Voices of corporate ghosts!
Flames of self-determination began the moment I realized that I was the only one with the will to rise to the occasion. If I sacrificed, I'd be a part of a something great, I knew this. The world told me that if I worked hard enough I would not want for anything. I was to propel my family name to new heights. I was to carry the torch from my parents to my great-grand children. I had a plan, and the flames of hope in my core propelled me forward. Never starved for anything else but to be and to achieve. You see, when you are raised by have-nots the world reminds you of it often. It strips you off of your worth and spits on you. I was that girl no one saw, no one heard, and never remembered. The amorphous figure moving amongst other ghosts. No matter the light in my eyes, my presence was overshadowed by something else, the shame of an vague background laced with penury and privation. Sometimes this shame morphed into guilt, and I would look up in the sky and say, "it's my fault." I should do something about it. I would cry to my fits in the depth of the night wishing I could be more. So, for many years I stood by my word. I rose well before dawn and retired late into the night trying to find a way out. And of course, the onlookers plied my path with meaningless praises. Some of them toxic, some of them half-useful. Keep going, you go girl, go get it, you deserve it! I was to be the knight in shinning armor in my own story. Why not? The earth did not speak when I spent countless nights ploughing through spreadsheets, preparing for the next exam, the next internship, the next job opportunity that will turn into a long coveted career - I was this close. Always this close. This close to an unreachable goal that I pursued so relentlessly. I knew no better than what I felt was expected of me. And when men in high positions tanked Wall Street in 08, it was my fault. I wasn't working hard enough. As usual I went back to a beast mode, a ferocious pursuit of goals that were getting farther and farther away from me. I met every hurtle with a grin and more words of affirmation recited in front of broken mirrors. Love? What was love to me? Love was a reserved privilege for those girl who were carved out of manikins. Victoria Secret angels of the world, I was nothing of the sort. I was born a worker and the world told me that my worth was tied to my work. So, that's why I never fell in love, never even contemplated it. No one in their right mind falls in love with a function. At least that's what the world said and the earth did not interject. I stayed a lady in waiting inside poorly ventilated cubicles pushing paper, given orders, dictated to. Do this, do that, the deadline is approaching soon. The meaning of life careened past my peripheral view while I was bogged down in the morass of making others rich. Bosses who snapped, threw tantrums, entitled men-children who've never had a "no" in their lives. Yes, men who threw office supplies every which way telling girls like me that we are diametrically opposed to joy. I was to derive joy from my work. And thus, I worked. I worked for my parents who were never given the chance. I worked for those with privileges to excuse themselves. I worked for the men who sat the the top of the totem pole with impossible demands. I worked for the CEOs and CFOs who smiled all the way to the bank never caring an iota about the welfare of those at the bottom of the ladder. I worked so that the big boys with penthouses for offices can get their yachts custom built in Amsterdam all the while threatening to destroy world heritage sites. I worked so that most of you can spend time online insulting others for no reason at all. I worked for billionaires, true chameleons whose stress levels only reached a boiling point at every tax season. I lost a lot of sleep at night bolstering companies whose foundations were not built with me in mind. I worked for lady bosses, A-type women who stared you down until you felt the skin melting off of your bones. I was hurting badly, psychologically. Food tasted like salt. The voice that propelling me forward over the years when the last reservoirs of strength were depleted also left me. Overwhelmed with tough decisions above my pay grade, yet making half the pay. No days off, I count even take a sick leave. Always reminded that down here the luxury of lollygagging did not exist. They said keep grinding, be the team player, we'll clock you out if you drop down and die though. They didn't care about how hard I fought for this. And how hard I fought for them too. And when the pandemic hit, I blamed myself. Did I do enough for everyone? Yet none of them ever asked, "Are you okay?"
The mother’s way
You can’t let the life slip off a pregnant woman
Because she’s carries two spirits
You can’t let the life slip off a pregnant woman
She’s not longer just a single entity
You can’t let the life slip off a pregnant woman
She’s the soil that bolsters the root of another life
You can’t let the life slip off a pregnant woman
She’s the source of heat and hearth
for the future to spring and let be thus
You can’t let the life slip off a pregnant woman
She’s the garden and the guardian
A voice that molds new eden from old hell
Reflection
what's this scheme?
