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SUICIDE
WHEN HOPE DIES
So Sad it Sucks
Suicide is the easy way out. Suicide is cowardice. That was my view until I rammed onto my own wall of problems, problems, and problems of this unfair world.
©Simon Chilembo 2019
I felt no pain at point of impact. I had already long been a dead man walking. I saw pieces of my soul getting strewn everywhere I looked. Bloody silhouette on the wall portrayed a spread-eagled human body shape. Unpalatable sight. The wall had sucked much of my spirit. My strength was gone.
The fall was as fast as it was unpredictable. I had once been king of the skies buoyed by winds of success in the form of the dollar sign.
“The bottom line is the dollar sign!” sang South Bronx in 1982. Two decades later I had leapt from the bottom line to high up in the sky.
Sky is the limit. It’s a common saying. The dollar sign knows no limits in the sky. Elon Musk will tell you that. Maybe. Try Richard Branson too. But then again, the dollar sign and its numbers are written on paper. Paper burns to ashes when fire rages. Sky holds no ash. Trash. That’s how we fall. When this happens, gravity becomes our worst enemy. We can’t beat the force. For we are not peregrine falcons we can only spread our limbs. Close our eyes. Hope for a few seconds to project our last prayers to God before we embrace the first wall to receive us, if not the ground itself. Welcome back down to earth with a plash. Instant death sealed if it’s not your lucky day.
They shall make another dollar sign note. The bottom line is that the dollar sign is forever. For now, anyway. In the digital space they call it cryptocurrency these days. I do want to live forever, but I’m only human. I survived my fall. Miraculous. Today I’m with my feet on the ground below the dollar sign bottom line. I’m in sync with the grassroots. I can hear my heart beat. I feel life everywhere. My soul is together again.
Perhaps it is because, despite its timing and speed, I had in fact had a hunch of the fall coming. I had seen some men and women fall around me before. I had rescued a few in my job. I knew, I know the signs therefore. I knew that if I did not take a time out, eternal darkness would be my destination. In the realm of eternal darkness, everything of the unthinkable, everything of the anti-life is possible. Once people have fallen into this abyss, there is no turning back. More often than not.
Fortunately I am a child of the light. I’ve never been inclined to be drawn towards the direction of eternal darkness. Temptations abound, with or without dollar sign opulent existence. These temptations come forth in variable manifestations, but eternal darkness is a constant. I understood that if ever I got to succumb to temptation, I’d ultimately find myself knocking on the door to eternal darkness. Therefore, I zeroed myself out from conventional social routines. I had acknowledged my lack of passion for the latter after my fall had sapped nearly all of my desire to live and love.
Somewhere in my growing up years, I had learned that there was no dishonour in accepting defeat and all that it entails at the personal and material levels. If I got the chance to wait for as long as it was necessary, I would regain my strength and passion for living again. I went into hibernation. For five years and three months I faced isolation, my frustrations, my bitterness, my fears, my inadequacies, my nightmares, and my hopes head-on. In time, my reflections on hope as a concept and process rekindled my life light.
Despite everything else, my hope that everything would be alright someday was steadfast. I reckon that this effectively dissuaded me from seeking to enter into the path towards the realm of eternal darkness. I felt a strange warmth and respect towards suicide. Finally, it all made sense to me. And I began to write books. The books have driven me to visit the deepest recesses of my being as a private soul, and as a social entity. I obsoleted my demons. I know myself better. I understand my world better. I have found inner peace. Life is a joy. Pure joy.
Suicide feeds on the state of emotional desperation of everyone equally. Hope is a constant human attribute that conditions behaviour towards achievement of certain values or states of being. All things remaining equal, happiness is derived from different experiences from person to person because human beings are born ever so different from one another. People also rightly define what happiness is owing to who they are vis-à-vis their respective stations in life. However, once attained, the feeling of happiness as a human emotion is a planetary constant.
In the same vein, people shall as individuals or collectives hope to attain a myriad of desirable ends in their lives. They’ll be variably motivated to actively work in as innumerable ways towards the achievement of these goals. Success is the reward for keeping the dream alive, driven by hope and faith during the process of overcoming eventual obstacles encountered along the way. Success then ignites the auto neurological response manifest through various ways of expressing the constant of happiness. Like a rose, happiness is happiness by any other name.
