Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya; aopicho@yahoo.com)


I guess most of you will be born when
Taban Makitiyong Reneket lo Liyong is dead
When he will be already another ****** dead
Myself I am luck I have met relative of zinjathropus
I have shared a table and a roof
With Liyong the poetical witch of port Africa
Let me tell you how he is and what puzzles him;
He is black and short stumpy and weak
In his shadow of seventy years, a sagacious septuagenarian
He has **** eyes and his protruding nose is keen
On solving problems of an African girl child
He has read all the books in the world
Apart from the book of Amos in the evil Bible
He is ugly in the face and breathes cacophonously
In the left north with heavy sound
He is an aggressive eater with sharp appetites
Towards African herbs and turkana beef; goat meet
He is a sympathetic listener who gets
Inspiration by listening to the young
He loves all students with passion, but who knows
He loves poems and incantations
From the akuku culture in southern Sudan
Where he was born before becoming a temporary Ugandan
He is fond of taking knowledge upwards
The palm wine tree along the shores and coastlines
This is where he found the fellow son of zinjathropus
A palm wine Drinkard in the name of Amos Tutuola,

Taban wonders why Frantz Omar Fanon has
The un-even ribs on the sides
Taban wonders why there are no aged Chinese in the world
Why turkana women are the most beautiful in Africa
But they play like playing bush love where
But every time before you go off her top
The deadly desert scorpion bites you on the leg
Why The Babukusu of east Africa stopped their revolution
Why the books of Ali A Mazrui form a succinct tribe
Why the Masai chiefs eat as peasants beggingly look
Why there is oil in turkana area and no turkana man knows where oil is
Why Obama has not read his fixions and meditations, his youthful oeuvre
Why Wole Soyinka used to be jailed by foolish people in Nigeria
Why Achebe and Okigbo condemned Captain Elechi Amadi to detention
During the tribally secessionist Igbo war of Biafra
Why publishers in Kenya take bribes in kind
Especially whisky, pilsner, viceroy, smirnoff and freezing tusker
Why Pablo Neruda was not born in Congo
Why Jews are all over the world but none is seen
Why thirteen offenses against his enemies
Never shook the world like Das kapitel of Karl Marx
Why man cannot eat socialism but only bread and wine
Why Ramogi Acheing Oneko was not in Lodwar prison
Why Paul Ngei broke the leg of Jomo Kenyatta
When they were in detention at Lodwar
Why he missed by a whisker to betroth Grace Ogot
A Luo babie who leaves in the land without
Neither thunder nor promise of thunder
In the bossomy bossom of Bethwel Ogot
Whose foot prints on the sands of times
Hat to Sent Daniel arap Moi Home shout a lame poem;
Jogoo! Jogoo! Jogoo! Jogoo!
Why a short fat big headed man the poet in this poem
Asked him why he launched Christmas in Lodwar during December 2013
But not the intellectually logical So what and Show What
Why turkana men don’t put on *******
But still their ***** cannot make three percent in size
Of the size of the ***** of a Luhyia man Mr. Wanyama
Who hosted Taban during chrismas in Lodwar
Why his tribesmen will remove six front teeth
From his lower jawbone when he is dead.

Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya;aopicho@yahoo.com)

Here is a toast for valentine
Valentine in all seasons perennial
Where angst of money for love  
Cradled utopian capitalism,
It is once again in the city of Omurate
In the south most parts of Ethiopia
On the borders of Kenya and Ethiopia
Where actually the river Ormo enters Lake Turkana,
There lived a pair of lovers
With overt compassion for one another
The male lover was an origin of Nyangtom,
A cattle rustling Nilotic kingdom
While the female lover was a descendant of King Solomon
The Jewish children which King Solomon aborted
Because their mother was an Ethiopian African
They now form substantial part of the Ethiopian population
Their clan is known as Amharic, they speak subverted Yiddish,
These lovers were good to one another
Sharing secrets and all other stuffs that go with love.

Both the lovers were fatherless
They had lost their fathers through early death
They only had the mothers, who were again sickly
Their mothers coughed a whole night with whoops
And when in the wee of the night, when temperatures go low
The mothers breathe with wheezing sound
Like peasant music from African violin,
They didn’t eat with good appetite
They always left irritating chunks on the plates,
But they all puked mucus from their mouths
And of course with a very sickening regularity.

The menace of sick mothers intervened with love freedom
Among the inter-compassionate lovers
They did not have time for real active love
I will not mention recurrent missing of ceremonies
Fetes that are bound to go with valentine day
The lovers were bored to their teeth
They don’t knew when gods will come to unyoke them.

Especially the male lover, was most perturbed
His mother looked sorriest
With a scrofulous look on her old aged African face
She looked like a forlorn erstwhile cattle rustler
She ever whined in pain like a trapped hyena
Her son the male lover even began apologizing
To the female lover for such environmental upsets
Hence an African proverb that;
No love is possible with impaired judgment.

One day in the wee of the night
With no electricity nor any source of light
Darkness engulfing each and every aspect of the city
Confirming the hinterland of Africa
The female lover woke up from the sleep
And she never heard the usual wheezing breathes
That her mother often made in such hours,
Feat of suspicion gripped her
She jumped out of her bed to where her mother was
On feeling her, she found her dead, cold like a black member
She was already past the rigor mortis stage of death process
African chilliness had frozen her like a poikilothermic creature.