I'm strung like jerky over barbed wire.
others scale to the top of the hill
while I'm here falling back into the fire
I'm hindered by a swift current of doubts
that I, myself imbibe until I stand motionless
unlifted by the wheeling circle of the mirage
I wilt in the haze of my fears
seeing all opportunities approach and recede
until a white vapor dissolves every hope
so that my future is bleaker and bleaker
I know not of my soul even though I feel my body
The climate
That’s never about the rain
Wind or dusty storms
You see, since money became king
And servants do services
high up in a house of glass
Build with gold dug by African infants
Earth was not born of bones
Thought and thrones
Earth is a stone, the sole abode
for anything born to it
So, laws and rules that apply to me
Yet not to you, are not of nature
But just of spite, a malignant brain
It’s never about the rain
Hail or El Niño, it’s the brain
The corporate monster with deep pockets
taking from the Congo and the Amazon
Until Amazon morphed from trees to trillions
We now have such names as trillionaires
Whilst the real Amazonians drown
Or burn, let’s burn them!
Says the executive after the Valdez spilled
They’ll never deign an apology
or descent from their lofty seats
to look at the sea and hear wailing seals
Otters clawing their eyes out
Stung by the the sludge,
Never again to breathe
Yet, they will another DeepWater Horizon
Greed has a color and a home
deeper than the oceans floor
It built empires and destroyed its offsprings
It’s never about the rain
Thunder or bolts of lightning
It’s lightening. Cropping of Vanessa Nakate
What does a Ugandan girl
know about climate change?
It’s never about the surface
It’s about the nadirs, so long in shadows
We see it them now, revealed by time
so bare a caricature, we must all desist
feeding it the fear, a blood stream
it needs for it to exist
Oyana
over the smooth caramel - rich
drip, drip, the sap of the elm gross
human bodies can't move
bound by mold, sweet sautéed rosemary
clung for ages on grinning ceilings
sorry, my dear, this here
compels your psyche into a disorder
up in here is no entrance to a home
no one is here but the smell
so crude and so sere,
isn't it ironic to look for comfort in a shrine
bedecked with garlands and brier
before rodents cleaned all the bones
there was a faint scent of sage
now, it's all but the tang of old age
age, not of flesh and brittle bones
but that of blazes died down to inferior ashes
to most, home is a passage of time
the rest are walls, monuments not good to us
Eternal
How will I go home?
If it be a perfect day
I’ll lay down and let eternal slumber devour my breath
I’ll kiss the palms of those around me
and tell them I’m on the verge of eternity
even as my breath begins to climb the turret beyond return
I'll proceed right through diaphanous circles
let sadness not fester in these lines
the earth sanctions death everywhere
roots to roots, my hair too must intertwine with spines of grass
forever is not a mystery in our imagination
the sky is a window to the deliverance
Enceladus shoots wildest to what the eye perceives as voids
she fears no unrest in what was sanctioned
so, she let’s go of her geysers as the sun awakes
with them are her newborn sucklings
eager-eyed, together perhaps a day old
yet their faces are endowed with a magnificent wisdom
knowing that in this cosmic drift, nothing really expires
the fall of one is the rise of another
every breath exhaled fills lurid skies with even more beautiful things
Casual Communion
Yesterday, we came home hand in hand
from the start, ours was the best
a marvelous tale to never go stale
I begged you to remember this moment as the best
In the morning I opened windows
to let the sunlight in,
never thinking I’d also let you go
now I only close my eyes and yearn
for the return of a part of me I let go
Foolish November
She chose November
And allowed leaves rolling back like a kaleidoscopic canvas to touch her face
She chose November
for solace from thriving grievances and displeasing conjectures,
disappointments so grave they mar the mirror
She chose November
to learn the concept of love
and quit the billows of cigarette that never nourished the soul
but that by degrees burned her lungs beyond midnight
She chose November
to perch at the cradle of the piano
and let the veins of her fingers play melodies of remembrance
there was a time she cried night and day
but this November
she bathes differently in the urn of her misery
growth expands with numbing blue days
but like a form of prayer, she has made it her own
the flaws of the whole
I'd punish the evildoer
if he wasn't human behavior
thrills, spoils, and spectacles
fed by rage, are human behavior
so is love, poetry, and believing in the eternal
an integral aspect of human behavior
why then punish someone that has been made whole?
flawed from birth, will he rest in delightful death?
he's a lier and he's a lover
and tries to get-by or breakaway from all shadowy folds
his future evaporates with the fog
his love dies amid his own sad smile
by now, I cannot punish
one raised like the rest and worthy of life, just like the rest
the courage of a grown girl
I was that girl
who elders dispatched
far and vast to send a word
I was that girl
whose peers brushed aside
I was that girl
to whom picks and shovels were shoved
a little shell whose lips were sealed
I was that girl
who wasn't in the princely refrain
and my motley apparel,
somewhat outlanding earings
enduced curious gazes
I was that girl
ogred to the brink
by those who should've protected me