The poet who sought inspiration

By Makau Kitata

He was the only friend I knew who treated inspiration like ritual: a walk across the road, a silent drink, then a return to the library to jot down whatever verse had descended on him. We called him the Poet, and he called his walk “taking one for the road”—though that road would one day swallow him whole.

One afternoon, somewhere between lectures and our semester papers, he rose from his seat, stretched like a dog waking from rest, and declared he needed to “seize the moment” on the other side of the university gates. Back then, the University of Nairobi had no fence—you crossed University Way. He walked out toward Afro Unity, his favourite bar. We expected him back before nightfall. But the chair he left behind stayed empty. And in my mind, still is.

I saw him many times afterwards—never again in classroom, always moving, always descending. Nairobi has many roads running parallel to Uhuru Highway. On the west, they usher the wealthy to calm, leafy homes; on the east, they lead the less fortunate to their crowded dwellings. My friend seemed pulled eastward by some invisible magnet. Street after street, year after year, he drifted down like loose paper caught in an eastbound vortex.

His first makeshift shelter appeared on State House Road—a contraption of polythene and cartons near the YMCA. The county government cleared it away, but he kept returning to that road, strolling it like a man revisiting an unwritten stanza. Sometimes he’d intercept me as I walked from the hostels to class.

“Last Man, I need 20 bob,” he’d say, smiling that half-drunk Poet’s smile before drifting off again. I began carrying a twenty-bob coin just for him—a small toll I paid to the city’s forgotten muse.

He kept moving—Koinange Street, Muindi Mbingu, Moi Avenue, Tom Mboya—building temporary homes in each, only to lose them in turn. He loved the streets and wanted a home; you could tell. But the city refused to claim him, and gradually he stopped speaking, even to me.

Years later, after I bought a car, I found him again – down Kirinyaga Road among the spare parts shops. He’d lean against a wall or perch on a curb, smoking. I’d hand him some money and leave without a word. Yet, he always recognised me, his eyes lit up, and for a brief moment, I’d feel him remembering something, though he lived inside a cloud of anonymity. The clatter of the mechanics and the city’s restless noise swirled around him like a verse still forming.

Eventually, even Kirinyaga Road lost him. My mechanic Odhis told me, “The Poet has pitched himself by the banks of the Nairobi River.”

 I found him among the castaways the city never plans for. On weekends, when I took the car for check-ups, I’d walk along the river with bread and milk for him. I always found him lounging on a sack he carried like a talisman.

Then the floods came—sweeping away debris, trash, and illegal dwellings. In cleansing itself, the Nairobi River erased the last trace of him. I have not seen my poet friend since.

Now, the castaways live beneath the Nairobi Expressway—a ten-kilometre concrete spine rising over Uhuru Highway, lifting the city’s wealthy even farther from its suffering. The pillars are wrapped in green plastic for climbing vines, denying graffiti artists their canvas. For years, I suspected Poet was the elusive Flossin Mauwano, that ghostly hand behind the city’s roadside art. It felt like something Poet would do. When the papers revealed it was someone else, I felt oddly let down.

Every evening, as I drive home along Uhuru Highway, I see dark figures slumped around the Chinese-built pillars. Their silhouettes blur at dusk, and each one becomes him—my lost Poet, my friend, the one who left class for a drink and never returned.

And so I keep watching. One day, I tell myself, he will emerge from beneath the Expressway, notebook in hand, backpack slung over one shoulder, ready to scribble a poem on concrete for us to ponder on our morning commute.