She wept but not in the uproarious groan
In that instinctive Jewish shrewdness
She did not announce nor inform her lover of her mother’s death
She only washed and groomed the cadaver of her mother
She made a headscarf around the head of dead mother
She even placed reading glasses on her face
On her mother’s dead torso she wrapped a dress
The most expensive of all bought from Egypt,
In the same wee of the night
She carried cadaver of her mother on her shoulders
The way a poor Nigerian farmer would carry a stem of banana
And walked slowly by slowly for a distance of a hundred kilometers
Down ***** into Kenya towards the city of Todanyang in Turkana County
Todanyang was a busy city, but silent and minus people in the night
The king of this city was called Lapur the son of Turkanai
And the law that Lapur passed in this city was archaic
It was; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a Jew for a Jew
A pokot for a pokot, a samburu for a samburu
It was simply the law with nothing else
Other than clauses of measure for measure
And clauses of *** for tat instantaneously administered,
On reaching the market she placed her mother standing
Being supported on a sign post at the bus stage
In pose similar to that of an early morning traveler,
She sat a side like a prowling spider awaiting foolish fly
They way an African ***** exposes its red ****
And when the hen comes to peck
It traps and closes the head of the hen
Deeper into its ****,
At that bus stage there was a hotel
Owned by a Rwandese refugee
From the foolish clan of the Hutu
He had ran away from the genocide
In his country, he was also the perpetrator
And thus he was a runaway from the law *** hotelier
His name was Chapuchapu, meaning the quick one,
When Chapuchapu opened the hotel for the early customers
The female lover walked into the hotel
With innocence on her face like all the Jews
She placed an order for two mugs of coffee
And two pieces of bread
When Chapuchapu had placed food on the table
The female lover shrewdly instructed Chapuchapu
To go and hold the hand of the woman standing at the sign post
To bring her into the hotel for morning tea,
Chapuchapu in his unsuspecting charisma
With a mad drive to make money that morning
He dashed out as instructed with his foolish notion
That the customer is the queen, which is not
He grapped the standing cadaver with force
On pulling her to come along
The cadaver tumbled down like a marionette
Everything falling away; headscarf and glasses
Chapuchapu was overtaken by awe
The female lover was watching
Like the big brother in the Orwellian satire, 1984.
When the cadaver of her mother fell
She came out of the hotel
Screaming like a hundred vehicles
Of St John Ambulance
And two hundred Kenyan vehicles of fire brigade
And three hundred Kenyan cash transfer vehicles,
She was accusing Chapuchapu for being careless
Careless in his work that he had killed her mother,
Swam of armed humanity in Turkana loinclothes
Began pouring in like waters of Nile into Mediterranean
Female lover improved the scale of her screaming
Chapuchapu like a heavyweight idiot was dumbfounded
Armed people came in their infinite
Finally king Lapur arrived on his royal donkey
That his foot soldiers had only rustled
From Samburu land a fortnight ago,
The presence of the king quelled the hullabaloo
The king asked to find out what had happened
Amid sops the female lover narrated how
Chapuchapu the hotelier had killed her mother
Through his careless helter skelter behaviour
The king sighed and shouted the judgment
To the mad crowd; an eye for a……….!?
The crowd responded back to the King
In a feat of amok value;
For an eye you mighty Lapur son  ofTurkanai,
The stones, kicks, jabs began rainning
In volleys on an innocent Chapuchapu
Amid shouts that **** him, he came here to **** people
The way he killed a thousand fold in Rwanda.

The sopping female lover requested the king
That his people wait a bit before they continue
Then the king waved to the people to stop
Chapuchapu was on the ground writhing in pain
When the King asked the female lover what was the concern
She requested for pay from Chapuchapu not people to **** him
Chapuchapu accepted to pay whatever the price that will be put
Female lover asked for everything in hundreds;
Carmel, money, Birr, sheep, goats, donkeys, cows
Name them all they were in hundreds
Chapuchapu and his family were saying yes to every demand
And they rushed to bring whatever was said
The payments exhausted Chapuchapu back to square zero
The female lover carried everything away
The cadaver of her mother on her shoulder
She disappeared into the forest
and buried her mother there.

When she arrived home she found the male lover
He looked at her overnight change in fortune in stupefaction
He didn’t believe his eyes, it was a dream
Sweetheart, where have you gotten all these?
Questioned the male lover
Sweetie darling there is market for dead women
At Todanyang in the Turkana County of Kenya
I killed my sickly mother and carried her cadaver
As a trade ware to Todanyang
Whatever I have that you are looking at is the proceed,
Can my mother fetch the same? Asked the male lover
Of course yes, even more
Given the Africanness of your mother
African cadavers fetch more than the Jewish ones
At Todanyang market,
The male lover was now overtaken
By strong urge for quick riches
Was not seeing it getting evening
That day for him was as long as a whole century
He was anxious and restless more tired of a sickly mother
When evening fell he was already ready with the butcherer’s tools
He didn’t have nerves to wait till the wee of the night
As early as eleven in the evening he axed his mother’s head
Into two chunks of human skull spilling the brains in stark horror
Blood streaming like a rivulet all over the house
The male lover was nonchalant to all these
He was in the full feat of determination
To **** and sell his mother to  get the proceeds
With which he could foot the bills of valentine day.

