"contumely" poems
Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya;[email protected])
But I remain a believer in my ancestral religion
Whose God is wele but not the Germany world, it is a religion,
Like most of universal ancestral ones,
With appalling moral threshold,
When Elijah Masinde of dini ya Misambwa
Despised those who condemned man as notoriously religious
He meant human religious approach to life is absolute in nature
However diverse religions compete for human ears
Rich ones glorified in the luring away of modal ears
But all are devoid of spiritual impetus
Disappointing the progenitors of religious imperialism
These short-cutters in matters of sanctimony
Will not come to our heaven
They will get me sharing a cup of tea
With my sister- in-law; Mary, the mother of Jesus
And I will shun them, I will not know them
I will not invite them to a heavenly cup of tea
They will be suffocated by cadaverous appetite,
For we honor our religion with ancestral regard;
The Faith of Our Ancestors
But in ridicule they call us kaffirs, pagans, christo-pagans,
Animists, atheists, gentiles, non-believers, mediumists,
Rebellious rebels or whatsoever they call us;
The anti-muhamedan-mis-christologists,
Let them delude themselves,
If they disparage us with sick contumely
Abreast the dumbfounding development in sciences
Plus so fortuitous humanistic awareness,
Humanity in Religion has to adjust optimally
Religious masters have to help
Interpret the religious Books, bible, gita, quran
All Written or verbalistically in the glory of epical orality
In tandem with the best centered
Life extant,
Otherwise selfish religions becomes an old wine bag
With its old and stale wine,
You will persuade Russian carousers to drink
But to your chagrin, none will condone, your stale wine
Do not seek to sell your faith
Because every human community
Has an ancestral faith
Respect them all for that is gods in their accolade of
Omonipresecence,
Any man or woman without religion is dangerous
But do not advantagize yourselves
At the expense of people of other faiths
It is good you reciprocated
Planet earth is our only sure and known abode
If we lived well here, and there is another world
For those who will be good, we hope the conclave of Gods
Would all sit in judgment for their credit
And reward those who helped humble humanity
Of their religions as well as those of other religions
As for all the Gods love humanists.
Dec 17, 2013
Dec 17, 2013 at 10:17 AM UTC
I have been insulted for sharing out
my peasant songs, pataphorical poems,
on the table of the cultural patriarchy
the insults have come in a serial flow
into my dark soul a basin of condemn,
it began as my duty to take my poetry
to the bottom of African latrine,
followed by volley of insults like ;
cerebral panicking insensitive idiot,
a gifted ******** of arsolian poetry
One other contumely went aboveboard
to announce me a better dead ******
i wondered how much one can ****
without erstwhile duty of creation,
now i have been condemned in starkness,
to be a beautiful walking ghost
of William Seward Burroughs,
Uhm! folly of eugenics, No! i am wrong,
this accolade, i seriously decline to take,
my innateness is not wounded at all,
by anything near to genetic disorder,
i am only conscious of my luckless past,
of Slavery,colonialism,wars,re-colonialism
Then poverty spiced by open ridicule ,
And partly trenchant and half-honkey tease
firmly fuelled by racial intolerance,
i have now been mistaken in awry,
to be a looming ghost of William Burroughs,
and i am not
i am purely my self,
without imperious wide blood
any where in my by black veins,
i may easily have chimpanzee blood,
Flowing turbulently through my vessels,
but no tincture of white blood in my zoo,
Burroughs broke his virginity with a *****
i have remained a ****** for three decades,
As African virgins marry only virgins,
Burroughs was the king of underworlds;
chasing lessbian prostitutes and gays,
to quench his mad erotic appetite
the turf in which i am a better sham,
Billy was a serial criminal, ever on the run,
my soul is clean as new pin,
in fact gorgeously dressed
in the unique royal attires
of as a Bristol pin merchant,
Billy worshiped crime and drugs
my piety is anchored on freedom of all,
Billy went to Latin America for *****
i have been there to mourn Gabriel Garcia,
the Nobelite who was alone in deathly solicitude
Billy never lifted a finger against tyranny,
my arsolian poetry is center-pieced on nothing,
other than African chantings for liberty,
freedom for the white and black peasants
perhaps to unyoke themselves,
from the yoke of vicious human avarice.
Sep 9, 2014
Sep 9, 2014 at 9:03 AM UTC
Oh see the thing! Glass mesosphere and ink:
The soil contumely in the field of green
From times when man among the sand could think
A second longer, in the stone tureen.
