Lost in Nairobi

She was almost sixteen or so,
And clueless,
It was 10 pm in the night,
And I was lost in the CBD.

Somewhere around Haile Selassie,
She was new I could tell,
I wasn't,
I had been around long enough but not long enough to know the entire city,
Just,long enough,
To have eaten all its kales from sewer dumpsites and its Madness,
And its madness wasn't as delicious as those kales.
Promise.

I was to be on a bus by 10.30,
That very night,

She had been dropped off I don't know from where,
But she needed help.
I stopped for a moment,
Tried to help her in my head but I couldn't.
I couldn't get her a room,
Nor a job,
Nor call the cops for her,

I was just a broke phoneless student.
Lost and desperate as she was in that city.
We looked at each other for a while,
Then I walked past her,
And she past me.
And we went on on our business of being lost,
Scanning the city's sky scrappers,
Praying that death doesn't yank at us anywhere  from its bins,

artstreetpoet 📸