He Visits Me

He visits me.

A doomed apparition, he materialised out the dark

Transfixed in horror and disbelief as I met him

With my swift indiscriminate metal and might.

We promptly unmet to an aftermath

Of bones broken and blood spilling.

From birth, forty four years ago,

I journeyed through time and space;

From birth, twenty nine years ago,

Also, he journeyed through time and space;

To a spot, a stretch of tarmac, nondescript and mundane.

I recollect, with shudders as I do,

How bones and flesh sound;

How wind howls through splintered windscreens;

How a seemingly ordinary night without moon,

Enveloped in eerie silence all around,

Can give birth to my play and his play,

Unfolding in our pre-ordained drama.

I mean, think about it.

What are the odds that we should have met so;

At that precise moment, that black place,

In such an unfair manner, both horribly surprised,

If not that ever since, we had been converging,

With our bags of mistakes, towards each other?

And so, that dark night we unwittingly played it out

We, who, from birth, wandered to that spot.

He to provide the thuds and dents

The sacrifice of his sacred essence;

I to provide the sword and might

The blood curdling guilt and horrified yells,

...And the ability to subsequently chronicle our meeting.

As I sojourned the rest of the night

In a dank police cell, graffitied by countless ancestors,

Listening to three other hard fellows talk

Of similar sleepovers elsewhere,

One more comfortably snoring,

All my 1,403,387,100 seconds coagulated.

How fragile Life is! How fleeting.

How easy it is to take!

Till the rooster's crow, I stared at those scarred walls

Immensely sad that already Time had rolled and he was the Past

Yet detached enough to think of self-preservation.

So he visits me.

A doomed apparition materialising out the dark

We're forever connected in our hideous tie,

When we met and unmet,

That night, that spot,

He to dust and I to now.

(This is an account of a sad event that happened between him and I on the night of 16 April 2020 at a place called Mbwana on the Zomba-Blantyre Road here in Malawi.)