– dedication to Charity N.A.G
By: Fadi Dabbousi

Sshhhh, quiet please, lest she slings yet another deadly shot.
***
It is not a mistake to love someone for four years and going strong but the wrong is in the side that creeps and crawls with surprising stings and clutches that itch the skin and curd the blood and cease the heart.

Beauty, as is said, lies in the eyes of the beholder but how miraculous can it be when blinded eyes continue to see this beauty even after her lethal poison has closed them forever. It is often said that love is blind and I ask, “What more blindness can be caused after that?”

Verily it may be the flagitious side of love that sees neither equal nor measure of sanity, for its only recompense is in the vilification of character so loving and true. Yes, and whoever claimed that love is always sweet? It is a fallacy to think so and the evidence is alive and throbbing in the karma of people cast asunder and left to sizzle on the meteors of space to float forever; it is the cries of these splintered and shattered hearts that are heard in the echoes of silence and the solitude of sound that reverberates louder and louder with each ripple and every wave.

“Watch the tangent of your desires”, they seem to scream out their warnings, “Lest you end up on a platform murkier than ours and drier than desert dust in the month of December. The poison of ivy will leave you in sordid agony wetting your pain and drying your conscience, for you will lose all thoughts and take leave of reason. It will drive you to the inanity of unnecessary insanity”.
I have ever heard such a warning but heeded not the cries of the already departed. My soul was stuck on her; stuck because her antlers crept and her claws cleft the very tissues and the inner sinews of majestic membranes that loved to the tune of her name and throbbed to the beat of my dame. I have been in it to my neck and now I am under, for ivy pulls down as it climbs up and as certain as poison ivy is a creature in this world, I will continue to speak of the roughness of love in the majesty of its reign and wickedness in its vein.
It goes to say that Africa is the continent of beauty and somewhere in Ghana is the land of an ivy so beautiful in her pride and dazzling colour that it mesmerises the soul and sweetens the pain of death when she unleashes her venom to one day claim, “I am Love and Love is I; I am mine and he is mine; no matter the roughness in my creeps, he will never go away, neither in stride nor ever in leaps”.

I wince not to say my love that the day will come when you shall see no favour or feel not the warmth of a heart that sought to embrace you. It is the poison in this beautiful ivy that will kill the vibrancy in passion more exquisite than the reflections of rays from a clean-cut diamond, scintillating and bright. And that is what is referred to the as the slow pain of death, gradually phasing off what was created to remain…LOVE.

Unpoison my heart, my love, for you are as cute and seemingly affable as a wonderful ivy. Your malice knows no borders and respects no limits, yet I shall cough your poison out and each time you spit it in I shall spit it back out into oblivion, for poison cannot be left in the open to the detriment of people who might just fall prey to camouflaged innocence of such a lethal concoction.
Stop being a poison ivy and become a lovely orchid….unpoison me, beautiful Ivy…just UNPOSION ME!!!