He stuffed the headless blood soaked torso
Of his mothers cadaver in the sisal bag
He threw it to his bag
And began going to Todanyang
The market for human dead bodies
He went half running and half walking
With regular whistling of his favourite poem;
Ode to my Jewish lover
He reached Todanyang in the wee of the night
No human being was in sight
All people had gone as it was late in the night
He then slept in the open with dead body of his mother
Stuffed in the sisal bag beside him
Wandering night dogs regularly disturbed him
As they came to bite at smelling curdled blood
But he always scared them away.
As per the male lover he overslept till five in the morning
But when he woke up he unhesitatingly began to shout
Advertising his ware of trade in foolish version;
Am selling, the body of my mother, I have killed,
I killed her myself, it is still fresh, come and buy,
I will give you’re a bargain price,

When the morning came
People began crowding around him
As he kept on shouting his advertisement
Also Lapur the king came
He was surprised with the situation,
He asked the male lover to confirm
Whatever he was shouting
The male lover vehemently confirmed,
Then the law of an eye for an eye
Effortlessly took its course
Lapur  ordered his people, in a glorious royal decree
To stone the male lover to death
And bury him away without ceremony
Along with his mother in the sisal bag
In the wasted cemetery of villains
The same way Pablo Neruda
Had to bury his dead dog behind the house,

On hearing the tidings
About what had befallen her lover
The female lover had to send out a long giggle
Coming deep from her heart with maximum joy
She took over the estate of the male lover
Combined with hers,
All the animals and everything she took,
She made her son the manager
The son whom she immaculately conceived
Without any nuptial experience in the usual Jewish style
And their wealth multiplied to vastness
And hence toxic valentine gave birth to capitalism

Build in a very humble way
Its architecture redolent of Europe,
Plain and honest in structure,
The vestibule at the entrance
Replete with old hardbound books
Dust covering the jackets
In their agony of human oblivion,
Every section has shelves under lock
Only to be open on permitted access.

Located in the desert like an oases,
But the desert of readers not waters,
But like any other oasis, it is useful,
At most to the genuine users.

There are books and books all over,
Windows only open after adjustment,
You start at the door step with classics,
Indian, European, American and global classics,
I pumped into Leo Tolstoy at the first glance,
Finely juxtaposed; Anne Karenina after War and peace.

I opened war and peace and I chanced on Napoleon
Then thrill of intellect and bliss of art
Began flowing into my guts like a river
I kept on wandering why Leo Tolstoy
Never became a Christian sub religion,
To be added to the two testaments,
For it to begat the post-modern holy Bible.

My physical peregrination of the hand
Led me to a vase of rosy wine
Its intellectual whiff surpassing all,
The psalms of David and songs of songs
This was nothing but precious discovery;
A thousand Rubiyats of Omar Khayyam
The shoulder of wisdom and love of God
The hero of Sufism and demystifier of heaven,
When in fact I came unto his 69th Rubiyat;
I have heard people say
that those who love wine are ******.
That can't be true, that clearly is a lie.
For if lovers of wine and love are bound for hell,
heaven would be quite empty!

I chewed and chewed fortune out of Rubiyats,
I went through all the thousand Rubiyats,
Only hot Sun and desert sand storms of Lodwar
Are my witnesses among the myriads of bystanders
As life of a reader is similar to the life a writer,
They both derive energy from solitude’s power.

I moved on again to Alfred Jarren
The son of France, the father of mystery;
Pataphysics the science of fantasy
It has the realm beyond metaphysics,
His survey of pataphorical world
Has remained witchcraft
Beyond my simple soul’s grasp.

Paradox is one other worldwide wonder
As I look at an illiterate Turkana Man,
Guarding the library, club in his hand,
His ever week from stubborn hunger,
His sires never go to school, perhaps culture
I looked at him often in my pause for muse,
Why guard knowledge that you can’t use?

I again came upon the Quran
I read it voraciously over and again,
In expectation of great knowledge
Always making Muslims to be noisy,
I have found nothing great in the Quran,
Only regular subversions of Biblical grammar,
Let Muslims sober up to respect Jesus Christ,
His sermon on the Mountain is perfectly enough
as an impeachment to crazed pataphoricals
That Muslims often dare the world with.

I read the Bible again in repetition
Of what I had did ten years ago,
I read psalms, Job and Isaiah,
Gospels and epistles are more nice,
Chronicles and Habakkuk are so dull,
Lamentations are somber poems,
Revelations are esoteric lies,
Kings and Samuel full of chauvinism,
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are mere clichés
My idea is; mankind can fear God
Minus Jewish intervention.

Now I chanced upon The synagogue of Satan,
A book written by one other crazy American,
His name is Andrew Hitchcock Crichton,
The book is long and spellbinding,
Having historical facts from early centuries,
Chronicling mysterious growth of Jewish empire,
Arranging facts one after another
Dismissing Bush’s anger against Arabs,
Over the bombing of the twin towers
When they are the Jews who Bombed America
As a decoy to induce American wrath,
Thus twin towers bombing was Jewish war ploy
To put Arabs into a rat’s corner.

I came across one funny book
Written by a Indian sage
Its title was Secrets of ***
From male perspective,
I don’t liked the book
For its prurient content,
But to my sad chagrin it was the most read
Its leaves were dog eared and use worn
I spied into the rumour about its tearing,
T it was a hot cake among nuns and priests
Presently living at Lodwar cathedral.

You could also wonder my dear brother
Why a Christian library has works of Marx?
This was my muse as I read Karl Marx,
I mean everything written by Karl Marx,
From Das Kapita to Germany Philosophy,
Selected works to Poverty of philosophy,
18th Brumaire to Integral calculus,
The Manifesto to the letters,
I read Karl Marx as if I was in Russia,
I wondered why Catholics are Liberal
They fear not those who contradict them.

The Holy Grail is visibly placed
In fact at right hand corner,
At the far end on your entrance
I chose to read it
Because of its voluminousity,
The book is about ****** life
Of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene,
This book shares out that;
One time Jesus was found hiding,
Kissing Mary Magdalene, the Grail
In the most affectionate manner ever.

The catholic Library at Lodwar is bad news
It swallowed me like waters of Indian Ocean,
It is located at place called Lokiriama,
It was established by Bishop Mahoni
One other man deserving my respect
He was humble and catholically wise,
Very intelligent and consciously bookish,
His mission was to make the Turkana people
A modern community, but he failed,
He was so disappointed to his hilt
He transferred to the Archdioceses of New-York
Where he began facing problems of the law
On allegations of him being a *******,
I curse the devil for such temptations.

