I always feel like, a part of a grand carnival,

if not its major rehearsal.

Yaani, living Nairobi furahidaynights always is as if one is rehearsing for something major that is to come;

Something big, bigger than the independence celebration of our 1960s…

Something bigger than an Islamisation of Madonna fete or rather the Pope’s wedding fete…

Something bloodiloquently grand…

Our fated life, Nairobi nighters’ always been a major rehearsal…but rehearsal for what?

“Karibu, pita ndani, ndiyo utadiscover” say, Deux Vultures

She was perched atop a tall steel and velvet stool.

By the long glittering bar, next to the yawning entrance to this famed human butchery,

her generous hindquarters pout at me…

greeting me.

She eyes, like a mangy dog does unattended Manyakes,

the yawning entrance to this shophouse of entranced souls,

where spirits of the young and old unite in a ritualised offering to the God of Earthy Life….

She seems lost within the convolutions of her wavy, cushitic hair that seem to germinate from more convoluted roots in her refugee mind.

I find my eyes glued to pink G-string hiding coyly behind

the transluscence of her cheap second-hand brandy lingerie…

then, in a slow, slithering swish,

she moves!

As if she’d been staring at me through a monster eye hidden at the back of her wavy head, she heads straight to me, turn and then does it…

Oh God! She does it!

Gyrates it nimbly right before my riveted, red sickly eyes.

The concealed panty seems to grow large then grow small, turn blue, turn white, glow red, glow orange

Then turn-turn,  glow-grow, all-colours before my dilated, misting eyes.

My body languorously wakes up as if from an internal sleep to the strange kaleidoscopic hypnotize

That this pink-pantied, plump enchantress’ now exposed ebony thighs, radiate!

Knowing her marketing success, she moves forth to plant her puffy, bloodish, hot lips

On my taut, shiny, greyish spotted baldness, then as if electrocuted by a sense of her vanquished victim’s male weakness,

She pulls me by my bone-in-skin-sack hands

to the epicentre of the steel altar of commercial love…

…then on this

rectangular shrine of revolving (de)lights, glittering, silvery cling-clings,

in the thick of a multilingual symphony of all races made by these dancing and roasting souls,

I let myself into the fantasy realm of my mighty Miss Angel of Darkness.

I recall mass movements of many human bodies

so so close to another…

movements eliciting in both human minds and hearts much warmth and …heat…

A kind of human heat as if the glistening human sweat was some devilish cooking fat that was frying the revellers’ hot bodies slowly in a ritualised rehearsal of the eternal time they will do in hell.

Then comes the small voice, which whispers that it cares for me

But its persistence only makes me angry as I cling even tighter to the baby-powder smelling sticky skin of my tar-black curvaceous worldly witch.

I hug her, ululating with her

I grab her, gyrating with her

wriggling my skeletal frame obediently in tune with sleazy rhythms of her voluptuous buttocks.

She sighs with faked whisky abandon, closes her mascarad, fake lashes eyes,

takes both of my gnarled hands in both of smooth, sweaty ones…

before I KNOW IT...

she has me off my feet!

I’m being swirled and swung around the silver floor as her fleshiest mass makes coupling gestures in rapid successions against my rigid, excited loins!

Suddenly there rose drunken, drugged jubilations

Drowned only by a shrill ululation from the dark eaves

Where fags, foreign and local, touch and pinch

The hind-quarters of tired revellers passing by, into-outof the stinking, seedy restrooms,

Occasionally to check for any peeping, bulging wallet but mostly

Just to make perverted sensations run in deep spiralling contours

Across the queer cheeks of their own buttocks;

Trapped underneath the cheaply perfumed, nappies peeping from their dirty jeans’ waistlines!

The bouncy, gravel Jamaican tune paves way

to a fast-paced, screaming Zairean tune amidst some metallic and human screeches from the deejay’s turntable.

Someone tremblingly shrieks from the club’s furthest (darkest) corner!

You cannot tell whether it’s a relieved welcome from a happyist tired

of raunchy Caribbean beats

that’s kept mingling bodies

milling, grinding all over

the tiny square floor for

four harrowing hours past midnight.

Or it’s a voiced relief from the wan Singh and his rum-black Amazonian partner

couched together in a strange yoga tangle on the dimly-lit, velvet T-shaped corner sofa

guarded by two indifferent, goggled, muscled, black-vested goons.

Distracted,

before I know it I’m heaving on a low chaise longue next to the full silver dance-floor,

heavy, flabby kilos of human beef landing on my emaciated thighs in creaks, heaves, and sighs.

I passed out she later told me

As I sought my pants in her dimly lit

Dingy refugee-room where she’d carted me-her last night’s offering-

Her beer-socked Kenyan Aid to war-torn Somali…

I’ll never know whether we…

For wasn’t it always like this

till I discovered…

till I discovered,

till I discovered, (sigh)

I am living my last?

Till my runaway family discovered,

as nights die with their dark sins

So was I, a nocturnal Nairobi darkchild