The city is (not) your saviour

Are you happy for me? asks Baby Keem on a long drive
down a highway littered with my childhood: a zombie Uchumi
supermarket, a middle-aged bowling alley. This city is alive
with the stench of stagnant pond water. This city is a petri
dish and we are tadpoles looking for oxygen in stagnant pond
water, listening to Baby Keem ask us if we’re happy for him,
as if happiness knows our names, as if its word is bond—
Baby Keem, I am not happy at all. I have been in this car for
years, this city is infected with traffic, this city separates
food from mouths, sense from common, democracy from elections,
blood from kin, but somehow fails to separate church from state,
this city will rip a rainbow from the sky and build a mall in its place.
I don’t know what time I will reach home. Maybe we grow old in this car.
We grow old and reach for home while we still have the chance.