In the extreme, regardless of the goal or the dreamer, failure to achieve can lead to one common denominator that is also a constant across the board: desperation. Desperation is a recipe for depression. Depression is a rough surface, unlit downhill express tunnel highway into the realm of eternal darkness. If the mind still works positively somehow, and if even a minute glimmer of hope still exists at this stage, the afflicted might ask just one last question: “What am I living for?”
I know – I’ve been there, done that.
I do not speak for religious and other convictions. Neither do I speak for wanton social deviants, psychopaths, when I postulate that suicide is the respectable way out when people have come to the conclusion that they have nothing left to live for; when they have concluded that their lives have no worth or meaning to anybody, when they are caught up in the maze of helplessness against deceit and cold-heartedness of fellow humans. How many times have we in anger, or outright malice, said to one another something like, “You are useless. You are fuck all. You mean nothing to me. Get out of my life. Go hang, loser!”?
Human nature is complex. That complexity directly translates itself in the complex nature of human relations. That said, I believe that much as I am responsible for my own happiness, I am as responsible to help to make other people find and sustain their own happiness. The overriding assumption being that I am allowed the privilege to give and to assist whenever necessary. Happiness does not occur in a vacuum. It is also imperative that we allow one another to make mistakes, correct them, repent, and forgive*. Just as it is of absolute importance to show humility in the face of our sins and errors of judgement as we all go about each the routes and obligations of our respective journeys of life.
Given the adventures that the routes of my life’s journey have exposed me to so far, I have developed profound but non-attached love for the vast majority of people I have had anything to do with in all the human survival and growth endeavours that I still go through. I am a humble and grateful recipient of much love from all these people too. This grand love is the reason for my living.
All categories of love considered, my love for people is non-attached to the extent that I could never impose my love on anybody that does not want my love. Neither could I ever beg, nor long for non-forthcoming love from anybody that despises me. In my world, love is a voluntary, spontaneous two-way traffic. It’s either it works, or it doesn’t. Love is not an entitlement. Love is a desirable, not an imperative.
Love is discerning. So is its redemptive power. Unconditional love is for children; it is for the sick, the weak, and the vulnerable. Love becomes an imperative only when it comes to the self. The greatest love of all is the love of the self. Should I ever feel devoid of self-love one day, I might as well be dead.
On Wednesday, December 18, 2019, I lost my youngest cousin in South Africa to suicide. Exactly one week later, Christmas Day, Wednesday, December 25, 2019, all-Norway’s Ari Behn followed suit. Beloved South African activist friends in Johannesburg, Sipho Singwisa and Gillian Schutte had already begun to grieve since their only child and son met his demise likewise on Sunday, December 01. 2019. I am Sad as Hell for sure. My deepfelt condolences to the bereaved parents, their broader families, friends, and fans in South Africa and Norway.
©Simon Chilembo 2019
Who feels it knows it. I find comfort and lasting hope in that I have reason to believe that I have an idea as to the magnitude of the battles the three dearly departed had to put up against their respective demons along the way into the realm of eternal darkness. No weaknesses here. No cowardice. No stupidity. No selfishness. No eccentricity. No madness. Only insurmountable troubles of being human having crushed spirit and hope foundations of a man’s existential premises: Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody knows … my sorrow.
In the end, we are all ever so vulnerable against forces that make us breathe. When it’s over and done with, it’s not in the act, but in compassion we want to dwell upon; it’s in the enshrinement of dignity of our humanity in our hearts. It could happen to anyone of us. Anytime. May the souls of Kagiso, Ari, and Kai rest in eternal peace. My thoughts also go to the numerous others whose fall into the suicide trap have gone unnoticed the world over, as well as those that suicide beckons and shall consume in obscurity today, tomorrow and beyond.
SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
TEL.: +4792525032
DECEMBER 26, 2019
*As a rule, I don’t do forgiveness for free – Ask and ye shall be (for-)given!
LOVE AS A NEUROLOGICAL FIX
Scientifically speaking, at the moment of human conception, there is no telling what perfections or imperfections shall take place as the to-be-human-being develops until birth. Not in the least as the new human being steadily grows up into adulthood and advanced old age, if so destined. There never is any guarantee that the new to-be-human-being shall in fact be born, to begin with.
©Mona Karlsen, 2019
Depending on the genetic material quality of the sperm and the egg of the respective parents, children born can turn out to have and to be anything. Life is by default a game of chance from the start. Consideration of infinite other internal and exterior variables prior to, during the mother’s pregnancy and actual eventual birthing is crucial in this regard as well. Children can be born still. They can be born healthy and strong, weak and ever fragile, with or without arms or ears. They can be born with all kinds of everything and/ or nothing, including sexuality.
