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Retrospection

We used to dine at that small cafe just outside Chitungwiza

We had our favorite spot at the back

2 wooden chairs and a table with a wiggle

There was that waitress you fancied; tiny waist, big eyes and a smile like water

Every time she would serve us the one meal on the menu

Sadza, bathed in a pool of soup and some lean strips of chicken

And you almost didn't see the chicken till really dug in

And every Friday night it was like that

Then there were days along 1st Street

Peeping through the tall glass windows of furniture shops

The endless debates on what would fit where in the derelict hovel we rented in Unit B

A packet of maputi shuttling between our hands all the while

And it was you who would always finish it off…

(Of course, you wanted the nuts at the bottom of the packet)

I remember the stories we shared...the lewd jokes you always threw in-between

I always talked about the future, and you always listened like an overzealous schoolboy

Each time your girlfriend dumbed you, you would call 

I would show up with a bottle of cheap whiskey 

Ready to drown your sorrows six shots under

Thereafter, I would listen to you curse on end

And we always agreed that this was a requisite immorality

Today, I play Russian roulette with the memories of you 

Betting on the one that's bound to make me cry

I laugh at that; see, they are just old thoughts 

Perhaps outstaying their welcome

But why do I feel the urge to cry at that?

I'm sitting in the old Beetle, stuck in Friday's traffic jam 

There is a song issuing from the stereo

Toto's Hold the line

I recall how we used to 'chop' the lyrics

Yet we sang our hearts whenever the old codger next door played it on his acoustic gramophone

It hurts me now that all I am left with are the memories

And a dead stereo you left in my apartment

So I miss you dearly, painfully still

I wish you were around

So that I could tell you I found a girl to marry

And that would be something to drink to

For old times' sake

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Too Big a Noise for my Trade

I have not the lines to describe the whim of a painter fashioning a portrait of a kept woman, 

nor have I saddled my gaze upon the seesawing bosom, supple skin's dimpled rise, the rounds and turns of a damsel’s posture looming out of a steamy illustrator’s zoomed lens

How unfortunate it is to be without knowledge of such sinuous a summation of feminine artwork,

it's rendered foreign to me, that adverse ineptness straddling up on my tongue

needless to say, the portrait in itself is an object of forlorn ambience to the eyes of the escapist, 

the one extremist I am inescapably mutating into

It isn't surprising why my verses maintain that I have tastes colder than a witch’s ears

unwrapped to such a cruel set of words, too soon I'm bound to step aside and let the painter and his paint do what they think to know best

The Art of Painting -- Johannes Vermeer

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A Song

I wrote a song today 

A song of color grey, dull and sad 

An irregular composition such as of an eroded riverbed 

It didn’t tell of the starry night 

It was devoid of the sweet smell of roses on my portico 

So heartless was the song 

It went on and on about suffering and hurt 

It was clad as a loser without purpose and worth

I wrote a song today 

It wasn't a song about love and her immoral cousin lust 

Or was it a sheaf on how my feelings have been toyed with 

By those beefy maidens from downtown 

It lacked ceremony and solemnness 

Or the sublime flow of words that rhyme with emotion

Today I wrote a song 

Too desperate to be heard and worshiped 

Its verses spilt out of me in one breath

But the song breathed not as new born songs ought to 

It lay dead and lifeless like a bag of rotten eggs

So I rubbed off the song I wrote today 

Tore up the piece and set it ablaze on the dying candle fire 

It wept bitterly into flame and smoke 

My own song choked me to tears 

Reason why I wrote this piece to keep her memory 

Lest her ghost comes back to hound me

El violinista -- Oswaldo Guayasamin