now you are beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n

I only stayed black until I met Malcolm.<\/p>\n

He was in the streets of our town, in a black suit and anger.<\/p>\n

His words of freedom were like a knife\u2019s edge<\/p>\n

and I believed him.<\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t been allowed into the pool the previous weekend<\/p>\n

and my mum had never told me why we had to stand in the bus,<\/p>\n

save for \u2018lucky we are not going too far, right?\u2019<\/p>\n

And we\u2019d stand for forty-five minutes.<\/p>\n

In one of Malcolm\u2019s speeches in the neighbourhood,<\/p>\n

he questioned the blackness of the people who listened to King<\/p>\n

and indeed I wondered how far black I went.<\/p>\n

I returned to my mother that evening, a small quran in hand.<\/p>\n

She stared at it with blankness for a moment,<\/p>\n

then traced her finger over the gilded writings and murmured something.<\/p>\n

\u2018Mama, can you read it for me?\u2019<\/p>\n

(I might as well have asked her \u2018mama, can you die right now?\u2019)<\/p>\n

\u2018Of course, baby, but after you\u2019ve eaten and rested\u2019.<\/p>\n

It took me years to learn that she couldn\u2019t read,<\/p>\n

and the songs she sang to me made little to no sense.<\/p>\n

Still the songs came to die in my ears,<\/p>\n

the vanity, the sounds of her blabbering lost in the deception<\/p>\n

of a dark night as I sobbed myself to sleep,<\/p>\n

the assassin out in the street,<\/p>\n

Malcolm in a pool of blood and faith, my mother\u2019s vanity<\/p>\n

promising that I was not alone.<\/p>\n

Three years later, when I went to sleep, Kingless.<\/p>\n

She swathed me in a song, and King remained with the blood.<\/p>\n

Lucky him, he was a king.<\/p>\n

Lucky my mother, she\u2019d already dead.<\/p>\n

And where do the rest of us fall?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Letter to My Son<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emptiness is misunderstood in sculptures and writings<\/p>\n

It is not a state of the mind, or the heart.<\/p>\n

It is when a broken man learns that snakes are growing<\/p>\n

where there used to be a road<\/p>\n

and there is no way back to where he once was,<\/p>\n

back to the misery he was comfortable with.<\/p>\n

Misery is knowing that he is a grown man now,<\/p>\n

and no one gives a hoot that his father<\/p>\n

left, or whether he was right to do it,<\/p>\n

or that all that is left of his life is bone.<\/p>\n

As a curious boy, you asked me why I always write<\/p>\n

about blood?<\/p>\n

What else is there, son?<\/p>\n

My blood got warm, and I looked for your mother.<\/p>\n

When she became hot-blooded,<\/p>\n

I had to leave, or we would die.<\/p>\n

A part of me died either way, for when the door opened on her one last time,<\/p>\n

a shadow trooped in,<\/p>\n

Evening.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what they called it.<\/p>\n

Darkness.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what I called it.<\/p>\n

My moon yowled and turned into blood,<\/p>\n

the dogs in me became wolves, and the man inside grew canines.<\/p>\n

Forgive me for the bites and the barks.<\/p>\n

I was hurting, and now you are bleeding.<\/p>\n

Again, blood.<\/p>\n

When there is fear in the night, and the answer is blood,<\/p>\n

on paper, in the inkpot, in the words, in the eyes<\/p>\n

in the depths, ends and beginnings.<\/p>\n

Some stories are long ropes to hang from for those lucky enough.<\/p>\n

Mine is over, now I hand you the knife.<\/p>\n

Because what else is there to hand you, foolish boy?<\/p>\n

Your books? Your words? Love? Life?<\/p>\n

Have you ever wondered why your life is an empty page?<\/p>\n

When you were born, your mother was bathed<\/p>\n

in blood, and vomit, and shit, but much of it was blood<\/p>\n

\u201cNever again,\u201d she vowed.<\/p>\n

And that is why she never loved you.<\/p>\n

She saw the blood she shed every time she saw you,<\/p>\n

like Christ every time he sees the father.<\/p>\n

I know your emptiness, boy.<\/p>\n

You will not make me forget how your tongue<\/p>\n

explored closed mouths as you tried to convince him<\/p>\n

that love was love, and his eyes shone with desire,<\/p>\n

and evening fear.<\/p>\n

I think I should forgive you for loving him.<\/p>\n

Maybe by forgiving you, I will forgive myself<\/p>\n

and the man right now kneeling in front of me.<\/p>\n

He wants to pray but his mouth is full<\/p>\n

and the spirit has no place to enter anymore, but I do.<\/p>\n

I wished I had loved you more, but whatever I love<\/p>\n

explodes.<\/p>\n

Some explode into fire and ash, some memories,<\/p>\n

some orgasms, some children.<\/p>\n

I am waiting to see what you will burn into.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I am Not Happy<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Where did I forget my hands last night?<\/p>\n

