Chapter 2 of NUMERO UNO/Day 42 of Steemit School Poetry: Lost

Hi Friends,
Everyday is a blessing really. But sometimes, it doesn't feel that way. This poem is to knowing the gift of life, but still getting lost in the maze of living life.

i
Dido spat a line
From her honey coated, harpic voice:
"I look no further for happiness."

ii
Happiness is what life gives in reward
For going through the hassles of
Getting born, getting tall, fat, ugly, beautiful,
Getting laid, getting made and getting old.

iii
My mother used to be young and fair.
But she gambled too much with the first offerings
Of happiness life gave her - like the free coins certain thing
Called airdrops are giving these days.
She gambled with her airdrops, joy drops,
Life drops, tucked them in between the
Cleavage of her breasts. Loose thing to do.
QHer good drops were stolen
From her.
They dropped from her breasts unto her laps,
And then into her vagina. A hungry man took them.
And now,
All she got are teardrops.

iv
My body says it loves me,
It promises me a lot of joy to feedme
For an entire lifetime.
But my body is a bitch,
Cheating on me with the mind,
They think up some pervert thoughts together,
And my body makes love to the mind with so much
Abstract zeal and tenderness.
Everybody calls it masturbation,
I call it cheating.

v
In my next life,
I won't want this fucked up happiness
That Life hands newly-borns.
I won't need the saucy joy that
Sulks once its bladder is full.
I will just need Life to stop poking
Its nose in my business,
Life's many faces, like the many heads of a Hydra
Gets me thoroughly confused.
So, in my next life,
When Life follows hard on my heels,
I will just say,
"Life, Life, Life, butt off,"
"You make me feel lost!"

---

Ok, so you would think I would give you a break here. Well, not yet. You do remember I said I was going to write this sci-fi novel. Well, I am trying to follow up on my word. This is the second chapter of

NUMERO UNO

One must die as a blind person to be born again as a seeing person- Dr. Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars.

The seismic radiations that hit Earth in the year 2152 didn't come without a warning. In fact, it sent a messenger - Brandy Ellison. Brandy had come to the D.A for technological affairs in Queens, a street on the department of the commons, babbling and reporting what seemed like a crime. The Department Attorney, a fat, brusque man that spoke like he had the devil feasting in his mouth was anything but ready to listen to the thin, petite lady with a hood on her head, a rambling tongue in her mouth and a sudden fear for stepping on the very earth she walked on,

“Hey, hol’ up, hol’ up lady. Cin’t hear you. You say you are some geophysicist. Well, you lost your pair of glasses? Or is it your microscope or stencil, whatever that is? You come here to report a technical crime? And I tell you have come to the right place. You come here to ramble and express some holy anger? And I tell you to go to your mama. So, which one is it gonna be?”

“Ehmmm, well, none really. Maybe, all of it.”

The D.A rapped his hand on his aluminum table that didn't, couldn't even against his entire weight,

“You are still rambling,lady, and I ain't got time to waste.”

Brandy brushed back her black sheen of a hair, swallowed in large gulps of her saliva and took time to unravel the mystery that was soon going to be a disaster. Amidst trembling hands and clasped legs, Brandy fotetold of the seismic magma chamber stoched beneath the 12th layer of the soil. She had heard of this from the orbital insights classes she had taken while in school. But even the professors had discarded the very thought of it as a myth that trailed the nine clans of the primitive Asana tribe in ancient Japan.

These clans were adept in the study of the soils and it was from them that the art of growing Rice as well as apothecarys’ herbal potions were passed down and perfected. These Asanics, by tapping on the ground with expert hands, had divided the Earth's beneath into twelve layers. And even as they gave each layer a classification, they shuddered at calling the name of the twelfth layer of the underworld, because according to them, it housed hell and was the seat of the devil himself.

Now, the D.A had the bad misfortune of listening to Brandy say that due to the several hiking trips she had taken over several years alongside her dog, Cherry, who was a Rottweiler-hyena hybrid, and a nanomachine that detected the thermal consistency of the soil, she was sure that hell itself was ready to be let loose, that devil would sooner than expected rush out from his magnificent palace to flood earth, mundane as it was, with the lava lake from his bowels.