Sexuality is a manifestation of a neurological state of being; biologically determined, needless to say. Therefore, sexual orientation is not a choice, it is an intrinsic aspect of being human as naturally programmed in our genetical construct as living organisms.
To strive to change or work against human sexual orientation is as good as working against God’s work and wonders of her infinite creative potential and its expressions, both for the relative good and bad of human existence on earth. This has to hold true if indeed all born and unborn human beings are made by God in her own image. God cannot be God only for socially constructed “normal” people.
Discrimination and loathing of people whose expression of being goes contra man-made social norms essentially invalidate the existence and relevance of God. A God who “so loved the world that [she] gave [her] one and only Son, that whoever believes in [her] shall not perish but have eternal life.” It is clear that God is aware that there shall be those that shall not believe in her because of the imperfect, non-predictable nature of being human, whether made after her image or not.
Amongst other things, assuming that we are indeed manifestations of God’s creation, she imparted in us the power of will. Therefore, people can as per their natural prerogative choose or not to choose to believe in God and take the consequences. Some people will, vis-à-vis artificial social precepts, be defined or judged to be anti-God only because they cannot do otherwise but live according to the essence of their being what or who they are. That as nature, or God, designed and subsequently brought them out to life on earth.
A really genuine and benevolent God simply cannot intentionally design and give life to sexual orientation “abnormal” people to, then, punish them upon their expression and living of life according to their inherent compulsions.
In a perfect world, it can be predicted that the act of human sexual intercourse shall under “normal circumstances” take place only between males and females only. But normalcy in nature is a fluid reality that is scientifically verifiable.
To, in the name of God, deny people of the same sex the privilege to love one another and enjoy free, mutually satisfactory sexual intercourse in a free world is fundamentally an outrageously spiritually vain, anti-God endeavour. Even worse when it’s expressed in the form of parochial, archaic “it is not our culture!” utterance.
And then there is “Even animals don’t do it! Why should we allow it in our society?”
This takes the cake of ludicrous logic founded on misguided understanding, if any, of how nature really works: human neurological wiring and hormonal propulsion influencing behavioural manifestations have no direct correlation with that of non-human animals, that emanating from mutually incongruent genetical constructs and preconditions. Basic science.
Humans and non-human animals need to have a common genome in order to be socially and, by extension, sexually comparable, if not compatible. In the same vein, for example, lions and buffaloes naturally don’t socially or sexually mix because they are inherently driven by different genetic factors. On the other hand, be they straight or gay, humans of all races, colours, religions, and creed will always be socially and sexually attracted to one another as a matter of course. That as a given attribute of sharing a common and invariable human genome. Elemental science.
“Green people and magenta people simply cannot mix! Ever seen hyenas and giraffes mix together out in nature? It’s not racism. No, not at all. It’s just the way things are. It’s God’s plan, you know, my friend!”
Baloney!
If I really am made by God in her image, then, everything I do and stand for in my life is but a small manifestation of her stupendous wonders in the universe. If she made me a Human Rights driven heterosexual with passion for fairness and justice for all, including homosexuals, then I’m a happy, humble, and obedient servant. This resonates 100% with my innate being as scientifically and/ or Godly constructed man. What I preach here is the word of God, therefore.
Conversely, should God punish me for performing my instinctual human or social obligations as per her design of me, she can go to hell. Hell ought to be yet another one of her self-defeatist masochistic creations. It’s absolutely preposterous that God can create me, send me to propagate her words and deeds in the world, and then shoot me for carrying out her commands exactly according to her designs. Amen!
SIMON CHILEMBO
OSLO
NORWAY
TELEPHONE: +4792525032
DECEMBER 05, 2019
PEOPLE OF THE FUTURE
RACISTS CRUMBLING
If some idiots start a nuclear war, then we are doomed. Good-bye planet earth. The same is bound to happen if climate change is not given the serious attention it calls for. That will be sad because I want to be here in the 23rd Century AD.
Beyond two hundred years from now monoracials, monoethnics will be relics of the past. The future belongs to a new composite race spearheaded by multiracials, multiculturals already treading the world today. In tracing their individual origins these people of the future will have their lineage points dotted all over the globe. These will be the true citizens of the world.