I did meet Yan Martel in this dome of books
His famous book; Life of Mr. Pi
It was my eye opener?
It transformed me from a village bumpkin
To a modern reader of global literature,
I read this book amid my fear of Tigre
But I was thrilled, to my bone marrow
When the main character drunk the blood,
Warm salty blood of the sea turtle.

I got another book with folded pages,
At its mid was the red book marker
Baring the name of the respected priest,
The book was entitled; How to excel as
A ****-******, chapter one focused on gays
Chapter two  focused on lesbians,
But the rest of the book was all homosexuality,
In nothing else, but rosiest terms.

On such encounters I once again went back,
To re-read 89th Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam
It has the following quatrain to echo;
Looking for peace on earth? Foolishness.
Believing in eternal calm? Foolishness.
Once dead your sleep will be short. You may
be reborn as a clump of weeds that will be
trodden underfoot, or as a flower that
will wither in the sun's heat.

African writers were stuffed on one shelve
Labeled African books of English expressions,
But on my request to the project manager,
His name was Peter Kebo, he was Flamboyant
And physically indifferent to Turkana poverty,
We agreed with him to rename the shelves
As; African literature in English Language,
Nobel Laureates are in this section;
Soyinka, Lessing, Coatze and Gordimer
Not forgetting the Egyptian literary tiger
In the name of Mahfouz or Maguiz
I clearly don’t know,
Sembene Ousmane is also here
I read him again for the fourth time,
It’s when I found out the simple truth,
That God’s bits of wood, translates as;
The wretched of the earth,
I read Lessing’s Grass is singing,
She likes ***,
I read Gordimer’s July’s people,
She likes menstrual blood,
I read everything here
As published by James Currey
In his Africa writes back,
I also read the White African Nobelite
Joshua Maxwell Coetzee
He is a wizard of Narrative literature,
I read his life of Mr. K.
I found amusing plots and amusing themes,
I also read Ngugi’s Wizard of the Crow
It is nice; Ngugi is still fighting dictatorship,
Not physically but in a metaphysical manner.

I was again lucky enough
To chance on Caribbean literature,
Is when I read Vitian S Naipaul
The humourist Marxist of Marxists,
I read his Mr. Biswas’s house,
With avidness of an aphrodisiac cur,
His characters like taking a long time
In the toilets, Naipaul is good,
I again chanced on George Flamming
In the Castle of my skin
Caribbean literature stinks of slavery
And counter-slavery.

My landing to the shelve of Latin America,
Was a total blessing; Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Stood out like tor of literature among others,
I began with his Big Maria’s Funeral,
Then I moved on to Love in Times of Cholera,
And then You Can’t Write to the Colonel,
As I spiced my intellect with Melancholic *****,
Then finally I revisited his Stories from Africa
And the Hundred Years of Solitude,
The following morning when I came back,
I read in the newspaper that;
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is dead!
It was sad and poor of me, I mourned him
With long essays and somber poetry,
Then I fell in love with the literatures
of Spanish origin in language sense,
I read Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda
From Octavio I enjoyed coda,
Between Coming and Going and so on,
Neruda thrilled me with his sense of Marx
Especially his poem; on burying the dog.

European classics section arrested me
I never easily moved out of there,
I chanced on ****** and annals of Goebbels,
Reading Russians like Tolstoy,Chenkov,
Gorky, Gogol and Shelynetsyn was lively,
Chewing Shakespeare from cover to cover
Not spearing Pushkin nor Homer,
Victor Hugo was a relish. Emile Zola
And Maugham, I too enjoyed…

Then my holiday in Lodwar was finally over,
But I am soon going back for my Xmas,
I will directly go back to the European section,
I also remember having come by;
The Satanic Verses of Salman Rushdie,
I will have to  re-read it with passion,
It is my prayer that this time comes
For I to resume my holy duty
In the Catholic Library at Lokiriama
In Lodwar Dioceses of Turkana County
In the Savannah desert in North West
Regions of my country Kenya.

by
Alexander K Opicho

(Eldoret, Kenya;aopicho@yahoo.com)

When I grow up I will seek permission
From my parents, my mother before my father
To travel to Russia the European land of dystopia
that has never known democracy in any tincture
I will beckon the tsar of Russia to open for me
Their classical cipher that Bogy visoky tsa dalyko
I will ask the daughters of Russia to oblivionize my dark skin
***** skin and make love to me the real pre-democratic love
Love that calls for ambers that will claw the fire of revolution,
I will ask my love from the land of Siberia to show me cradle of Rand
The European manger on which Ayn Rand was born during the Leninist census
I will exhume her umbilical cord plus the placenta to link me up
To her dystopian mind that germinated the vice
For shrugging the atlas for we the living ones,
In a full dint of my ***** libido I will ask her
With my African temerarious manner I will bother her
To show me the bronze statues of Alexander Pushkin
I hear it is at ******* of the city of Moscow; Petersburg
I will talk to my brother Pushkin, my fellow African born in Ethiopia
In the family of Godunov only taken to Europe in a slave raid
Ask the Frenchman Henri Troyat who stood with his ***** erected
As he watched an Ethiopian father fertilizing an Ethiopian mother
And child who was born was Dystopian Alexander Pushkin,
I will carry his remains; the bones, the skull and the skeleton in oily
Sisal threads made bag on my broad African shoulders back to Africa
I will re-bury him in the city of Omurate in southern Ethiopia at the buttocks
Of the fish venting beautiful summer waters of Lake Turkana,
I will ask Alexander Pushkin when in a sag on my back to sing for me
His famous poems in praise of thighs of women;

(I loved you: and, it may be, from my soul
The former love has never gone away,
But let it not recall to you my dole;
I wish not sadden you in any way.

