The Peeping Culture Poem by Moses Kainwo

1. Eyes
I
Those with gyrating eyes have prophesied,
That the eyes are openings on the side;
But entrepreneurs of the visible,
Shall trade their luck with the invisible.

The young are short-sighted by inspection,
The old are long-sighted by suspicion.
Children peep to see with elderly eyes
Dancing adults on their love prize with price.

See them still blinking at shadows at play,
While adults must blink their fanlight replay:
The ticklish world will unlock a window,
The greedy world will shut the gazer’s show.

Little surprise some shutters are so thick,
Though lucent curtains serve the purpose pick:
Many a gazer will tick to street bells,
And choose not to be their sisters’ angels.

II
Oh yes you can choose not to see the bell,
Because death standing in that deafening knell,
Attracts a witness that is not a witness:
Behind the window blinds the conscience stress.

I turned it on my mind over again,
Me too, I am not my sister’s bargain;
I am her Lucifer to chant her there,
And since no one beholds I shall not care.

Lucifer is in you my countrybore:
Together we mused and our sister tore,
From the Gallery down to the Crypt,
And from the Crypt down into the street.

If by this token new perception drops,
Then the nation wins the cowering crops:
Elect a hoodlum and you have an imp,
There you’ll survive with a well-earned gimp.

Let each goggle gauge a reverse gazing,
On the battered soul deformed from blazing:
Indeed a sorry darkness sits within,
And only when it rises will it spin.


2. Rivers
I
Five great rivers the death comrades did cross,
To square up with the age-old peeping loss:
They broke the bridges and co-steered their way,
The strange navigators driven by pay.

An evening salute from death on the streets,
Was not so welcome to the peeping feet;
In fact the streets died with a woeful woe,
As they bled and wasted before the foe.

Their names were written in the book of pyres,
To choose their deaths in the face of hellfire:
They received the eye-bursting-dripping beads,
Or the gift of shirts with chosen sleeves.

New rivers began to flow the main roads,
Nameless rivers made of countless red loads:
My sister peeped and her eyes became blood,
Her letter love was there in the flood.

II
Operation-no-living-thing had no date,
Or else this poetaster could not vibrate;
But Death sharpened the machete and cursed,
Unstopping the river of blood for the nursed.

No one ever cursed like that heavyweight,
No one ever cried like that featherweight;
The two looked at each other in the eye,
And the new peeping game was cast in dye.

But there was no rhythm in the new song:
Sung by the Ocean where we saw dung,
Waiting for a boat to set sail or withdraw,
Anywhere under God’s good sky for synod.

The river flooded on flora and fauna,
With shoppers listing to Noah’s oarsman:
Some green some white some blue unseemly queues,
Singing how we exhaust thee in the blues.

One mosquito that sucked the rancid blood,
Became so fat and burst open with flood:
But now rotten and not so good for washing,
Got drained and bottled in a dark basin.


3. Creation

Was this the way the universe began,
With a timeless zero and a big bang,
In green and white and blue of any shape,
With lions unseen on mountains in cape?

The metaphysics of the guessed order,
Throws naiveté at the vexed founder:
And that imaginative family tree,
Is a god planted to harbour fleas.

The Cotton Tree of Fleetown is a god,
Around whom the fleas converge with a nod;
And every sober march re-routes from there,
She amply fed and dressed with measured care.

Where the green god stands there is flesh on bones,
There is hope on toes that the green god knows,
From daybreak to nightfall they come and go,
Lifting new symbols from the place below.

Not one burgher knows who proscribed with fire,
And I want to ask who lighted the tyre.
Who made the bad heart, I can only guess.
But who declared the war we should not now stress.

How can we know where knowledge is remote?
You press a knob and something is afloat,
You lift a finger and some figure’s dumped;
The bluecoat is there with his fingers cupped.

They say the Cotton Tree saw them chop dogs,
She must have also seen them bogging bogs.
But who can make her tell the faded tale,
When the truth itself has been painted pale?

The sold train track some travel curses banned,
The power now rests in the palm of the band,
Which also is now in the poda handout;
But real power remains in the rear mouth.

Right around your base and just yesterday,
America waved in the nude by day;
And again yesterday like the other judge,
UNAMSIL was baptising in the lodge.

There they said disrobe to enter the pond.
He took off a shirt and then the bottom bonds:
Four shirts and four trousers on one body,
A moving wardrobe in fear of war folly.

Story-telling Tree, receive the prayers,
Offered in jest as a test of the years,
Your children will come from obloquy and cry,
Forgive their past and from your glory spy.

You gave them tongues yet dubbed their speeches wrong,
You gave them drugs and proffered ladder rungs,
The chequered love of a chequered nation,
But the wheat and the tares must have options.

4. Seasons
The dries are not summer so mark them tagged,
Winter and autumn each have their fume flagged;
They will come next year and always be first,
But will not spring where the reason is cursed.

The tears in you will come as will the rain,
Because the soul is alive with the stain,
And the charred remnants of battle will float,
T’announce the evidence of battered throat.

And one drunken gun-toter said to me,
“This is your own ambush brave pedigree,
Empty your pockets on a deserving angel,
The revolution is here first to sell”.

“Was this the accord you promised to pour,
Hunger and thirst rained upon all the poor? ”
I could not ask more that desperado,
The stooge of death ordered the thing like dough.


Someone will hate the success tale you tell,
Someone will not stop despising your wealth;
But please succeed and retreat from the rest,
To hold onto excess will be a test.

Can present time annul past time and stay?
You cannot bat the ball and keep it—nay!
The aged say the times are new to them,
The young reckon but say their time is dreamt.

We don’t even know who last left the shores,
Since the going is rated with sham shows.
Can you actually blame the move on some,
When in your heart and head you hailed the fun?

To appear they had to disappear,
But time will come though time was always here;
And time once lost is time forever gone,
As a deed done is deed forever done.

Roses stand in dustbins and make them sweet,
We need one on this ground for wiping our feet:
Life now smells of the swift and the ugly,
True revolution will make the foolish holy.