I want to be there then in order to see the true brotherhood, sisterhood of humanity living as one big pluricultural race. Perhaps I’ll have made a direct contribution, or my progeny will have done so. In this new pluricultural race, only the unlikely more intellectually retarded than today’s pure races ideologues, racists, white supremacists, regionalists, and tribalists will still be looking to define skin colours and other physical features to classify and to separate people. A futile exercise. As a collective, people of the future will be a complex set of an infinite extrapolation of possible cross generational genetic permutations. Whether or not they’ll be a coherent mass living harmoniously on the planet only time will tell. I want to be there in order to see this for myself.
The world had better start preparing for the future today. Writings of the future that I predict are already on the wall. The writings are filling up aeroplanes of the world, are on the highways of the world, are guiding footsteps across deserts of the world every day. They are traversing jungles of the world. Seas and oceans of the world are also witness to the pervasiveness of these writings on the wall about the inevitable pluricultural people of the future. No one can stop the tide.
The writings are in refugee camps; in detention centres and prison walls of the world. They are on apartheid walls that are erected on the face of mother earth. Treacherous barbed wire fences cannot dissuade enlivenment of the writings either: calligraphed in blood, torn-off clothing fabrics, pieces of human flesh, if not dead bodies hanging here and there.
Every act of tyranny committed today everywhere on the face of the earth emboldens every letter on the writings about the people of the future. Every international trade deal signed at any level simply shines more light on the writings. International trade in all its forms and components across the board grows exponentially every day. It constantly shrinks the globe, whilst signals of the potential and actual birth and growth of the people of the future are as clearly readable as the brightest night stars. The modern world calls this globalization, baby.
Globalization spreads goods and services across the globe. If globalization is about econo-political might, for good or bad regardless, it is because it is essentially about people with their needs and wants. Globalization draws people to domains of opulence attributable to gains from international trade and geo-political power.
As a tool for continued inequalities obtained from colonialism and earlier epochs, globalization facilitates exploitation of natural resources at the expense of economic development of poorer countries. This tendency continues to cause social unrests often culminating in protracted brutal civil wars. These wars can border on, if not actually lead to genocide of certain categories of people in the affected countries. The latter typically breed some of the worst despots in the world at any one time in human history.
The most resourceful of survivors in these troubled lands shall escape in search for safety havens and greener pastures across the globe. They shall follow routes leading to globalization powerhouses in the western world, or any other place on earth that has the promise of a better life. Any place that helps to keep hope aglow.
Whether in torment or existing on the bright side of life, people will always fall in love and procreate wherever they may find themselves in the world. Indeed, it is not always that procreation shall be an outcome of love. There sadly is a dark side to being human too. I intentionally choose to dwell on love here. Love is the power I aspire for in my looking into the future state and endeavours of humanity. May love forever reign supreme on planet earth.
As the world gets smaller and smaller, people of the world get to interact with one another ever more rapidly in all sorts of spaces and circumstances. All this creates fertile opportunities for cross-racial, cross-ethnic, cross-cultural love and reproduction to thrive over generations. This occurring as rapidly and as infinitely as humanity manifests its diversity as a species on planet earth. In our time, it can only get better and better. With or without globalization, no barriers of any kind can stop this trend.
Driven by magnetism of love and curiosity, and that of need for peace and abundance, human beings will achieve anything; they will go anywhere, including planets many light years away from home. The walls of Jericho fell, as did that of Berlin. The Great Wall of China is but what it is today: a fascinating feat of engineering. China wants to rule the world. Fools keep building walls and fences, they keep digging trenches and canals, they shoot people down, they keep coming up with all sorts of outlandish ideas to curtail people migration across the world. Outrageous. It’ll never work.
What a wonderful world the future has in store for humanity. White supremacists and other racial purists are fighting a losing battle. Wake up and smell the coffee, people!
Of course, where there is love there is the presence or absence of God. I am convinced that it’s God’s plan that monotheism shall allow love to disentangle it in parallel with the imminent major existential transformation and paradigm shift of the state of being human in the future. If religion chooses to remain static, then God is going to be even wearier than she is today. Which could just as well be as annihilatory as a nuclear war, or climate change let loose. Heaven forbid!
If we survive, I’m curious to see the face of God too in the year 2201. Amen.