I loved you silently, without hope, fully,
In diffidence, in jealousy, in pain;
I loved you so tenderly and truly,
As let you else be loved by any man.
I loved you because of your smooth thighs
They put my heart on fire like amber in gasoline)

I will leave the bronze statue of Alexander Pushkin in Moscow
For Lenin to look at, he will assign Mayakovski to guard it
Day and night as he sings for it the cacotopian
Poems of a slap in the face of public taste;

(I know the power of words, I know words' tocsin.
They're not the kind applauded by the boxes.
From words like these coffins burst from the earth
and on their own four oaken legs stride forth.
It happens they reject you, unpublished, unprinted.
But saddle-girths tightening words gallop ahead.
See how the centuries ring and trains crawl
to lick poetry's calloused hands.
I know the power of words. Seeming trifles that fall
like petals beneath the heel-taps of dance.
But man with his soul, his lips, his bones.)

I will come along to African city of Omurate
With the pedagogue of the thespic poet
The teacher of the poets, the teacher who taught
Alexander Sergeyvich Pushkin; I know his name
The name is Nikolai Vasileyvitch Gogol
I will caution him to carry only two books
From which he will teach the re-Africanized Pushkin
The first book is the Cloak and second book will be
The voluminous dead souls that have two sharp children of Russian dystopia;
The cactopia of Nosdrezv in his sadistic cult of betrayal
And utopia of Chichikov in his paranoid ownership of dead souls
Of the Russian peasants, muzhiks and serfs,
I will caution him not to carry the government inspector incognito
We don’t want the inspector general in the African city of Omurate
He will leave it behind for Lenin to read because he needs to know
What is to be done.
I don’t like the extreme badness of owning the dead souls
Let me run away to the city of Paris, where romance and poetry
Are utopian commanders of the dystopian orchestra
In which Victor Marie Hugo is haunted by
The ghost of Jean Val Jean; Le Miserable,
I will implore Hugo to take me to the Corsican Island
And chant for me one **** song of the French revolution;


       (  take heed of this small child of earth;
He is great; he hath in him God most high.
Children before their fleshly birth
Are lights alive in the blue sky.
  
In our light bitter world of wrong
They come; God gives us them awhile.
His speech is in their stammering tongue,
And his forgiveness in their smile.
  
Their sweet light rests upon our eyes.
Alas! their right to joy is plain.
If they are hungry Paradise
Weeps, and, if cold, Heaven thrills with pain.
  
The want that saps their sinless flower
Speaks judgment on sin's ministers.
Man holds an angel in his power.
Ah! deep in Heaven what thunder stirs,
  
When God seeks out these tender things
Whom in the shadow where we sleep
He sends us clothed about with wings,
And finds them ragged babes that we)

 From the Corsican I won’t go back to Paris
Because Napoleon Bonaparte and the proletariat
Has already taken over the municipal of Paris
I will dodge this city and maneuver my ways
Through Alsace and Lorraine
The Miginko islands of Europe
And cross the boundaries in to bundeslander
Into Germany, I will go to Berlin and beg the Gestapo
The State police not to shoot me as I climb the Berlin wall
I will balance dramatically on the top of Berlin wall
Like Eshu the Nigerian god of fate
With East Germany on my right; Die ossie
And West Germany on my left; Die wessie
Then like Jesus balancing and walking
On the waters of Lake Galilee
I will balance on Berlin wall
And call one of my faithful followers from Germany
The strong hearted Friedrich von Schiller
To climb the Berlin wall with me
So that we can sing his dystopic Cassandra as a duet
We shall sing and balance on the wall of Berlin
Schiller’s beauteous song of Cassandra;

(Mirth the halls of Troy was filling,
Ere its lofty ramparts fell;
From the golden lute so thrilling
Hymns of joy were heard to swell.
From the sad and tearful slaughter
All had laid their arms aside,
For Pelides Priam's daughter
Claimed then as his own fair bride.

Laurel branches with them bearing,
Troop on troop in bright array
To the temples were repairing,
Owning Thymbrius' sovereign sway.
Through the streets, with frantic measure,
Danced the bacchanal mad round,
And, amid the radiant pleasure,
Only one sad breast was found.

Joyless in the midst of gladness,
None to heed her, none to love,
Roamed Cassandra, plunged in sadness,
To Apollo's laurel grove.
To its dark and deep recesses
Swift the sorrowing priestess hied,
And from off her flowing tresses
Tore the sacred band, and cried:

"All around with joy is beaming,
Ev'ry heart is happy now,
And my sire is fondly dreaming,
Wreathed with flowers my sister's brow
I alone am doomed to wailing,
That sweet vision flies from me;
In my mind, these walls assailing,
Fierce destruction I can see."

"Though a torch I see all-glowing,
Yet 'tis not in *****'s hand;
Smoke across the skies is blowing,
Yet 'tis from no votive brand.
Yonder see I feasts entrancing,
But in my prophetic soul,
Hear I now the God advancing,
Who will steep in tears the bowl!"

"And they blame my lamentation,
And they laugh my grief to scorn;
To the haunts of desolation
I must bear my woes forlorn.
All who happy are, now shun me,
And my tears with laughter see;
Heavy lies thy hand upon me,
Cruel Pythian deity!"

"Thy divine decrees foretelling,
Wherefore hast thou thrown me here,
Where the ever-blind are dwelling,
With a mind, alas, too clear?
Wherefore hast thou power thus given,
What must needs occur to know?
Wrought must be the will of Heaven--
Onward come the hour of woe!"