They are for sure not with her, she was home.<\/p>\n

I was not.<\/p>\n

In whose skirts did my lips wander?<\/p>\n

Where did I come? Because I didn\u2019t come home.<\/p>\n

I know I am not cheating.<\/p>\n

I know I am not happy.<\/p>\n

I know there is no lipstick on my shirt,<\/p>\n

There is no taste of moss in my mouth.<\/p>\n

I worked late. The perfume is from clients.<\/p>\n

I know I have not been home much.<\/p>\n

I am not happy.<\/p>\n

My house is a coffin.<\/p>\n

My wife is a well.<\/p>\n

She cannot dance anymore, arthritis.<\/p>\n

She cannot sing anymore, sore throat.<\/p>\n

She cannot joke anymore, maturity.<\/p>\n

I am not happy with her.<\/p>\n

But I am happy with Winnie from HR.<\/p>\n

There is a fire that I forgot to collect<\/p>\n

when I left my youth behind.<\/p>\n

Winnie opened that wooden door, walked down the hallway<\/p>\n

found it and returned it to me.<\/p>\n

Now I am young again, but youth, even when old, fleets.<\/p>\n

Night cannot be ignored for too long, and when it is, it becomes tomorrow<\/p>\n

and haunts over again.<\/p>\n

Grace, she waits at the door in the wee hours.<\/p>\n

Her flesh sags. Her eyes are red.<\/p>\n

It must be the allergies. She doesn\u2019t do well with eggs.<\/p>\n

I look at her, she looks through me.<\/p>\n

She is not happy.<\/p>\n

I am supposed to look down when she spears me<\/p>\n

but a kiss on the cheek closes the door on silence<\/p>\n

and the only thing that comes out when she opens her mouth<\/p>\n

is disbelief and other gasps, like the musician who believed<\/p>\n

that his own song would never stab him like it did,<\/p>\n

like nostalgia that never happened.<\/p>\n

She does not believe me.<\/p>\n

She does not trust me.<\/p>\n

But isn\u2019t marriage a song anyway?<\/p>\n

It starts ending as soon as it starts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PTSD<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

