THE STREET AND THE CITY (PART 1)

THE STREET AND THE CITY (PART 1)

Just like any other dream you wind up into, this one, its curtain is drawn against the window burglary of a mild but believe me, wild’ public transport’. In the opposite corner from my view is a rather pale young man most likely in his late teens, headed for the infamous STREET, he seems more dreadful than his looks admit. He surfs with his tiny dancing fingers in an unsequential sequence through and across pages of some stitched papers wickedly joined together against their will in a pitiful manner until he reaches a page, he stops and smiles:

“So you stretched out your arms across

And on all of us
With a smile out on your face
And a tear out in your eyes
Couldn’t seem to gather a lot on your grace”

 

The world blew the city over us hence we haul below sea level
Calling for your world above, we strive but the muscles
On her arms shifts to our faces
That together we don’t sweat from our eyes
The aged, the street!
Where you look upwards but remain on your ruins
Where you look onwards but your legs stride sideway
Where you travel too many directions at a time
Yet, so far, the city sighs while the street scoffs
The city sobs in the street
We live in a moving camp and off her sentient lamp
“Let the good Lord shine the light
On your dark hours
and dark places”

He had enjoyed late night stories from the lips of his lying uncle of the awful theft profile ever maintained on the street. When Ade had finally highlighted he instantly touches and frisks all his body to his little, embarrassing but relatively precious luggage but something isn’t  right, he has had mad orientation from his uncle’s lying lips so he knows for sure he definitely has been robbed of something or so he expected so as the ruthless face of the conductor collected the door against itself he screamed!...Ade had feared this face for even longer than the journey took, he spent a reasonably larger part of those time with this scary creature in his mind, clenching his wide palm into a massive and fierce fist and placing it gently and with extreme care on his own face at uncoordinated intervals intending to keep himself company through the crawling and uneventful long journey. But now Ade is off the bus so he looks around and gathers just about enough courage he then screams: someone have stolen my leg! He watches the conductor’s face as it is carried away while it melts into laughter.

Has Ade just won his first battle off the street I mean on the very soil of the infamous street itself, deeply and intensely thrilled he gallops into a dark corner unconsciously too excited that he cares lees about his stolen leg and most significantly, of the caveats of his uncle’s lying lips of the hazard of The street, its dark hours, and its bends. He stamps into a showdown, crossfire of a number of wet shadows and soaring shadows unto runz just outside that famous storey building empty and colourless in the day but painted with green, red, yellow lights and calls at night at the tail end of the street beside the ill-famed bunk and opposite a sheltering coat precisely on the square called hopeless and church by its own and faithless by the city, where grains sell at the same damn price. He is caught in grave shock and amazement, terrified, but he slumps into despair and dies into calmness.  A heavy slap jolts him out of his frightful reverie where “them guns have been bursting and felled runz boys” accompanied with a loud but close voice (welcome to the street)! To Ade the dirty slap was nothing ‘the devils are gone; thank God I’m still in purgatory he shouted with his hand wide spread away from one another across the sky. He looks around the dead bodies soak him into yet another calm death, this time dazzling and dangling in a water bed with rather high walls on both sides with flavoured and limitless fragrance of endless frenzied varieties for his famished nostrils and an unpleasant delicacy that embarrassed his starved throats and makes his lips spread wide enough to allow a plate of eba he would have at home pass in through but his arrested subconscious; as the word ‘home’ dashed past it choke veins and spills water on blood. The ray of sunlight this time jolts Ade’s left eye into a rather busy pedestrian as he whipes the sunlight off his face.  Passers by keep whispering into his ears; Welcome to the gutter. Terrified and disturbed, he takes to swerve across and into the highway, Ade; faced down looks up and he’s blessed with a sight for old eyes there is an old friend of his standing just across he beckoned to him Ade is now filled with great relief and joy, as he heads towards him he hears a loud engine approach, an indistinct chatter from a yelling audience. He turns around……into oncoming steel, the scary face of the conductor is carried away again into a distance peeping at Ade’s body as it lay against the road as still and as calm as death itself his blood, darker than the darkest lake. The old friend wasn’t beckoning, he warned!

Gutter: the blank space between facing pages of a book between adjacent columns of types or stamps in a sheet.

Ade pulled his face out of the dusty page….
John: Ade, did you just get drunk in your dream again?
He hurriedly pulls himself off the chair, quickens while his legs blab as he heads away from the library, far enough…………………………………
Welcome to the missals

 To be continued.......