"When impending fate strikes terror,
Why remove the covering?
Life we have alone in error,
Knowledge with it death must bring.
Take away this prescience tearful,
Take this sight of woe from me;
Of thy truths, alas! how fearful
'Tis the mouthpiece frail to be!"

"Veil my mind once more in slumbers
Let me heedlessly rejoice;
Never have I sung glad numbers
Since I've been thy chosen voice.
Knowledge of the future giving,
Thou hast stolen the present day,
Stolen the moment's joyous living,--
Take thy false gift, then, away!"

"Ne'er with bridal train around me,
Have I wreathed my radiant brow,
Since to serve thy fane I bound me--
Bound me with a solemn vow.
Evermore in grief I languish--
All my youth in tears was spent;
And with thoughts of bitter anguish
My too-feeling heart is rent."

"Joyously my friends are playing,
All around are blest and glad,
In the paths of pleasure straying,--
My poor heart alone is sad.
Spring in vain unfolds each treasure,
Filling all the earth with bliss;
Who in life can e'er take pleasure,
When is seen its dark abyss?"

"With her heart in vision burning,
Truly blest is Polyxene,
As a bride to clasp him yearning.
Him, the noblest, best Hellene!
And her breast with rapture swelling,
All its bliss can scarcely know;
E'en the Gods in heavenly dwelling
Envying not, when dreaming so."

"He to whom my heart is plighted
Stood before my ravished eye,
And his look, by passion lighted,
Toward me turned imploringly.
With the loved one, oh, how gladly
Homeward would I take my flight
But a Stygian shadow sadly
Steps between us every night."

"Cruel Proserpine is sending
All her spectres pale to me;
Ever on my steps attending
Those dread shadowy forms I see.
Though I seek, in mirth and laughter
Refuge from that ghastly train,
Still I see them hastening after,--
Ne'er shall I know joy again."

"And I see the death-steel glancing,
And the eye of ****** glare;
On, with hasty strides advancing,
Terror haunts me everywhere.
Vain I seek alleviation;--
Knowing, seeing, suffering all,
I must wait the consummation,
In a foreign land must fall."

While her solemn words are ringing,
Hark! a dull and wailing tone
From the temple's gate upspringing,--
Dead lies Thetis' mighty son!
Eris shakes her snake-locks hated,
Swiftly flies each deity,
And o'er Ilion's walls ill-fated
Thunder-clouds loom heavily!)

When the Gestapoes get impatient
We shall not climb down to walk on earth
Because by this time  of utopia
Thespis and Muse the gods of poetry
Would have given us the wings to fly
To fly high over England, I and schiller
We shall not land any where in London
Nor perch to any of the English tree
Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Thales
We shall not land there in these lands
The waters of river Thames we shall not drink
We shall fly higher over England
The queen of England we shall not commune
For she is my lender; has lend me the language
English language in which I am chanting
My dystopic songs, poor me! What a cacotopia!
If she takes her language away from
I will remain poetically dead
In the Universe of art and culture
I will form a huge palimpsest of African poetry
Friedrich son of schiller please understand me
Let us not land in England lest I loose
My borrowed tools of worker back to the owner,
But instead let us fly higher in to the azure
The zenith of the sky where the eagles never dare
And call the English bard
through  our high shrilled eagle’s contralto
William Shakespeare to come up
In the English sky; to our treat of poetic blitzkrieg
Please dear schiller we shall tell the bard of London
To come up with his three Luftwaffe
These will be; the deer he stole from the rich farmer
Once when he was a lad in the rural house of john the father,
Second in order is the Hamlet the price of Denmark
Thirdly is  his beautiful song of the **** of lucrece,
We shall ask the bard to return back the deer to the owner
Three of ourselves shall enjoy together dystopia in Hamlet
And ask Shakespeare to sing for us his song
In which he saw a man **** Lucrece; the **** of Lucrece;

( From the besieged Ardea all in post,
Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,
Lust-breathed Tarquin leaves the Roman host,
And to Collatium bears the lightless fire
Which, in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire
  And girdle with embracing flames the waist
  Of Collatine's fair love, Lucrece the chaste.

Haply that name of chaste unhapp'ly set
This bateless edge on his keen appetite;
When Collatine unwisely did not let
To praise the clear unmatched red and white
Which triumph'd in that sky of his delight,
  Where mortal stars, as bright as heaven's beauties,
  With pure aspects did him peculiar duties.

For he the night before, in Tarquin's tent,
Unlock'd the treasure of his happy state;
What priceless wealth the heavens had him lent
In the possession of his beauteous mate;
Reckoning his fortune at such high-proud rate,
  That kings might be espoused to more fame,
  But king nor peer to such a peerless dame.

O happiness enjoy'd but of a few!
And, if possess'd, as soon decay'd and done
As is the morning's silver-melting dew
Against the golden splendour of the sun!
An expir'd date, cancell'd ere well begun:
  Honour and beauty, in the owner's arms,
  Are weakly fortress'd from a world of harms.

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator;
What needeth then apologies be made,
To set forth that which is so singular?
Or why is Collatine the publisher
  Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown
  From thievish ears, because it is his own?

Perchance his boast of Lucrece' sovereignty
Suggested this proud issue of a king;
For by our ears our hearts oft tainted be:
Perchance that envy of so rich a thing,
Braving compare, disdainfully did sting
  His high-pitch'd thoughts, that meaner men should vaunt
  That golden hap which their superiors want)

  
I and Schiller we shall be the audience
When Shakespeare will echo
The enemies of beauty as
It is weakly protected in the arms of Othello.

