The ‘If’ of Re-birth
If you spend your life
Adoring the Sun as
It shoots forth rays and
Plethora of colorful light plus
The opal power, then bliss
Knowledge and eternity will
Re-make you a Sun god on your
Re-birth, for you to savour
Fully the photo-juice from godliness
Of queenly solar world of the sub-solar
Realms, turfs, domains and territories,
If your nerves are reigned by neurotic fear of the cooing owl calling for the sexual mate Because of the owl’s sexual ancestry being unblemished in cradle on Lesbos island For you to exude the alarm calling for war between your tribal village and the owl On heat in dire need for the partner to mate to be saluted with rusted spears and axe Brandished in amok fit for mob-justice on the ogling owl calling the mate out of duty To serve the power of the cunt as all flames and fires of the flesh are in desert winds, Then bliss, knowledge and eternity will re-make you a wholesale lesbian in Uganda and
Ethiopia on your re-birth so that you swallow endless misfortune of the gender-fluid Living under the tyranny of populist homophobes spitting on you day in and day-out
The un-flagging vitriol of insults reserved for transgender, Queer lives, bi-curiosity, intersex, lesbianism, Gay and other all the non-binary gender-fluid in sexuality, you will have all the dystopian moment with institutionalized homophobia in your post Re-birth in the exclusive culture riding on politically sponsored hostility on you , with farragoes of people pretending to be beggars to lay begging siege on you , they will perpetrate a paroxysm of begging on you with all manner of wildness that will leave You in the recurrent zugzwang during your life in the land of your well earned Rebirth , for you give them and not giving them will be one and the same thing, they will still spit on you and hurl at you an insult; Farangis! Fisarangis! Farangis! Farangis! To dish you with the dissing institutionalized Xenophobia and ethreal-racism to wane -You mentally in sense of self-esteem, to make you wallow in grogginess of self-Thoughts like a non-human-non-protagonist god in Dagnachu Worku’s Thirteenth Sun,
If you love violating animals
Abusing oxen, poaching the wild-cows
Of Maasai Mara tri-Angle rendering captive
Enslaving the nasally mono-horned white Rhino of
Nominal Sudan and also snaring with death the bush
Fowls of Africa with your poly-trophic mad-mad
Appetite for the cured-cum-seasoned squab flesh
From which you pay allegiance to the emanating stew
Dominating the well peppered company of
Ugali slurped down by the voracious muscle-power
Of your village food-pipe, then bliss, Knowledge and
And eternity will remake you the valueless offal
Of an old black ewe live in faultless eternity
And endless continuity in the animal kingdom as the
Ritually sanitizing agent in the cleansing ritual
Unto the menial taboo from the act in the unlit bed-room
During which the grand-father’s post anal sausage
Gives a un-friendable wide-berth to the open mouth of the
Ever loyal thunder-mug worshipping a pair of buttocks in the
Fashion and version of your hamlet’s top-most civilization,
If you cull, thin and thrust a Gay Marxist from your Communist party, from your Socialist party , from your bourgeoisie-populist party , from your people’s party, from your African Socialist party, from your inanely bourgeois-cynically bourgeoisie party, then bliss, knowledge and eternity will re-make you a multi-potent Gay in you re-birth, a full planet will be set for you to rule under reigning joy and gusto in the powerful flesh of your he-madam nature and she-mister stature, under which your bones will be taking cover; cover from loneliness, cover from ignorance, cover from false evidence !
If your passion is to worship ancestors and
Falling in love with the bi-curious ghosts
Floating freely without a visa in the land
Of the living – dead, pre-birth dead and the
Un-known dead, then bliss, knowledge and
Eternity will re-make you lonely prisoner of graves
In your rebirth, struggling without arms and end against
Hypocrisy in the sarcophagus power of the white sepulcher
The un-matched abode to your bed, wynd, alley, garret and
Sleeping dome, rookery of dry bones the flowers in the flora,
If you send to jail women who chose freedom in using their bodies in love and hatred, to love as love comes, to un-love as distaste comes, to plait as the sense gratifies, to shave as the inner person demands, to marry as gender-germ dictates, to smoke as the social-fluid, to throw away hijabs in obeisance to praxis of liberty , to marry a she-lesbian and adopt a child beyond the race, to drink hard liquor then kiss a wench as patriarchy does to glorify traditions, to read a poem in Homintern Magazine as she takes a selfie, to read de Beauvoir while drive in no-man’s company, to hop at night from club to club amid shoals of women with liberated sexuality, or to stand out firmly and say ‘NO!’ to gender based violence; domestic violence; gender based police brutality ; gender based political brutality and say ‘NO!’ to brutality in the culture of binary sexuality , then bliss, knowledge and eternity will re-make you a small tsiitsii, a tiny African bird of rainless season ever clicking and clacking in extreme poverty of water to drink; tsiitsii! tsiitsii! tsiitsii! tsiitsii! tsiitsii! on your forth coming re-birth,
If you love money
To get much money at any cost
Sacrificing natural potency of nature
Of earth’s capacity to provide favorable
Climate in which man, fauna and flora flourishes,
Madly making money via abuse of political power
Rendering the poor more poorer and the sick more sickly
Inventing a deadly virus in emasculation of poor world’s health
A dream to put on pedestal the knowing and the owning that be-be!
As in the abyss of fear and anxiety in the pending loss of lives you put
We that live in the shrugged atlas of baby science, the wretched of the earth
Then bliss, knowledge and eternity will make you a mineral used in making coins
You will be buried under crust of the earth as copper, waiting to be mined on re-birth,
ALEXANDER OPICHO is a short story writer, essayist, and poet from Kenya. His literary eyes are focused on freedom of human diversity. His work has appeared in more that twenty journals and magazines, but is most humbled at being published in Queer Africa II and Transnational Journal’s special edition on Syd Harrex. He teaches biostatistics.