Simon Chilembo
Oslo
Norway
Tel.: +47 925 25 032
November 14, 2019
ONE YEAR LATER: ILLUSIONS IN MY WORLD
REALITY IS I AM HERE, I LIVE, I LOVE, I DANCE.
I AIN’T GOING NOWHERE
“Winter is coming now, Simon. If you have any doubts about coming back to Norway you still have a chance of returning to South Africa, you know,” said Sofia.
“Are you sure you have no regrets about coming back to Norway, Simon? You still have a home in South Africa, not so?” several others remark this way many a time.
I live with no doubts. If I have any doubts, I don’t do it. If I do it anyway and get burned as a result, too bad. What’s done is done. If I die, I die. Closed chapter. If I don’t die, no regrets. I pay the price I have to pay, and move on; assuming that I can still breathe, stand, walk, and think.
If I can think, I can contextualize my feelings. If it feels right to do so because it’s turned out that I’ve really screwed up, I’ll beg for mercy if given a chance to do so. When I’ve been unfairly screwed and the perpetrator is cool about it, exercising their own capacity not to regret unjust screwing up of other souls, I leave them where they are. I never look back. I never go back. I’ll always find new playing spaces.
I’ll always find new playmates. We might play on until our dying days. We might wear each other out in the midst of the golden years of our lives when some shit suddenly happens: somebody gets screwed up somehow, another one bites the dust, whilst the other glosses in new-found glory at the expense of the screwed. It is what it is. That’s how we roll. Falling out of glory is like milk spilling out of a glass. I never cry over either.
Exactly one year ago today, I came back to Norway more shattered than I was when I left for South Africa six years ago. At that time, I watched with dismay as the success empire that I had built came crumbling down. Getting to South Africa soon felt like I had evacuated a sinking ship without any safety equipment to wear or hang on to. Because I’m not a good swimmer, I knew that the only thing I could do was to let go and allow the ocean to take me where it pleased.
If any creature of the oceans came to eat me, I prayed it would be a shark: agile, precise, in perpetual motion straight on ahead. In my naked least-to-no-resistance state of mind in the middle of the waters, I decided to play dead, though. I survived. I marvelled at watching the last vestiges of my extended empire go with the wind to places beyond my fantasy.
By the time my mother died I had been thoroughly humiliated for five years and three months in South Africa. She died a disillusioned mother of a once indomitable son that had come on the verge of falling into the dreaded pit of poverty that is the fate of the vast majority of Black South Africans. On my part, I had long read and understood her despair. I had already long made peace with the fact that her inability to help me to fix my world would slowly but surely kill her. It was not only about me, but my two siblings also. But I had previously been a pillar of strength for the family.
I know that in her old age, my mother’s fear of living in abject poverty ate her soul like cancer did body cells. So, I am convinced that her death released her spirit to a place of lasting peace and abundance. I know that that’s what she aspired to achieve during her life time, anyway. My fourth novel and sixth book, Machona Mother – Shebeen Queen, is inspired by my observation of hers and other mothers’ and wives’ lives in South Africa. Through this I reflect on the challenges of wifehood and parenthood in oppressive societies the world over.
On the eve of my mother’s burial, I was threatened with a bullet in the head. My torment in South Africa had come to a head. I had to leave. Three months earlier, she had in fact finally acknowledged that my future in South Africa was bleak. The only thing she could do was to give me her blessings, and I’d have to find my way back. I should leave whenever I could. She was laid to rest on October 13, 2018.
Eleven days later I landed in Oslo. In grief. Tired. Bankrupt. Homeless. Businessless. Jobless. At total mercy of other people and the state for the first time in my adult life. I received unprecedented overwhelming support and love. This gave me a refreshing new taste of humility in my heart.
Alas, I’m still shocked by the discovery that love has inexplicably diminished, if not vanished altogether in certain quarters. But then again, love is like milk: when it’s spilt it’s gone. No salvage. No cry. Like milk, fresh love abounds. Always. Spilt milk tends to be messy. Post-spillage clean-up is ever so necessary, therefore.
Left unattended to, spilt milk can go stale and stink. Poison. There is a poisonous dark cloud of love lost hanging over my head. Apparently, this cloud is at alarming speed spreading itself throughout the extent of domains that are crucial for my continued existence as a free and happy man of the world.