I and Schiller we don’t know places in Greece
But Shakespeare’s mother comes from Greece
And Shakespeare’s wife comes from Athens
Shakespeare thus knows Greece like Pericles,
We shall not land anywhere on the way
But straight we shall be let
By Shakespeare to Greece
Into the inner chamber of calypso
Lest the Cyclopes eat us whole meal
We want to redeem Homer from the
Love detention camp of calypso
Where he has dallied nine years in the wilderness
Wilderness of love without reaching home
I will ask Homer to introduce me
To Muse, Clio and Thespis
The three spiritualities of poetry
That gave Homer powers to graft the epics
Of Iliad and Odyssey centerpieces of Greece dystopia
I will ask Homer to chant and sing for us the epical
Songs of love, Grecian cradle of utopia
Where Cyclopes thrive on heavyweight cacotopia
Please dear Homer kindly sing for us;
(Thus through the livelong day to the going down of the sun we
feasted our fill on meat and drink, but when the sun went down and
it came on dark, we camped upon the beach. When the child of
morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, I bade my men on board and
loose the hawsers. Then they took their places and smote the grey
sea with their oars; so we sailed on with sorrow in our hearts, but
glad to have escaped death though we had lost our comrades)
                                  
From Greece to Africa the short route  is via India
The sub continent of India where humanity
Flocks like the oceans of women and men
The land in which Romesh Tulsi
Grafted Ramayana and Mahabharata
The handbook of slavery and caste prejudice
The land in which Gujarat Indian tongue
In the cheeks of Rabidranathe Tagore
Was awarded a Poetical honour
By Alfred Nobel minus any Nemesis
From the land of Scandinavia,
I will implore Tagore to sing for me
The poem which made Nobel to give him a prize
I will ask Tagore to sing in English
The cacotopia and utopia that made India
An oversized dystopia that man has ever seen,
Tagore sing please Tagore sing for me your beggarly heat;

(When the heart is hard and parched up,
come upon me with a shower of mercy.

When grace is lost from life,
come with a burst of song.

When tumultuous work raises its din on all sides shutting me out from
beyond, come to me, my lord of silence, with thy peace and rest.

When my beggarly heart sits crouched, shut up in a corner,
break open the door, my king, and come with the ceremony of a king.

When desire blinds the mind with delusion and dust, O thou holy one,
thou wakeful, come with thy light and thy thunder)



The heart of beggar must be
A hard heart for it to glorify in the art of begging,

I don’t like begging
This is knot my heart suffered
From my childhood experience
I saw my mother

Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya;aopicho@yahoo.com)

Once upon a time in the city of Omurate
In the southern part of Ethiopia
Omurate that is on Ethiopian boundary with Kenya
There were two prosperous animal families
Living side by side as good neighbours
in glory and pomp of riches
Each family was ostensibly rich
And rambunctious in social styles
They were the families of African rat family
And the Jewish cat family; the city belonged to them
They all enjoyed stocks of desert scorpions from Todanyang
From the savanna desert of Northern Kenya,
The two families also enjoyed to feed on desert locusts
On which they regularly fed without food squabbles
                               Locust themselves they flew from Lowarang to Omurate
From Lowarang a desert region in Kenya, to their city of Omurate
Sometimes the Jewish cat family enjoyed an extra dish
In form of puff adder flesh, especially the steak of the puff adder muscle
Puff adder were cheaply available in plenty at the lakeshore,
Lakeshores of Lake Turkana
At point which river Ormo enters into Lake Turkana
So the cat was happy and relaxed
Even it rarely mewed,  
Neighbours never often heard its mewing sound
The rat also enjoyed plenty of milk with no strain
Easily gotten from the rustled cattles
Cattle rustled by the Merilee; a warrior tribe in Omurate.

That day the cat had gulped milk since morning
Even its stomach was bulging
Like that of Kenyan state officer
The rat had milk all over the house
In the kitchen, milk allover
In the sitting room, milk in abundance
In the wash, room milk all through
On the bed, milk and stuffs of milk
The rat was bored with nothing to be enticed
Sometimes plenty of milk can become a bother
The rat mused to itself in foolish African empathy
That may be the cat is starving in pangs of hunger
With nothing to drink, or may be it has no milk
When the milk is rotting here in my house
It is un-African for food to rot in your house
When the neighbour’s belly is not full,
On these thoughts the rat washed its legs, and hands
Finished up with its face,
Put on its white short trouser and a green top
It stuffed its tail inside its white short trouser,
The rat poured milk into two pots,
each *** was full to the brim
It carried one in its left hand
And balanced another on its head
In its right hand was an African walking stick
For the elders known as Pakora
The rat took off to the home of the cat
In full feat of animal love and philanthropy
Whistling its favourite poem;
An Ode to a good neighbour,
Walking carefully lest it spills brimful milk,
It entered into the house of the cat without haste
Neither knocking nor waiting to be told come in
In that spectacular charisma of a good neighbour,
When the cat saw the rat it giggled two short giggles
And almost got choked by indecision
For it had been long since this happened,
Since the cat had dine on milk leave alone rat meat
The rat said to the Jewish cat that my brother
Have milk I have brought for you
Have it and sip here it is; the real milk,
In devilish calmness the cat told the rat;
Put it for me on the table, thank you,
But my friend Mr. rat don’t go away; there is more
More for you to help me in addition to milk,
Continue my brother Mr. Cat, how can I help you?
Don’t call me your brother; bursted the cat,
For it is long since I ate the rat meat
And you know rat meat is our stable food
In a frenetic feat of powerlessness the rat was confused
In attempt to save itself
it pleaded that my dear elder, I was
Only having plenty of milk in my house
And to us African rats, it is a taboo
To have a lot of food in your house
When the neighbour’s belly is not full
So I only brought you the present of Milk
Please have it and drink,
Without taciturnity the Cat retorted in persistence;
I know and I am thankful for your good manners
But remember with us Jewish cats it is heinous sin
Forget of a taboo, it is blasphemy against the living
God for one of us to leave the rat free from our house
For you rats are the only stable and kosher food God blessed for us
The Jewish rat family all over the world
So shut up your mandibles, I am to eat you first
Then I will take milk later as a relish.