The D. A, after listening to Brandy like a wolf tamed to silence, burst into laughter. His wolfish mouth gnarled and howled and laughed all at once.

“You funny ma'am. You real funny. So you are saying the entire world is going to be gulped by some wicked flame filled with grubs and gels. Well, the pox on the devil himself. Let him bring on the hoards of hell. We are ready for him.”

It wasn't like the D.A had any power, technical or otherwise, he was just some figurehead that was picked out randomly from sorts like him, to piece together the broken shards of violence and metals that was always sure to litter the pubs, brothels and apartment buildings hosted by the commons. But the D. A trusted the system, he trusted that in the face of any adversity, the system up there at the other higher-up departments could handle it. He trusted Elnathan Black.

So, when Brandy kept pushing with her complaints and harrumphs, he didn't push the case to the blonde smart-arsed clerks at the Technolitic Research Institute as he was wont to do. It was to Elnathan Black he turned to.

***
Elnathan had been slightly annoyed when he felt his telepathic receiver glow red only to find out that it was the D. A of the department of the commons. Before the hands of power shuffled them into different class systems, they had been friends. Not the best of friends- they had not spoken to each other quite enough to form a real friendship- but they were friends nonetheless. In fact, the only time they ever do much as said anything to themselves, during their youthful years, was when Elnathan bumped into him at a bazaar while he was struggling to buy materials for a science project. Elnathan has saved him from the confusion that rounded his face and helped him select just the right materials he would need to build a. The D. A who was then just an obese, chubby-cheeked teen had muffled a word of thanks.

It was nothing but this singular, fond memory of immense gratitude that had made Elnathan present his name to the President and Congressmen when they thought of an appropriate appointee to replace the former D. A for the department of Commons lost his senses to Parkinson’s and the trifling sheer evils at the Department that could make a man's head blow up in many pieces. Elnathan was sure that his obese, round face would be able to absorb the miscreant deeds of the vagabonds, fugitives, rebels and religious fanatics that tore at the pillars of the department. And he was right.

But damn, did he have to worship him like a god or bring every criminal issue to him like a dog only trained to sniff scents? Wasn't that why was D. A, to deal with crimes the techno-magisterial way?

Grudgingly, Elnathan made eye contact with the red rays coming from the telepathic tool. And upon a biometric recognition of his eye, a wide screen that had not been there appeared to reveal the glum, gnomish face of the ignoramus of a D. A, who was giggling from mouth to mouth, like a boy in awe of being handed quite an expensive toy,

“Hi Joe, what is you want, this time” Elnathan said this amidst rolling his eyes and fighting the strong urge to add “you freakishly pesky sonofabitch.”

“Hey Boss, don't mean to barge on you this way. But I got this teeny-weeny case on my hands. Not by any means one of those regular troubles that happen down here. I sure wouldn't have knocked at your door for this. I know you are a busy man and I do respect that. Unlike the other… “

“Joe, get to your point. What do you want?”

“Well Boss, I gat this lady breathing down my neck. She saying things that are a lil’ difficult for my mind to comprehend. She don't let me rest no more, insists on seeing somebody. So I thought you would have a little look into her case. She crazy, trust me, saying psychotic things like the whole world is going to be covered in a dirty lake that will love to eat us humans raw. I wonder where she…”

Elnathan rolled his eyes. This was just like the other times. Just as he was about to dismiss Joe with a “you know what, I gat plenty to do, tell the lady off or better still, tell her to go to hell”, Elnathan caught sight of the “psycho” lady in question, she was sitting on the swivel chair rubbing her hands together in what appeared to be a show of apprehension. At first, all Elnathan could think of was that Joe had call the lady ‘psychotic’ and demented, right in front of her. Then replacing that thought was a dawning consciousness of her appearance - she had an oblong face, with a jaw that appeared to be stretched out beyond its limit, this drawn-out jaw made her look younger than her age; her hair, brown and yet not brown, were long strands of thin threads that looked soft, even without needing to touch them.

