[Poetry] Bottles Have Become Bibles by Nforche Gerald

I
Bottles have become bibles
In clench of drunks who babble.
Watch their lips quiver
Like some flibbertigibbet bastards
While shaky hands transport dose after dose
Of the sedated beer to shuddering lips.
Watch them sing and giggle, watch them mystify.
Gutters have become homes
To drunks who grabble
As urine pours throw python penises
And shit flees through beer stained buttocks.
Oh, and they stagger like drunken winds,
Their eyes cocking in lust at every heavy bosom
And every extravagant breast,
While drunken lips hallucinate—
‘mama, one night na how much?’
Then they belch like hungry whales—
Their eyes darting in desire like vampires,
Their brains reduced to pitiful fibres.
Trentetrois and Guinness, the new anthem—
Smirnoff and Booster, a new stratagem;
The bars fuller than Christ’s home,
The republic shattering under the beer curse:
The Cameroon beer.
Children starve, emaciate and weep
The wife having no keep
As she awaits one Cameroonian standardized
And famous drunk.
There he comes staggering
Urine escaping bleached jeans
While emaciated lips sing in queue:
afofoweti I do you
Afofoweti I do you,
I take ma money I buy you
You take me nakam for down.
Spittle urinated by beer invaded lips,
As he wobbles along with sheer pride—
Proud to be up to Cameroon standards.
II
The baby strapped to the contours
Of its mother’s lust deformed back.
One innocent Cameroonian
Shaking in fear and distrust
As a shameless mother rocks
To the rhythm of stale Makossa
And Tabooed Bikutsi
And to the bleats of Coupé Decalé,
And winds her inflated bosom
To the thrill of malnourished drunks,
And jittering her Medusan breasts
To the confusion of drunken admirers.
The baby wide-eyed
Fed with beer from the opiate bottle
And then it begins to giggle and writhe
And is silently withered and brittle
As it struggles to clutch at the bottle
From which a vampirical mother
Had it beer-fed in its beer tutorial lesson.
The disgrace it is
As beer seizes over the politics
Of the republic
Like a merited birthright.
 
Nforche Gerald is a writer and photographer.