His hand to wrist to arm is a bone at a blink.
Though pink birds innocent, they hope to glean
With blinding Wednesday eyes, they love to drink.
He, Woden-bloody, gathers what they've seen.
We gray collected in a city's link
Descend and nest on pavements, there to preen,
And watch enchanted victims gaily sink
By the cardboard box, attracted to the sheen.
A street magician can the world reverse
With subtlety and somewhere to rehearse.
Mar 5, 2011
Mar 5, 2011 at 8:17 AM UTC
one day i took lsd
my famished soul drank in all it could see
i sought answers, maybe god
but horror upon horror was all that i got
i woke up to the realization that
i was responsible for everything bad
guilt and pain and fear consumed me
beaten down by my ego's contumely
the mind is truly a wicked place
it can twist your world, contort your face
staring down the devil, the reflection in his eyes
gives away the mirror upon which his visage relies
t'was myself i feared the most
the ephemeral glimpse of a lurking ghost
the screams from hell echoing near
but they existed nowhere beyond my ear
Oct 20, 2019
Oct 20, 2019 at 3:20 AM UTC
1 Ring
5 Rings
10 Rings
20 Rings…
I was just sleeping—
walking down the stairs
with heavy feet.
The window cracks
shining light to my face—
tempting me back to bed.
Opposite of a charming kiss
given unto a princess in slumber.
…
But I cant go to sleep
as she doubled the rings on the door.
So I opened the door
and like a dead corpse,
I faded by the light.
“Ahhh.”
At that moment
I remembered what I dreamt of…
“Lying and Semaniusly”
Blurted out
as I realized
I was already blocked?
“That makes no sense!”
I thought to myself.
Why would they do that?
What was the reason for it?
Was it necessary?
All of these questions
and my mind was tied
to the self-deprecating rings
that stopped me
from searching in this dream.
———————————-
To acknowledge
that I left the dream confused
was frustrating.
But cleanly
I came out of the dream—
and had to check
if it really was a dream…
Contumely so—
I left with a new word.
“Semaniusly”?
Jul 28, 2025
Jul 28, 2025 at 9:26 AM UTC
A call to action is not action
Other things that are not action include:
Expostulation rhetoric poetry
Fulmination logic contumely
Proposition dialectic philosophy
Tergiversation polemic and ideology
Actual action, he expostulated, is behavior -
Behavior that acts, he fulminated,
Actually impels or constrains the acts
Of other behavers
This is only done, he propounded,
By applying pressure to weak points
In these others’ safety or security
But acts of violence, he tergiversated,
Only spread or institutionalize violence.
Apart from physical violence, he droned on,
All people have two things they can use
To act with –
Time, and Money.
What you can do with time is specific
To your skills and situation
But what you can do with money
Has exactly two categories:
You can give it,
Or you can withhold it.
You may think withholding is automatic,
And it is, it is; but you are not the one doing it,
It is being withheld from you, in every pay period.
By far your largest charitable contribution
Is to institutionalized violence.
To attempt to withhold your money from these withholdings
Would be enormously risky, painful and destabilizing
In ways that calls to action and other forms of talk never are.
But for one body to impart momentum to another body,
It has to transfer energy, i.e. there must be a cost.
* * * * * * *
On the other hand:
It is currently fashionable to say
That we are not the same person over time
Everything is replaced every few years, personality is a myth
And according to the most advanced thinking
Consciousness is an accident that affects nothing.
In the real world, of course,
I’m the same person I was at age seven
When I first thought of myself as a person;
This knowledge is immediate and irrefutable.
We aren’t the sum total of replaceable parts,
And consciousness for most people is a long-lived thing
Not the space between tick-tocks of a metronome.
This conscious thing concerns itself almost entirely
With exteriors, which are almost the only thing to
Latch onto. But the ultimate ho-hum of the exteriors
Compared to the permanent (mortal) consciousness,
Which has no good bad up down or plus-minus incentives
Gets so obvious as to become ridiculous. This is Anti-Action.
Other terms include depression, cynicism, selfishness,
Detachment, solipsism, reality.
But you must care about the others,
Or you are contemptible. Even the Buddha
Said this…right? (It was a long time ago
And there may have been many edits.)
The real and only basis for action is Love,
That is to say you must care about the exteriors
Which is to say the undeniable mechanics of the world
And what happens to those who are acted upon. You Must.
Is this knowledge immediate and irrefutable?
Apr 2, 2020
Apr 2, 2020 at 3:58 PM UTC