Elnathan was very much absorbed with the lady's intricately detailed face when she looked up to Joe's holographic screen, to him. He saw her eyes, her big, bulgy, black and white eyes that looked like they had tears permanently engraved on their lids. It was impossible to look at those eyes, watery and beautiful, without getting nostalgic about old memories that have lain lurked and buried within the pit of the heart. At least, this was the case with Elnathan. It was these eyes, the need to see them stare at him physically that caused Elnathan to change his mind,

“Ehm, why don't you just tell her to come see me. We could, you know, look into each other eyes, and talk about this heavy flood threatening to sweep earth away. Again.”

“Ok, Boss,” Joe replied, with a giggle plastered to his face, “you are doing me a whole lot of favour here getting this lady off my hands. You know that new law forbids us from turning any… “

“I know what the laws say, Joe. But the seer with you, I don't know her name. But I bet she is some descendant from the Biblical Noah.”

As expected, Joe turned to the lady that had Elnathan swimming in her gaze,

“You hear, lady, are you a descendant of the Noah dude?”

“No, no,”she let herself smile, “My name is Brandy. Just Brandy.”

***

If Elnathan had paid more attention to Brandy’s hysteria just a little bit more, if he had listened to her gibberish about some twelfth layer and how she was sure something was roiling within, threatening to burst out at the most uneventful of times, just maybe Earth would have been redeemed. But no. Rather than listen to Brandy while she charted out some threatened coordinates on a wide, expansive map of UFE, which had all the departments grafted accordingly, Elnathan spent the better part of his time with her gazing at her eyes, which became more watery even as she got more agitated. He also couldn't help but stare at her temple with the tiny, sultry veins that crawled within as she opened and closed her mouth to talk. He always thought the veins would become less conspicuous if she stopped hitting her head with a light pen every time she needed to remember something.

The scientists that crowded his office just to listen to her speak said she had a point. Something was indeed coming. The earth had gone through so many disruptions not to have anything rocking its spherical arcade. The Orbital insights that dig into the earth's belly had pointed to the several holes bored in the ground by only the devil knows what. Even astronomers were shocked to find the shifting position of Earth in the order of the cosmos. Brandy would have been, something of a heroine, were it not for the precarious event that occasioned her heroic discovery.

Meetings upon meetings, and the whole team knew the Earth was crumbling from its very roots. And something had to be done fast. The scientists, however, could not so much as move a finger without Elnathan’s wrested seal from the president. But Elnathan, he could not see that. He could not see anything.

He was so lost in the halos on the magnificent, brown face of Brandy. His genius mind was not anywhere steeped in the corridors of physics or geography, it was wrapped around unraveling what locked in his heart at the sight of Brandy. The way she moved her petite body like a feather waved against the boisterous wind, moved his heart to shivers. He wanted it to stop, he wanted to think, he wanted to hold the whole earth in his palms again, turn it to whatever direction he wanted. He wanted to save Earth again.

But Brandy had become a wild source of inspiration for everything not related to the task at saving Earth. With Brandy always raising her cackling voice at him, begging him to be proactive while at the same time flailing her long hands colored with wild cloth prints, into the air, Elnathan rubbed his forehead constantly thinking how he would save himself first and then go about his proper, daily business of keeping the world spinning right.

Well, it turned out he thought too much. Because right in the middle of his thoughts, the horror in Brandy’s mind translated into a living, breathing reality. One day, the world was sunny - Departments thrived in their duties and people thrived in their occupations. But the next day, a green, jelly magma that boiled and hissed at its incoming seeped out of an oil rig in the Department of Commerce and streamed into every crack that was found till it flooded nearly everywhere. Like a sleeping snake, the poisonous broth brewed consistently once it came in contact with some human flesh. It was some kind of blobby virus whose hideous appearance was visible to the human eyes.

While the entire world thought it was Ragnarok - the predicted Apocalypse that would sweep Earth off its feet in one waltz, Elnathan knew it was his own mistake. He had fallen in love at the wrong time. While the whole world waited for a Saviour, Elnathan searched for what he knew could he knew could be the antidote - a simulated reverse gravitational pull that would turn Earth down side up. Both the ‘whole world’ and Elnathan got what they wanted; a Saviour and a reverse gravitational pull.

The Alpha Male-s came back home.

So there it is. Now, I can rest my hands. I can tell you to join the Steemit School Poetry community on Discord and I can tell you to please upvote, comment on and possibly resteem this post.