i cannot love you

I love you,

In your eyes I see your soul

And the love in their depths astounds me

Your smile, it makes my heart skip

It skips and skips and skips

I love you, though I must not love you

But my palms sweat in anticipation

Every time you walk into a room

Of its own volition, heart runs to you

And I stop breathing…

For a moment I stand, frozen in time…

I’m lost in your gaze

I love you, yet I should not love you

Lila na fila havitangamani

Miye lila, nawe fila

Itakuaje kwenda njia moja?

But against all reason,

Defying all sentiment

You light a fire under my feet,

And with just one touch

I lose every train of thought

I forget everything but you

I love you, but I cannot love you

Because I love you too much

I cannot love you even though

Every time my feet set to walking

They’re going towards you

Every time my lips are parted

It’s your name they continually utter

I cannot love you

I have to leave you

Though I know I will die without you

I know my life is meaningless apart from you

And my love, I hope you understand

I hope one day you will forgive me

For walking away without turning

Even though every step I take is one mile long

Forgive me my love

Because I had to go

How can I tell them my child is white?

How can I explain this... what we have?

Believe me love, it was the only way

If they had killed my child, our child,

They would have killed me as well

I pay my dues everyday,

I die for my sins everyday,

My heart aches for you

My tears have run dry

For though I cannot love you, my heart won’t listen

So love, still love, I love you…

My first complete poem in over a year. It is, for the record,, not based on a true story. ;))) It just reminds me of my younger days in more ways than one

if the foundations be destroyed...

If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?

Ps 11:3

Earlier this evening I set out to do some sudoku puzzle, that very involving logic puzzle. So I was just about done, and was feeling very proud, when I discovered I had just input the same digit twice in one line, all logic leading until that point had seemed rock solid,  I could not see why the math was not coming together , so I had to erase the whole thing and start from scratch. Of course I decided that my life does not really depend on this here one puzzle, and I lay it aside for more constructive self-driven activities.

Nevertheless it got me thinking about this whole state I found myself in – the whole being stuck in the middle. The resemblance to the puzzle I was doing was astounding. The game, for those unfamiliar, is a 9 by 9 square puzzle, so it has 9 rows, 9 columns and nine 3 by 3 smaller squares. The objective is to fill up those squares with the numbers 1 to 9 such that all digits appear once in every row, every column and every 3 by 3 square. It’s purely a game of logic. So back to my earlier point, I discovered that maybe when I started out, I may have been logically sound in my reasoning, following the clues I’d been given -  in the puzzle they give you a few numbers to get you going. But somewhere along the way, and I don’t know where exactly, some flawed logic found its way in. And so, from that point, no matter  how correct the inferences may have been, the answers, the decisions made, the conclusions drawn, none of them could have been correct, because they were based on wrong data in the first place. And when that happens, it’s easier to just erase it all and take it up from the start, moving once again from what’s known to the unknown, this time with the advantage of hindsight.

If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do? So it turns out that the solution to all my dilemmas is really very simple: take it from the top. It’s always the simple commands that are the hardest to obey though. But like a wise man I have come to greatly rely on in recent times said:

The Lord will not go after you, He will not plead, but every time He meets you on that point He will simply repeat, “If you really mean what you say, those are the conditions, sell all you have. Turn it all over to me.” Undress yourself before God of everything that might be a possession, until you are a mere conscious human being, then give God that.

It turns out it isn’t as much an issue of “How close can I get to my surrender without losing all control” as much as it is an issue of how yielded I’m willing to be, how capable I am of losing all control, how willing I am to give up my right to own myself (which is indeed rightfully mine) for the “goal of the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus”. It’s the ability to say, like Paul, everything is permissible, everything is lawful, but not everything is beneficial, not everything is expedient, I will not be brought under the power of any. Others may, but I can’t. Now, that right there, that is the real foundation. That is where the math must begin.

somewhere in the middle you'll find me

Many times, like every other writer I've got a lot to say, so much that sometimes I don't even know how to begin. That is usually the way of it. So I sit here tonight, buried in the midst of all that usual mumbo jumbo... but maybe today I can sift through it and try and make sense of this non-sense.

Casting crowns sang that 'Somewhere in the middle' song, and right now sioni how else I can describe the state I'm in, because their words just seem to fit the bill so perfectly, I wonder how many people out there understand this:

Somewhere between the hot and the cold
Somewhere between the new and the old
Somewhere between who I am and who I used to be
Somewhere in the middle, You'll find me


Somewhere between the wrong and the right
Somewhere between the darkness and the light
Somewhere between who I was and who You're making me
Somewhere in the middle, You'll find me


Just how close can I get, Lord, to my surrender without losing all control...

 There are times I'm sure I've got a little bit of it  figured out, but over the past few weeks I've started to feel like I'm drowning under all the pressure of who my friends think I should be, what I should be putting on my head, what I should be listening to... It's all so jumbled up... Should I just conform without conviction, is God using them maybe and I'm just too stubborn to listen, what is it that everyone wants of me? I don't want to pretend that I don't care what people think, I do, certain people can shutter me with just one sentence. I'm probably a little more liberal than your average Christian, especially with stuff like clothes, music,, the works. And I feel stuck in the middle of both ends: extreme conformation (but I'm still in the world, aren't I?) or being lukewarm (that doesn't get me very far)... It's all so very confusing!! Like them, I find myself stuck somewhere in the middle, and with all my heart I wish things were just a little bit clearer. Maybe it's all wrong, all of it. Maybe all my foundations,the basis of all my arguments are wrong... But if the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?

nobody said it was easy

I learnt this lesson about five minutes ago: things are never what they seem. Sometimes this is a good thing. It is better to think of something as bad only to find out it was good, than to think of something as really out of this world, only to find that it is, but not in the direction you thought. I was hoping for something, something I hoped for a long time ago, so long I even forgot, then all out of nowhere it was as though it was coming to me, but then as I learnt five minutes ago, things are never what they seem. What I saw was a mirage, the closer I got to it, the farther away it seemed to move.