With its herculean paw the cat crushed the rat
With mighty of the leopard culture
Throwing away the white trouser
And green top from the torso of the rat
The cat ate the rat with voracity of the devil
After which it punctuated its mid day appetite
With slow and relaxed sipping of milk
Slowly and slowly as it felt its internal greatness
And hence the African proverbial cry that;
Behold foolish angst kills the African rat!

Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya;aopicho@yahoo.com)

It is not a half a yellow sun
Nor a full purple hibiscus
Neither a question of Americana
But the political tidbits of Africana
They are indeed a half a government
Neither a coalition nor coalescence
But a journey which starts with one
Very African mile in the sunny city of Nairobi
In the country Kenya where there is hakuna matata
Where gorgeous skyscrapers hang loosely
Like Towers of Singapore in a babellian ego
Swam of humanity in full pomp and glory
Money, property and cityish aura
Moving up and down in bluish collar task
Flock and throng like the north bound mating fish
In the waters of river Nile; O Nile!........,

Moving you down then the countries
Passing the geographical enigma
Of the Great Rift Valley view point
Putting a wonder working escapement before
Your eyes in which once the daughter of primitive
Political bourgeoisie rolled in a Germany Volkswagen
And gasped the last ****** breath
A beautiful Maasai breathe echoing
In the ***** of masculine bowels
The waves of erotically charged ions,

You then passing down to Nakuru minus
Your meat eating halt at carnivorous kikobey
Strait to Kiamba  area where you easily
Meet the Kalenjin militia in a tribal cleansement
Ruthlessly roasting the human steak of kikuyu merchants
In the church but not a mosque due to scarcity
Both young and old kikuyus being roasted
As they forlorn groan and wail;
Atherere ! atherere ! atherere ! niki kioru muntu wa lumbwa !,

Down you go again to a chilly town of  Eldoret
Where you get a ****** *******
Pursuing a bachelors course at the dumb
Moi university where low temperatures
Curtail lively learning in the pedagogy
Or pedagogy of the kipsigis ******,

Down you go a fresh to the town of Kitale
You meet with  maize and corn in the
Full regalia of colonial economy
In its ostensible memento  
Of the palimpsestish British Empire
In the brutish colonial history
Of man eat man civilization,

Then up you go, you beautiful nincompoop
To the slopes of pokotish kapenguria and
Again down slopes to Ortum valleys then whoopsy!
A half a government starts in full swing
The bush pokot youths utterly naked
Like the chimpanzees in Kakamega forest
Shoals of them and throngs of them
Each having a modern gun,a short gun
A Sten gun,a  machine gun,a slave raiding long gun,
Revolvers, the lethal AK 47,
Them pokot youths; extremely illiterate
Put extremely armed with extremely
Modern weapons like the last wonder of the world,

Up you go into the desert of Dr. Richard Leakey’s first home of man
In the land of the Turkana, to a toast of human misery
Where people are sick, people are naked
People are hungry, people die of starvations
After thorough hunger based emaciation
Redolent of purely   a half a government.

Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya;aopicho@yahoo.com)

There are more and more misfortunes in the world
Known to you dear people in your diverse conditions,
But my life and experience has taught me unique lessons
Of kindred to befit me Elizabeth, a daughter of Zinjathropus
Hailing in the savannah desert, Turkana County of Kenya,
I have graduated in to a single lady without test of marriage,
As desert men look at me in their irritating impotence,
**** clothes wrapped around their slender waists passing on me
Like a dog passing on American dollars; cursed be desert men,
I thought my beauty of dark African complexions will give them a ****** tease
But to my chagrin; desert men have a fear of beautiful ladies
My conscience tells me that my beauty is an eye sore to them,
I thought my bulging hips will entice them as is a promise of fertility
Leave alone not to mention my concupiscent ****** warmth, uhmmm!
Desert men have dared not to see and appreciate my **** bossom,
They often pass on me driving their donkeys and emaciated carmels,
I thought my ***** sharp pointed *******, assign of virginity
Will call them to me into a treat of love, affiliative love,
But sadly enough; these dudes are erotically blind,
They they nonchalantly pass on my **** *****,
Wielding a begging bowl in their ***** long hands
Running like drunkard chimpanzees going to Oxfam stores to beg for food,
Cursed be Oxfam an imperialist agent, it has crashed flat
The testicles of our desert brothers into ****** insensitivity,
Oxfam has made African desert men to beg like Hebrew lepers
Other than standing up on their feet to feed their women,
Normally as men would do from the sweat of their brow,
I thought my education will attract them to me,
To love me with those romantic University kisses,
But desert men have crude cultures and slavish religion
They rebuke girl child education as if it is a devil,
Oh my dear God of the forsaken desert ladies
Of the forsaken African daughters,
Take me out of this ****** desert
Take me out of the city desert of Lodwar,
Take me to the equator line and give me a husband,
My eggs are pretty ready to conceive and sire children
Sons and daughters for your own glory O almighty God,
Take me out of this ****** desert,
Where no man treats a modern woman,
Take me out of here and give me a fresh man of my dream.

Because I have known from today;
It is accurse to be a woman in Africa
It is a curse to be a beautiful lady in African deserts
It is a curse to  be a woman graduate in the African desert
It is a curse to have ***** ******* in the African desert,
O! Help me God.