The sun is up, and rubs itself all over my skin,
Yet I feel no flames, just lead filled with lead
Hanging from my bottom eyelids, swinging.
Sunshades usually cast shadows on eye pain,
But this time, the sun can see right through me.
Nothing can save me it seems, sitting on this bench.
The sunshades cast shadows in the teacher's mind:
Sleeping? Not sleeping? No need to check, I suppose.
The lead's getting heavier, and pulls my head down.
The lead's getting heavier, and lulls me, eyes shut,
Head bent. The teacher draws on the board,
And all I remember is that I sleepily missed it all.
(c) nyonglema
Lies #facts
What tales are you telling your thoughts today?
Walking to face your Facebook feed elated,
Post pictures of you in Adonis' heyday,
And thumbs up fast to keep reality sedated
Motivational merchants pick them to hawk wares
And tell the youth of paths that lead to heaven
Only the trials you bear beset like grizzly bears
When you close your eyes to walk to heaven.
As if ever anything came from being chained down
They offer hope as: "Be yourself", "Keep your booth"
You fight with Science, seek solace on tainted ground
While soaking pillows in salient prayers with solid truth.
(c) nyonglema
Je suis #Darak
"J'ai appris avec émotion, l'attentat ignoble perpétré contre Darak et pour lequel plusieurs de ces inconnus sont morts.
Je condamne avec force cet acte odieux des adeptes de la violence et de la terreur. Je vous exprime à vous et au peuple Camerounais ma solidarité."
Ceci aurait suffit dans un tweet, mais qu'est-ce qui est plus important: la mort de ton enfant, ou celui du voisin?
Celui du voisin bien sûr!
(c) nyonglema
#RIP brave soldiers, future generations shall appreciate your sacrifice.
Elections #Cameroon
The voice of the people cry out in the wilderness:
"Prepare ye the days of the next overlord."
They dream of wild money and tarred net streets
But can only be guaranteed not a single day to be bored.
Cast your vote, like exorcism in a closed building
Where faith died! You know the head-spin
Is the moment the vomit spells your inevitable failure.
Votes mean nothing when owned by demons.
I dreamt of choosing a president all mine,
But that's not mine for the choosing,
And despair cooks witch spells in the back of my mind
To drown my dreams in dreary musing.
I dreamt of choosing the laws to rule
But one person rules the parliament supreme
And waves a wand if any should dare to speak
In his presence of the forbidden or of another team.
I dreamt of choosing the mayors to ride,
But the Boss not mine defines the governor
And delegates another to give them orders and more,
And decides what moves, grows, or becomes manure.
I dreamt of a great nation in Africa's armpit
But got a snapshot of generations in the belly
Of the Beast. Maybe I shouldn't be dreaming,
Maybe I should just stand for truth; just maybe.
(c) nyonglema
River bed #Cameroon #dialogNow
The rain falls on the soldier's helmet.
But he can't shoot the clouds. So he shoots at the river.
Water is water. It flows, it pours, it spills, it glides:
Water is just water, even with fish blood in it.
A river's just water,
Even with once living creatures resting on its bed.
(c) nyonglema
My secret is that:
Nobody knows that I died a long time ago.
But she would have known,
Even from the slab at Melen.
She just slept.
She never liked hard surfaces,
Preferring the 6 cushion couch
Of red yellow and orange circles of my childhood.
I still remember the watery smells that danced the Burlesque
Of firefly magic from Lake Wum on my childhood days.
The chairs sat under a family of 20 with 1 mother.
Yes, same chairs followed us to Yaoundé, where
She'd start the TV shows with me and then slip away.
Then I like a bad dream would slowly touch her skin awake:
"Mum you should go to bed now".
The show was over.
She would rise then go to sleep.
In a 6-foot hole in Baligham.
(c) nyonglema
Fair or Real, choose wisely
Real isn't reeled anymore out the tube.
It was rolled up before as snippets of the world, but with CGI
Nothing is as it was.
What should I believe? What should you believe?
Man saw the void and with words and steel
Said let there be light, and so it was, and night was day
And day was day, there was neither evening nor day.
Then they flooded pieces of land, and dried up seas
And tweaked the plants, and fiddled with DNA,
Spawning animals new and weird. Still no day.
And then they set about to make man
And woman
According to the images of the Vogue 2008 summer edition.
They looked on and saw it was good.
And rushed to teach our children:
1 + 1 depends on what your 1 means
A cell depends on what you want it to mean
An electron is whatever of those particles you choose
And Kirchoff's nodal law is even applicable to voltage
And your nationality depends on your heart's choice
And a mountain is an upside-down valley
And there still wasn't any day.
Men became women, women became men, and monkeys
Said they'd rather be called humanoid, or else!
