THE BOYS' QUARTER
The sunburnt roof on a Rain-drenched wall.
A canvas of fate and destiny as emulsion, which boys use to conceal their ugly wall cracks with fractured tiles.
This is the shelter of the long-forgotten boys in recklessly abandoned homes:
Where boys like me woke up to see the sunrise from the east to rest on our shoulders, which often remind us it's time to move on without our shadows.
Where we've learnt to sweep dirt under our tattered rugs and carpets of haunting memories for being left alone to sail solo through the storm of life.
Where we've learnt to wash and spread our filthy shirts at night and removed them before the early morning dew come to rub us off our naked coverings.
The same shabby shirt and one jeans all day on, In a city of crowded histories, shrouded with mysteries. No one cares. No one cares about us, whose daily bread is on the busy streets of this metropolis, where our necks and shoulders support and react to the impact of the bag of sand on our heads and our joy depend solely on the number of bags we live to carry every day.
Still, we carry on, because no one cares about us, no one feels our pain of being subjected to overloading. Most times we are like overburdened donkeys treading the highways, sometimes we slip and fall, sometimes we stumble and tumble back and forth, and people on the streets laugh at us for not being boyish and strong enough to bear the overload, and their mockery slices us through like a knife cutting through yam. Yet, we stood up, cheered and moved on like it never happened.
On these streets, our dewy-eyed have become owl-eyed to see golds deep down the hills of the City, but no jigger to dig. Since no one wants to give a hand, we often run harum-scarum after the horizon; like a lunatic in search of his sanity.
We are boys not mild steel nor iron to withstand all the load, burden and forces that tend to break and tear us apart but we have just mastered the art and science of survival to outlive every stone life hurls at us every day.
At night, we'd sit at the doorway to watch porn since our girlfriends are long gone and no one to share our shattered tales of the day with. We all had phones but no one to call. Sometimes, we'd laughed about good old days and we'd cry about the obscurity of our abstract future.
We'd place bottles of an alcoholic drink at our feet, weed in between the middle of our fingers, watch the smoke billowed up into the sky as a rhetorical question begging for an answer, while we'd stare hopelessly at the gloomy clouds in search of a brighter star.
And the sky would often reply with a cloudy and thunderous tone:
"Boys, wear your jacket and tie your boots. It's going to be a long cold night."
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