Closer, Circle Art Gallery, 10 2021

Beauty is not in the process but the product Still I stand as I am
Even after stripped my native tong. Subconsciously, thinking of my mother a forgotten land, I call this home but why does this home look at me like a strange fruit. Just to fall, rot and be buried six feet deep, as if to be buried is not to be taken back to my roots. Finally, home is a building, a person or a place for some. Obviously, a metaphor uncomfortable to be the center of attention of this poem. When home is neither here nor there and remaining to be a thing I cannot throw away.

A negative film that is yet to be cleaned; my skin made of foreign jewelry engraved in orange beads. I laugh at the end of every bad movie because I like to know the end to everything except to my story of belonging. Aspiring to be the people I do not know, and hoping not to be like the ones I do.

I am the girl that takes a flight back to a land she cannot claim out loud. Backspaced, scratched out, written about it a couple of times before. Moving forward because how do you write about a land that’s not ready to listen.

Staring out, bear, exposed, facetime calls with bad Wi-Fi over long distance family. Lost connections and forced separations.
I am the things I cannot throw away. Old pictures, books that al never get to reading. I am made up of ruined imaged of fiction. Quotes I wished I would have thought of first. Bad calligraphy but an excellent Mural painter.

So, look me in the eye, I am crafts, passions with the next billion-dollar idea, crumpled up piece of paper under my bed, unfinished, under explored, abandoned. Constantly having a new place to call home

I am taught the world has decided what is useful
Laughing over repeated jokes in a language that was forced upon on me
With books and movies weaving new vocabularies over my brother’s wit.
I see the world exactly as everyone else in blues and greens, except on borrowed time. Stolen traits. Understanding that nothing will ever be entirely mine, except this photo, this dance, this idea and this Art.
Because my only home is this Art.

Still, I stand as I am by Drop of Melanin (Nairobi 2022)