Your son here lies broken

Mama, where is the tiny cot that you rocked your son in when he was only a week old? Where are the clothes you swaddled him when he still had on him the smell of the maternity ward? Where are the breasts that suckled his thirsty mouth ten times a day? Where are you, mother to my roommate? Your son here lies broken. He has refused to eat. He has refused to drink unless it’s from the bottle of gin. Life has battered him really bad.

Your son, you sent him abroad to get education, well he has, not from lecture theatres and glittering halls of furious intellectualism but the harsh and uncompromising school of life.

Mama, freedom made your son a slave the moment you left. Your prayers and sacrifices, are you sure you invoke the right gods? Are you sure you spray his room with the right potions every morning and evening? Here he came and found women, lots of women.

He was first charmed by those in skirts shorter than a fly’s lifespan but soon discovered they had so much to show but too little to offer. He tried those in trousers that seemed to suffocate their thighs but those, they were really good at suffocating his pockets. Your son, he soon shed off his colour blind and fell for those with yellow hair. They taught him to take his first beer and smoke his first cigar. He thought he belonged till he was arrested for trespassing and looking suspicious and they left him to face the music, his biggest mistake was being black.

He moved on to those with red hair but they were weird, wore weird clothes and listened to weird music that he couldn’t understand. He came back to his brothers, mama, he came back to the people he thought were his brothers just because the colours agreed. Here he got his first tattoo. They told him it was a lion but it looked more like a cowed mongrel. He was taught to steal and sell drugs. They taught him how to evade the feds and for once i saw a hint of grim satisfaction on his face. He was living, at least they were living but one night three of his friends were shot dead, peddling drugs, possession of an illegal firearm and conspiracy to commit a crime. He was lucky to survive but his pockets were not. His people took away the car they had given him and cleaned out his room. Only your portrait was left, the memory of the two eyes that cry every night and the knees that kneel down to blow away into a smoky fire. Mama, your son here lies broken.

The school, he never got to any. He believed in the American dream he had read about in newspapers and in old textbooks. He believed he could make it big and fast. He invested all the money he had in his dreams, nay, daydreams but nature dictated that he had to snap out of them.

Mama, your son here sits broken in the wicker rocking chair, half-burnt cigars and broken whiskey bottles dotting the floor on his drunken feet. I don’t know him anymore, but if you think that’s strange, it’s not, because he doesn’t know himself either.