I now feel that the time has come for me to dissipate the treacherous cloud. Had I lived a hermitic life somewhere oblivious to the real world of real people, I really wouldn’t bother. My imperfections notwithstanding, as an ethically conscious man living in a morally charged world, I have no doubt as to my personal integrity in every step I make every day of my life. It isn’t just about my ego. I respond from a need to protect the honour and legacy of my late parents. Through the latter I reach out to my ancestral spirits throughout the entire Sub-Saharan Africa.
My own legacy matters too. It’s not just about me. It’s all in the name of the living of my people in the afore-mentioned part of the world, particularly my clans in Zambia and South Africa. I have in mind my bosom friends, my godchildren, my teachers, and colleagues all over the world throughout my life’s journey thus far as well. I intend to stay the course until my last breath on earth, which won’t be tomorrow. I’m here for the long haul.
My thoughts also go to all the people the lives of whom I have impacted before, I impact today, and I shall be allowed to impact in the future anywhere in the world: my raison d’être. It is my wish and hope that all the people falling into this broad category shall never feel shame, embarrassment, guilt, or fear at the mention or thoughts of my name, my deeds. My legacy.
I’m proud of my roots. I’m protective of my heritage. I value highly the love and faith of my confidants. I am in awe of the big religious and philosophical thoughts of the world that daily inspire and guide me in my search of liberatory enlightenment in the labyrinth of life. Truth must never shy away from me.
With the poisonous dark cloud of love lost hanging over my head cleared, the following shall be revealed:
- I have been unilaterally charged and convicted without a trial.
- I am not a sexual pervert. I am not a dirty old man. I am not a sexual predator.
- I am not a paedophile. Neither in practice nor by inclination.
- I am not a rapist. I am not into the habit of imposing my sexual power over women. I am not in the habit of taking advantage of sick, weak, and vulnerable women. I am not a sexual manipulator. I am not a philanderer. I shall never engage in sexual intercourse at any price, with anything.
- I love power. But I am not power-hungry. I am not a powermonger. The essence of my being is not defined by the power that I wield as attendant to the things that I do. For example, when I’m revered for being a 6th Dan Black Belt Karate Master, I don’t take it personal. I am nothing more than a conduit between higher knowledge and the people that my position empowers me to serve.
With or without Karate and its inherent existential and functional attributes, I remain the same original Simon Chilembo ever aspiring to be a decent human being each and every day of my life, my fallibilities considered. Karate does not define the essence of my being. It is but one mirror of many that reflect the infinite potential of the essence of me as a human being, a social change force.
I shall never fight for power acquisition and sustenance at any cost. But I shall fight with all of my life against deliberate malicious application of unfairness and injustice as tools and manifestations of power against me, my own, including the values that I stand for. - I am addicted to love and peace.
- It is preposterous to seek to delete my existence in the historical developments of certain phenomena in my worlds. History never forgets. The wise will always query. Answers will have to be given, no matter how murky.
Having stated the above, I encourage anybody with any compelling evidence to contradict me to come forth and present their cases. This evidence shall be tangible, derived from real-life circumstances. It shall not be derived from ill-founded conclusions obtained from subjective misinterpretations of my literary works. It shall not be derived from malicious rumours about me either. Otherwise, people can just lay their weapons down and move on with their lives. We all deserve happily-ever-after living once love has found new hearts to entice. That’s the way of the world.
Character assassination claims and rumours about my person have been doing the rounds in Oslo and environs especially since the publication of my debut novel, When The Mighty Fall, in November, 2015. I feel strongly about these. Such that, in the unlikely event that it can be objectively proved that I am a molester, I will kill myself. That not as a manifestation of any suicidal vice about my character. Moreover, I will consciously choose to kill myself for my sins to save society resources and troubles of arrests, tedious court cases and all that goes with dealing with issues of crimes against humanity. It ought to be as simple as that, really.
I am not a fan of capital punishment. However, my abhorrence of sexual abuse, especially with respect to children, ignites the most primitive of my human instincts. Were I to be found actually guilty in this case, I wouldn’t hesitate to execute upon myself the ultimate punishment that my primitive instincts see as justifiable against child molestation.
I will publicly nail myself on the cross. I will invite the world to come and practice archery on my body until there’ll be no more flesh and bone left for an arrow to pierce. Then my corpse must be set on fire whilst on the cross. No funeral services. No urns. Let the wind blow the devil’s ashes away to places far away into outer space. No memorial services. Denialism of my place in history will be just fine, then: I was never here. I was an accident of nature. I was a figment of my imagination. I was just an illusion.
I say to my enemies all the time: you don’t know me.