You won the war<\/p>\n

But you took home tales of war told in tongues so sharp that<\/p>\n

they can cut men to pieces<\/p>\n

The gun is in some shelf thousands of miles away<\/p>\n

But the memories are engraved in your head.<\/p>\n

Do you remember the woman with the fair skin?<\/p>\n

Yes, you do.<\/p>\n

She tortures you every time the rain falls.<\/p>\n

The music it composes on the roof is a memory of the song that night<\/p>\n

when you exploded into flood and seed inside her.<\/p>\n

Pray, do you remember the beautiful man?<\/p>\n

The one you stabbed with your tongue<\/p>\n

and then he drowned, only for you to remember that he was your son?<\/p>\n

Do you recall the day your fingers<\/p>\n

slipped under the schoolgirl\u2019s dress by accident<\/p>\n

and you wrote in her a memory that slit her wrists?<\/p>\n

The war was yesterday, and you forgot it there.<\/p>\n

but the dregs walked with you to your house<\/p>\n

and now follow to the toilet where the loudness<\/p>\n

of your bowels sends you scampering for cover.<\/p>\n

Darkness finds you in the rocking chair, waiting for the black sun<\/p>\n

to save you from the rivers drowning your toes inside those fetid boots.<\/p>\n

Something is always dead where you are now.<\/p>\n

Everyday a soldier falls into smoke and a widow picks up the pieces<\/p>\n

The hyena bays among the twigs,<\/p>\n

his grandchildren have started to smell<\/p>\n

like goats<\/p>\n

The vultures have refused to leave the trees in the yard.<\/p>\n

They no longer fear the admonitions from the echoes in your throat.<\/p>\n

Your words cannot stop the rain, or the smoke swirling in the rubble<\/p>\n

that you confuse for a mind.<\/p>\n

All you can do now is stand next to the window,<\/p>\n

but you painted it shut when your daughter drew a heart on it.<\/p>\n

You told her that you do not want to remember some things<\/p>\n

and she packed her bags and left you in the pool, drowning.<\/p>\n

You wish to go back to the past and be a child again<\/p>\n

but you lit those rooms on fire<\/p>\n

and now you don\u2019t remember where the house draped in loneliness<\/p>\n

stands anymore, if it does, it\u2019s in your head.<\/p>\n

You were young so many times, and maybe then,<\/p>\n

you could have afforded to drown in every mirror you saw, but now,<\/p>\n

it is always night, and the moon is always out,<\/p>\n

The werewolf in you desires to get out, but there is no strength,<\/p>\n

only but for the bones to creak in a song half-remembered.<\/p>\n

Someday you will want to die, but it will not come easy,<\/p>\n

not like the dreams of the olden days when you would go up in the sky<\/p>\n

They are all up in smoke now, and the only thing you can crunch<\/p>\n

is bones in the names of stairs,<\/p>\n

You can pretend that the stubborn waves are behind you now<\/p>\n

but the human mind is a thicket, and many who go there<\/p>\n

can no longer remember the way out.<\/p>\n

They forget that the only way out of the past is through the future<\/p>\n

But how can the future be seen through broken eyes?<\/p>\n

Man should only die once, but who\u2019s counting?<\/p>\n

Where, after all, do you hide<\/p>\n

when you are running from yourself?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Remembering Fragments Lost in Time<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What is there to remember<\/p>\n

save for the day you said it out loud, in your heart,<\/p>\n

that they should let him love whosoever his heart desired?<\/p>\n

What about the Sunday when the priest spelled the bible verse<\/p>\n

that there was time for everything?<\/p>\n

\u2018Why not time for everyone?\u2019<\/p>\n

You raised your hand to ask and he said it even louder,<\/p>\n

assuming that the Holy Spirit had driven the point home.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What is there to remember save for the days we spent<\/p>\n

staring at the rain from the comfort of the window,<\/p>\n

you outside, me inside,<\/p>\n

bound by the ropes of a past in fragments,<\/p>\n

a past we wished was different?<\/p>\n

If we recollect the shards, we will remember<\/p>\n

that we were busy counting the arrows that missed,<\/p>\n

forgetting that one hit and the womb that birthed our love<\/p>\n

took to water.<\/p>\n

Yes, we were wishing we had said something before the whispers on the rooftop<\/p>\n

became a storm,<\/p>\n

but what does it matter when words are raindrops<\/p>\n

that lose their meaning in dirty streams<\/p>\n

and in ears that cannot wait for the end of the sentence<\/p>\n

to pounce in with one of their own?<\/p>\n

What is there to remember,<\/p>\n

except that in the silence born of wrath,<\/p>\n

we saw love turn to war<\/p>\n

and people around us withered and died?<\/p>\n

Look, the girls we once loved are now women,<\/p>\n

or lifeless, because we did not tell them what they needed to hear.<\/p>\n

But there is no time to remember that, is there?<\/p>\n

There is no time to remember anything<\/p>\n

unless you really hate it and it consumes you.<\/p>\n

Do you remember the horse you told me about?<\/p>\n

Yes, the one that wouldn\u2019t gallop off of the picture hanging on the wall<\/p>\n

on the day you made up with your stepfather,<\/p>\n

while your mother lay half-naked upstairs?<\/p>\n

Do you remember how much you hated that picture?<\/p>\n

Now that I can see, I think you hated the moment more than the picture.<\/p>\n

Somehow, I do not want to remember his beard all over your face,<\/p>\n

his moist fingers writing memories in the glory of your home,<\/p>\n

your mouth half-open with a \u2018no\u2019 that wouldn\u2019t spill out\u2026<\/p>\n

But from my lonely chair planted next to the window where words crystalize<\/p>\n

on the sun-kissed mirror hazy with fog from our lungs,<\/p>\n

I can see in hindsight<\/p>\n

what you meant when you said that there will come a time<\/p>\n

when night will stretch for days,<\/p>\n

and the eyes of the sun will refuse to close<\/p>\n

when I desire sleep the most.<\/p>\n

I now understand that I should have listened<\/p>\n

and maybe the wars we waged in the fleeting pages<\/p>\n

that now belong to the ashes where your mother dumps the char,<\/p>\n

right where I dumped you and collected you again, like a bad poem,<\/p>\n

wouldn\u2019t have happened.<\/p>\n

But that memory is in fragments lost in time.<\/p>\n

What I remember well is the day you tried put your hurt into a painting<\/p>\n

but there wasn\u2019t enough pain to convince your heart that the sky is black enough.<\/p>\n

If time was a place, I would go back and hold my tongue<\/p>\n

and listen to the falling chinks as you fall apart, in silence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Requiem For A King \u00a0 When I first stumbled upon Martin Luther King Jr., I was black. My mother was not in the kitchen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1595,77],"tags":[1596,1123,1614],"class_list":["post-14534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-74","category-english","tag-egophobia-74","tag-english","tag-johnpaul-simiyu"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-3Mq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14535,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14534\/revisions\/14535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}