Repression and The Senegambia Highway Man

I once met a gentleman twice, who purely
by some chance,
I only recall, bumping into, the first time ..
It was just off from
   the brand new, Senegambia highway ..
I never did manage
   to learn his Mandinka name though ..
He was tall and so
very thin however, my dear lord, it was
easy to see that he
   was quite literally, starving back then ..
And so, I gave him
a handful of rice, Adana the house girl
   had previously given me ..
Plus a small piece of something, I took
to be meat, from
the back of my very old host, Hanna’s
very temperamental,
antique refrigerator and then, at least
for a moment or two,
he did seem, reasonably contented ..
But when I met with
him again, the very next day, we both
kind of knew by then,
 that he was very much in dying mode ..
He had a hole in one
of his legs you see, so big you could
poke a big stick
right through it and see clearly from
one side to the other ..
   But his eyes were by then, sadly 
dead in his head and
the truth was, he was totally blinded ..
So I gave him the one
hundred and twenty five dalasi which
was all that I had on me
and told him to go grab a bush cab to
the Banjul infirmary a.s.a.p.
That same evening, one of the cooks
at Old Uncle Noah’s
Fish Restaurant, came and told me that
the guy with no name,
   they called Happy never quite made it ..
And all the scraps he had
saved in his carrier bag, were promptly
divided between,
a young orphaned albino, riddled with
skin cancer and his four
three month old abandoned puppy dogs ..
Oh’ and since I happened
to be passing, would I care to make a
small donation to some
other lost causes .. I said, sorry but no,
   I’ve got a plane to catch ..
And while you may think it strange that
I have hardly ever even
thought about that guy, or that day again,
until a moment ago, that is ..
Now on reflection, I guess that’s what we
in the trade, used to call repression ..