Simon Chilembo
Oslo
Norway
Tel.: +47 925 25 032
October 24, 2019
BLACK CURSE: Africa Burning!
Divide and Conquer Necro-Power Games
South Africa
Has Afro-Xenophobia lynching squads
Eliminating their kindred
Off the streets of the land
Even the soil of the land
Won’t absorb the blood of the slain
With the rains far, far away
The blood cakes on the ground
Corpses not welcome in mortuaries
Rot
Under the sun of
The land of the broken rainbow
Bleeding dark
Venomous blood
The stench combines
With smoke of those bodies
Caught in flames of devilish fire
In Mzansi fo sho
Satanic voices chant: HABASHWE!!!
And then I recall
Last time:
I heard that
Boko Haram were Nigerian
Al-Shabaab were Somalian
The Lord’s Resistance Army were Ugandan
In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
Kivu province is a land of bloodbaths
In the days of Zaire
There was Mobutu Sese Seko
Patrice Lumumba’s ghost
Must have haunted this man for life
In neighbouring Uganda
There was Idi Amin
They say he ate human flesh
Rwanda gave genocide application
A new Afro-touch meaning
In Charles Taylor’s Liberian war
Survivors had their hands hacked off
We’ve had Emperors Jean-Bédel Bokassas
Of the Central African Republics
A seven-university-degreed Mugabe of Zimbabwe
Has just died
Believe me: Matebeleland people aren’t mourning
Closer to home
I understood as a child that
Qomatsi was Lesotho rulers’ licence to kill their own
In the Gambia
Yahya Jammeh’s atrocities
Make Qomatsi a child’s play in comparison
And so, asking for a friend
I wonder:
Who is better?
Who is worse?
Same bloody-black-curse-difference
If you ask me
Simon Chilembo
Oslo
Norway
Telephone: +4792525032
09/ 09- 2019
ODE TO ANNE GRETE PREUS
WOMAN OF THE MOON:
It is the 1990s
My decade of
Big books, big love
Big moon, big moves
Big pushes, big rewards
Big visions
Big woman
This big bassline
Of the
Big moon song
Now I know
Limousined me
Through the decade
As if it was born
On January one, 1990
Only for the vehicle
To succumb to
The millennium bug
At time
Zero, zero, zero, zero hours
December 1999
January, year 2000
Splitting the old
From the new
Decade of
Big games, big monies
Big broken hearts
Big losses, big spaces
Of silence after
Big bangs
Big rebirths
I recall seeing her on TV once:
When she was a little girl
Her mother told her to drink milk
So that she’d grow big and strong
She did as implored
Strong she became
Big she became
She became so big
That when the big love
Of the 1990s
Came with moments of
Too big
Too dark to handle
Dark clouds of despair
I looked at her
The big woman
She filled my ears
With her
Big bass line drive
Her voice singing
In praise of the moon
Gave me strength
Gave me hope
I looked forward
To every new full moon
Coming on ahead
Hoping, praying that
This time around
It’s gonna be alright
Alas, the Y2K bug struck
As the big glow of
The 1990s love faded
In spite of
New decade full moon rising
Big love crashed
Pulverized into the
Big river
Of memories
Of sweet moments
Of sweet
Big loving here
Of sweet
Big loving there
That once was
And now she’s gone
The big woman
Big dark clouds of despair
Became a thing of the past
A long time ago
That is how I could
Watch the moon
Full and big
And dream again
The week just gone past
Big moon’s glow lingers on
In my mind’s eye
That is my comfort
To drown my grief
I shall do what she kept
Telling me through her song
During that decade of
My big love
That is history
Of mixed emotions
Today
She said that
Whilst the moon
Hoovers silently
Confident in wisdom
Amongst the stars
People dancing in circles
Looking for life’s answers
On earth
She
Big moon says no word
I too shall become
A pupil of the moon
So that I can
See my pain heal
See my joy
See my love
Return in silence
I shall remain
Pupil of the moon
‘till I see her again
Big woman of the moon
For she knows
Her Highness
The moon
Knows everything
About my world
A tear the size of
Full moon gracing
A star-free night sky
Has just dropped from
The eye above my heart
Jeg er månens elev
I shall cry
And dry
I shall sing
I shall dance
For I know that
If the moon is forever
So is her soul
Love x Love
©Simon Chilembo, 26/ 08- 2019
Oslo
Norway
Telephone: +4792525032
