If they ask you why tell them I refused to live on hope alone

If they ask you why tell them I refused to live on hope alone,

Hope of a girlfriend yet I don’t own a Mercedes,

I was a fool to think I could satisfy a girl like that,

All I had was the black mamba my brother left me when he became a tout,

I was a fool to think I would ride her on its “leather seats” to my favourite goat head soup place.

So after she got off her taxi after a night with her new European boy I decided if my mouth could not woe her maybe I could persuade her with the snake I hid under my belt.

From all the porn I had watched I knew I had all the supporting documents, I double-checked just to be sure.

Then I made my move, grabbed her then did what I had to do. She let out a few moans and screams but I was sure she would never go back to him,, after all she kept on screaming “goma” ,,

I zipped up and rode my mamba to a good night sleep.

**********

As I burnt in the tire I could not help but feel like the devil, with all the smoke around me it was like the real devil was kissing my ass.

Rocks upon rocks whip upon whip, they killed me for exercising my right, just because she was hotter than the village girls, and she had a college degree I wasn’t allowed to “rape” her? Only graduates or wealthy politicians are allowed to after a few days of shopping and expensive meals?

Isn’t that prostitution? Which is also illegal? But in society, the sentence was inversely proportional to the size of your wallet. Funny enough the rich man did not throw a rock, he only provided the tire, after all none of the stone throwers could even afford one for their kids to play with, but they,  my neighbours and colleagues, my fellow boda boda operators, who we suffered day in day out, drank “chang’aa” every end month at mama pimas, they that would warn me if the police came on patrol, they  threw the rocks, it was like they were yelling “how stupid could you get? Raping a rich girl? Could you not marry a village girl like I did? Were you not satisfied with what God gave you?” I was paying the ultimate price for defying the ultimate law: “do not cross the rich man”!!  It sounded similar to the colonial rule of “do not cross the white man!”  Only that nowadays, from experience it’s the money that bleaches you white.

I had refused to live on hope alone, I was not satisfied by a mere village girl, I wanted more, but the harder I tried the more she drifted away from me. After all, aren’t we are all human, born equal? I heard that in a song, when growing up, my mom used to say it was written by a mad man that was possessed by evil spirits who do not want to accept their place in society but my dad said every man made his place in society. I knew I wasn’t going to make mine with class 8 education and a boda boda, so I took mine, grabbed the bull by its horns.  Little did I know that hope was my life in this den of wolves.

But the truth is I hoped till I was 37, I was still single, but the moment I stopped hopping and started acting, hope took me by the neck and hang me. I could no longer live, no not like that, on that lie hope, it was a drug whose withdrawal caused death. As my kin buried me, they wrote on the wooden cross “beloved brother and son”, 37 years of my life and that’s all my eulogy wrote. Hope was not taking me anywhere, I refused to live on it alone, and that’s what they should have written.

 -kk