I love books, I love the vastness of the world they represent, the power an author has to transform the world using one story, sometimes not even a whole big one, sometimes even just a 700 word story. I love poetry, the undiscovered rhymes and rhythms, the tales, the music hidden in those words. And because I love these things, I have loved writing since I could hold a pen. I used to have a little book of poems when I was in primary, on its cover I put my name as an alias, just in case someone ever found it and found out how I think. In high school I got another pink book, I wrote poems in it, about love and the strange imaginings of a sixteen year old mind. I loved Okoth p'Bitek, and those funny poems of his we did as part of course work, so sometimes I tried to write like Okoth. This time I showed my little pink book to my three closest friends, after some long internal battle. Then I went to some college, and an editor friend of mine saw it, thought it nice. That was the first time the world ever knew what i thought. I was never more scared. But still I wrote, because if these things stay in the head, they threaten one's sanity. 

Last year my little pink book got lost, and a part of me went with  it, a few of my words, a few of my rhymes. I haven't written a single poem since. And those things I mentioned, they are threatening my sanity. my mind is full of half-constructed thoughts, my document folder full of unfinished work and my life seems like one big puzzle.I took on this blog six months ago, hoping that I would never turn it into another stage I act upon. There's supposed to be a lot of safety in masses, especially masses of people I may never know. But this too has become a stage, and so I have been omitting most of the things I would rather be speaking about.I've got to go back to the beginning, I've got to take it from the top. I've got to get down to the heart of the matter, try and finish those thoughts that lie half done threatening to overwhelm me. I've gotta figure out how to untangle this web. I've gotta be honest with myself. That's where the math is.

That mirage I was chasing, I'm still hopeful. What's a man without his hope? I very well know it may never be mine, but I suppose this is better than nothing at all. Playing in my head: Coldplay - The Scientist:

I was just guessing at numbers and figures

Pulling the puzzles apart

Questions of science, science and progress 

Do not speak as loud as my heart...

especially in my own home, where i long to act as i should

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and who, when they have chastened him, will not heed them, then his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city, to the gate of his city. And they shall say to the elders of his city, "This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious;he will not obey our voice, he is a glutton and a drunkard." Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death with stones; so shall you put away the evil from among you...

Deuteronomy 21:18-21

I've been thinking about this verse for some time now. It was a very interesting law, not because they stoned them peoples who were gluttonous and drunkards ;))) , but what intrigues me most is how parents were required to kill, so to speak,their child. I know from my mum that a parent's worst fear is that of having to bury their own child. But now in this they are to actually kill him! Imagine that!

Yesterday I watched the movie 'The Freedom Writers' , decidedly the most dopest movie I have watched in a long time. This is a story of teenagers growing up in the hood, where the kids handled guns on a daily basis, and you could be shot for being the wrong colour of skin. the black shot the whites, the Hispanics shot the blacks, and no one cared about justice, only about 'their own'. People got put away for crimes they did not commit, because the star witness was protecting the real perp. It was never about justice, only that someone had to pay, it didn't matter who. I've grown up sheltered from all kinds of crap, so I can't speak with much authority on the subject, but I have friends who've grown up in the ghettos (of  course in Kenya it's probably not that bad). Still, trying to educate those kids was a tall order for anyone, of what good is good grammar to a child who may never get to school tomorrow morning? And at thirteen, fourteen years of age, kids have already learnt hate, are already in gangs, and have already lost three or four friends to gang violence. How do you teach kids like that, what do you say to them to make it all better? How do you bring sense to a situation which has no sense? How do you stop the Hispanic from punching the black student in class? But Erin Gruwell, a white 24 year old school teacher, full of vigour and life, was able to do it, she made a difference. She invested her life in them, those hopeless teenagers who hated her on sight, because she was white, she taught them good grammar and tenses, and she taught them life. She did the impossible: she earned their respect, all of them. I cried when I watched this movie, it's just one of those stories. But that may not have been my point.

One of the young men in that class, Marcus, his mum threw him out when he joined a gang. How do you bring up straight-shooting children in an environment like that? How do you teach them justice, when they see their father being carried away for someone else's crime? How do you teach them to have faith, growing up homes where the next meal was a miracle? How do you unteach them violence, and retaliation, kids who, at sixteen, had seen more dead bodies than a mortician, most of them of people they knew? But that's how they were brought up. While 'normal' kids are taught how to ride bikes by their dads, these kids were taught boxing, how to handle a gun. They were taught that nobody's innocent. 

I'm now trying to get my hands on the Freedom Writer's Diary, the real book (the movie was based on a true story) I don' think I have ever been affected this much by a story. I keep thinking about my kids, about how hard it might be to bring up kids, even in the best environment. Sometimes you can do everything right, and still... Sometimes I may have to be the one to pick up the first stone... Like David, all I can say is 

I will try to walk a blameless path, but how I need Your help, especially in my own home, where I long to act as I should!

Psalms 101:2