The bonobos said they were descendants of wolves
While those who stayed off the green screen tried to say:
"If you jump of a 10-storey building, you will die".
But who is to believe them?
The green screen made Thanos!
(c) nyonglema
While there's a war on truth, now they add a threat to competition?
The solution to a special woman dominating sport is to suppress her?
It's unfair what they are doing to Caster Semenya, a woman,
meanwhile transgender women are allowed to participate with
"advantaged" bone and muscle structure from their DNA, even with
lower testosterone. Men remain on par with men even after sex change,
which puts them at an advantage over women.
Starting over #hope
As I stared out the wooden window wishing
I wasn't sitting here, but thinking the words
To paint on this page, I create brand new worlds
That the teachers will totally dig relishing.
But you know sometimes you notice that one line
Is out of place, then the paragraph, then the whole
As the sweat beads decorate my forehead folds
I know I'll draw a line, and toss one into the bowl.
Despair decorates mistakes beautifully, but
I know muses loiter in strange places, like deep
Sea fish hanging their lanterns in a weird jut.
I reach in, and grab one before off it leaps.
(c) nyonglema
CFA #freeDOOM
“Si ton père est alcoolique et bois de la bière pendant que vos voisins gèrent vos finances, il boira du Hennessy dès qu’ils lui laisseront le contrôle : l’impact sur la ration journalière sera nul.”
—
He was screaming at my bent head, louder and louder,
And I tried to hide my face from his words: “Make no excuses!”
I hadn’t realized my explanation of why I’d chosen Bowser
Over doing the dishes would get such a lame label. “Excuse you!”
I thought to myself, as he poured words out to change
My mind, but it had wandered off…
I remembered when the excuse for the pain that paved every street of my city was that the colonial masters wished it so. I remembered the same streets turned red so that this pilfering could end, that we could decide by ourselves. I remembered independence.
I remembered when the excuse for the pain that paved every street of my country was that the white man had taken our brothers away in slavery. Poor William Ellison, the prejudice done to him by the white man must be the reason why APGAR scores are lower around me than they are in his state. I remembered abolishment…
but
Only for the slavery to the white man’s land, for we kept up the lucrative business of selling our kind to the Arab market, where no abolishment was in sight. Yes, I remember partial abolishment.
I remembered colonial currencies. This must have been the cause of the AFCON competition being withdrawn from Cameroon, or the civil unrest in Sudan, and Algeria, Cameroon. This must be why medical doctors get jobs in non-existent hospitals, or schools look different on paper than in reality (especially when buildings don’t exist). This must be the reason for social decay, the bane of investors, the pervasiveness of corruption and officials stea…mean embezzling. I remembered the CFA.
That evil currency which prevents roads from being built, prevents hospitals from being built, and extorts pregnant mothers waiting to deliver in urgency. It’s the CFA that destroyed the educational fabric, let problems fester into mini-wars, killed all moral and ethics in business, and stabbed the future à-la Julius Caesar.
Now he was screaming even louder and louder
But I just stood there, head bent, seeming to hear it all,
But my thoughts meandered off further and further,
Remembering it all, then dreading our persistent fall.
(c) nyonglema
Choices
Where do they find their solace when time takes toll?
Choices that is. You know, when a fur coat seems better than a wind-breaking
piece of plastic in a shop where the browned decay of the sales lady’s teeth
hint at the bad breadth of its shoulders, and the colours seem off, but you’re
worried about the environment, so you lean towards it and away from dead animals.
Where do they find their stretch when time takes toll?
At one point you’ve got many, and at another the page is blank. Even the word
to start a poem hides behind the distractions of the day, and your choice to watch
Infinity Wars till 2am, and be up to your employer’s hobby, your livelihood, by
4am, which meant that your brain factory remained littered with yesterday.
I’ve noticed how choices impact choices, no troll!
It’s like the Mahjong possibility counter, and the kanji sign you just clicked
to reduce it, or when you go for a piece further off to the left, and the counter
goes up the sides of your cheeks, like to say you did the right thing by chance
or by calculated meticulousness.
My daughter stares me in the eyes as I get daily old:
I answer her that every action from that first cry she made hanging upside
down with amniotic coat has determined where she stands now, and every
action she freely wills will determine the amount of freedom she can exercise
as time takes its course and my hairline reduces my freedom of hair styling.
My son stares at my lies, head cocked like “It’s getting old!”:
I tell him freedom comes from sacrificing freedom, like Isaac on an altar, or
Joseph in a well, or me writing this here, or Jesus on a cross, or hitting a campaign
or running trail, or studying for a test, or digging up fossils, or just helping a
neighbour: the more of your freedom you forfeit for the right reasons, the more
you’re ready for the fullness of more freedom to forfeit.
(c) nyonglema
waghni 