Three Poems | Robin S Ngangom

Street Life

I’ve had decadence forced on me.

I let the rain waste my day, and arriving

at streets that do not even know my name

I take off just like that, waving to silhouettes,

buying drinks for anyone, even primates

for whom I have no great regard, hating the houses

which warn of dogs instead of welcoming me.

I allow the rain to flay desire’s skin

after falling in lust with an assortment of women,

pursued by an obstinate heat, and an old nose for adultery.

I covet the well-groomed bodies of vehicles

which thread through the eyes of the street,

before darting in and out of shops interspersed like snares,

choosing clothes and shoes which the manly discarded, and

even perfumes to throw off my real self.

Reaching barbers’s hideouts

I spend hours there in a trade union

with men who deal in a hairy business,

watching fingers that pick noses and

teeth in disgusting turn.

I let them fondle my head for a long time.

Until I reached the blind alley of night, and

I slowly uncovered myself

observing shops murdered before they were born,

listening to the dead orchestra of the street.

Genesis’s End

Khyrim woman, by the presage of this dark wind

wracking the breast of the hill,

the leaves kindling, it is autumn again and

the passes of summer

no longer carry our missives.

Your dying laughter withers the rock’s lip,

pines possessed by your eyes,

after you changed into an unearthly desire,

and the moons inhabit only the observatory of stone

though I plaited dreams in your once-woman hair.

Wedged between the stones of origin

your mute cry wanders the slopes

while we search for days on end,

in rains of memory, holding a solitary flower,

scanning monoliths standing in the mist.

Moons ago, lured from your cautious cave

you permitted the sun and rain

to undo your blind coiffure,

and allowed your opaline heart

to be doused by waters of home and hearth.

You also hummed ballads of freedom

and wrote on suntanned granite

the genealogy of your people

and your man-wounded heart.

Stone you were

stone you were sung to be and

I kissed you to begin my dying.

Revolutionaries

I

Before they used terror when things were beginning

to go out of control and people showed aberrant

behaviour, revolutionaries had asked poets in their

lower ranks to compose patriotic songs for a country

which cannot be found on any map. They would coerce

nocturnal drivers of interstate buses to play tapes of

one-act plays which are designed to make unsuspecting

passengers weep with patriotic shame. I know this for

real, I grew up with revolutionaries. They had even

asked me to translate a press release over the phone.

Before he became the sharpshooter of a revolutionary

band my childhood friend smelled of straw and cattle,

and then one day he bridled a horse and rode it hard

through a busy marketplace scattering customers and

traders alike like straw in a gale. I was told that he

buried a pistol at my cousin’s backyard just before he

went under the ground. Only after he came over ground

with the venerable title ‘teacher’, because Chinese

masters trained him, did I meet him on the street and

he smelled of designer clothes. He now keeps himself

occupied with work contracted out by the public works

department and once asked me if I were married. He

has two wives, one of them an actor.

Before the crackling fire of revolution which warms the

hearts of boys we sat in a circle and talked endlessly about

oppressors and life in the jungle. Friends brought stories

of the ordained, who survived on roots and eggshells. We

looked at Che’s hammock with longing and even mixed

his cocktail but had no idea of when to dig a tank pit.

When little books with a star and red skins appeared it

was too late for me. I had fallen in love, and although it

broke my heart, my father sent me to another land with

gentle hills, so that I can read other books which will

make me stand on my bourgeois feet.

II

When they are not around they become butts of fun.

The roving story then was of a wastrel who went home

after midnight because he had wasted all his time with

his layabout friends around a fire one winter night. He

had to cross a walled house guarded by fierce dogs to

reach his home. When the owner of the house who was

woken up by the dogs asked ‘Who goes there?’ the

wastrel found his wits and replied, ‘In the service of the

motherland’ in a solemn voice as one would expect a

revolutionary to reply.

When they became arbiters when someone’s duck was

stolen or two women were fighting over one man I

stopped being furious with them.

You should write when you can still laugh at yourself

and the world, before you give yourself up to

revolution’s despair.