The following is a bit of prose I wrote in March on an overnight bus ride from Kenya to Uganda. Sometimes it’s the means of transportation that connects, as my thoughts jumped to three years earlier, when I was on an overnight bus on the other side of the continent, Morocco and them meandered from this to that, leading to sleep where I awoke to my first glimpse of Kampala.
What connects a bus-ride through dark Moroccan streets, the star’s pimples picked by the moon, that rattles the past like cans tie to a marriage, to a Ugandan bus that like the horses before it knows nobility by the verve of its loyalty—the melodies do not change though the personal stitches I thread inexpertly through corner’s of the earth’s inside jokes limited by their supply of oxygen do.
I will give you my hand if you promise to never again mention that unfortunate affair involving the Hampster and the whiskey.
You will whisk me away if you clear the mountain blocking my view of the world and throw the last pail of its dust into the snow fed creak I skinny-dipped in alone the night the hipsters cornered the Hampster after commandeering the whiskey and opening their ethics for a fresh intention.
They will release my passport from passport prison if I can only prove to them that my imagination apprenticed under large dust bound books whose covers were judged to contain evacuating utterances of those who punctuated their minds with the clarity of a thought’s final draft.
I will go to sleep only when the evidence is overwhelming that we will meet in some corner of our slumbering minds where the future grows tired of arriving and left behind everything she swept away.
Sometimes I feel I’m old and think, shit, when I look behind me at all the distant decisions dotting, blotting my trail like black bags on a national holiday when the suburbanites communally neglected to realize the garbage men had the day off too.
Sometimes I get a good glimpse ahead and think, shit—still such a long way to go and so little patience for the raw voices insisting it leads to their victory and everyone else’s laugh.
It leads to sand castles and singing, chili peppers on the spicy side, and inoperative longings eclipsed by the immediate concern of halitosis. It leads to music exchange parties where everyone quips about being a pirate and drags out the arrrr of phonics like the first spring the yellow dress returns victorious to the pedestal of a clothesline.
It leads to here too, but before it does it stops off at the proverbial carousal where the happy heads of horses rise to the occasion, their candy cane smiles permanent—their journey long and hopelessly round.
