In Complete Disregard of the power of Love (Spoken Word)

The words I speak are unpopular, unwanted and uninvited

Oh Lawd, pray I not be misunderstood

But then if I am, that too is okay

For I speak not in the vulgarity of this regime

This regiment armed with phallic extensions calling me a renegade

To insinuate that I am dangerous because my body speaks from a position of anarchy

As though anyone was what they looked like

But then again, I am dangerous, deliberate and afraid of nothing

Praise the Lorde, the Audrey Lorde!

Fuck what I look like!

I don’t care that I look like I was hit by a speed train at the bend

I don’t care that my hair sits on my head uncombed and unruly as though it owns me

Because then if I do I will let you fuck me over again, did I say again?

But if you can’t figure me out here please accept my apology for not being obvious

Take from my hand words for your Language Acquisition Device

And devise for your ilk ways of seeing, new ways of seeing me

This is the end of normal, arm yourself

Here an extra pair of eyes

Now drop the pretense and straighten the frown on your face

To act like ‘fuck’ is too sensitive a word to your senseless sensibilities is hypocrisy

The problem is, I said it and I ain’t no Rick Ross or Lil’ Wayne or some other brother

Whose ‘fuck’ comes to you as an endorsement to objectify women

To call her everything: a bitch, a cunt, a slut, a whore

To call a woman everything, but her name

And when you call a woman by name you mean to shame her

Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Wangari Maathai, Martha Karua

Kingwa Kamencu, , Audrey Mbugua, Wambui Otieno-Mbugua, Sojourner Truth

And this is the truth, black women have not even began to be resentful

of the rise to power of black men but there is a problem

A certain school of thought crafted by Slave masters on the colony

Teaches Black men that for them to be strong black women must be weak

Fallacious reasoning! This here is a product of gross miseducation

And Black men have not even began to unravel their role in the empire

Their counter-revolutionary exertion of a "manhood" that tells women to step back
As though to break off from our colonial oppression, never meant the total involvement
of every man, woman, and child, every-fucking-body
As though for us to get here didn’t take the breaking of a woman’s back

Women whose labour terms in developing political consciousness were cast in stone

A time ranging from I-can't-see in the morning until I-can't-see at night

O Lawd bless Malcolm X

So this is your to do list for every man

Every man who acknowledges Wangu wa Makeri and Bi Mswafari

in the same sentence with no sense of irony

Every woman who joins in the patriarchal laughter of our television

making fun of the nameless woman in Budalangi begging sirikal to help

As though her pain wasn’t real and the state hadn’t ignored her, three floods later

Please do yourself a favour, stop laughing 

and teach yourself something on capitalist oppression

Stop laughing at the propaganda being pushed around as the truth

About men having sex with cows and hens because it will not be marked in history

 that in two thousand and thirteen Kenyan men became intimate

with their food, pets and cocks

And stop wearing Christianity as a beautiful coat that covers  your hatred

Because I don’t care how many verses you have memorized to make your hatred effective

For you have a verse to pull out of your pile of cards to justify the way you treat women and gays and muslims and atheists and people

You see the truth is if Jesus came back to the world, you are the type that would still kill him

Because Jesus was a rogue, a rebel, and a revolutionary who refused to conform to any laws

Your hatred, judgement and self-righteousness must disgust him

because you are the worst thing that ever happened to my poetry

Stop condemning women for abortion and teenage pregnancy

as though there weren’t rapists and pedophile priests who still oppose the use of contraceptives

Stop passing down your hatred to your children and other people’s children in the name of Jesus

So look yourself in the mirror and imagine what would happen

Imagine what would happen if we were to be honest in this conversation

and for a minute tried to speak about love as though we invented it

Take off your prejudices as though they hang on your shirt and again,

again and again ask yourself  ‘Who am I?’

And when you take to the streets before you tweet jokes that humiliate real people

Please stop, instead, try to talk of the revolution of love

Like our mothers did, and their mothers before them

And when you raise your hand to hit a woman STOP!

She has been beaten before and your hand shouldn’t touch her the same way

Keep your hand mid air and in that breathe fucking thank a woman

Please Indulge Me

For three sleepless nights
I wrote this one long letter to South Africa
I might have said way too much
But please do indulge me for a second

I wrote South Africa a letter
Telling them about those Jozi streets
Wet with that-ever-running-water from  uThixo-knows-where
Jozi streets filled with noise in accents not immediately placeable
The "abeg, mek you bring'am" requests
First heard in Lagos spreading across Calabar
into Bamenda and Buea
And now all too familiar to the Bameleke, Bassa and the Bamum

Jozi
Welcoming you to the heavy  standard  English vocabulary
That betrays the roots of its Ndebele and Kalanga speakers
as they argue about the Zimbabwean man whose name I refuse to mention

I wrote a letter to South Africa
Reminding them of the many apologies
That they owe the world for the continued existence
Of that not-so-free state they call Free State

I reminded South Africa that they need to tell me
When exactly they were going to let Africa's non-people free
The men and women fleeing the Congo
Because daily, men at war are masturbating on each others egos
Uganda's  hyperfemme boys suffocating under Ssempa's armpits and Bahati's bum
The intellectual Kenyan mass who remain the glime of a country lost in itself

When, South Africa, I asked.
Are you going to start seeing the pain on the faces of your Black poor?
When do you intend to learn a language other than violence?

This letter I have been writing for three days
But I know I will not send it
I have no moral authority to question you dear South Africa
For the country I live in feels like a war zone
A country at war with itself

May be I will send it tomorrow
Yes, just may be
And mostly may be not!