How I wrote a 233 word poem on... not Ghana but... Zouk

I had not written a full poem in over 2 years. Every time I started to write one, I would stop at some point thinking it's not as good as the last few poems I had written. However, over the course of this year, I've had this idea of writing a poem to celebrate zouk. Over hiplife. Let's be real. I've been listening to zouk (and kizomba) music much more than Ghanaian music - hiplife, highlife, raglife, poplife, etc - recently. I still love Ghana, if you ever doubt it, study how much I use the number 233. If you can't figure out and understand the significance of the number 233 like that lady teller at UBA bank yesterday or the other GT bank teller in East Legon, then become aware. Everywhere.

So I went ahead to write a poem tonight. I intentionally put on a Zouk music playlist to get me in the mood. Not in the mood for 'you know what' but in the mood for inspiration to zouk the board by the keys and type up a Zouk poem. The idea was to write an ode to Zouk, while comparing it to hiplife and Ghanaian music. There is a deeper message in it but that's not be shared. Maybe you can decrypt it? Listening to the songs helped a great deal and made me more creative. So I even put in some of the song names in the poem - Don't change, One Love, Something Going On, On A Change, Deeper, Amor, Make Love on Tempo, Elles Demandent, and Cette Nuit.

I like to rhyme while writing poetry. My poem feels incomplete without some chaa (whaddup my Presec possies!), rhyming, pun or something of that sort. I've started to make sure the number of syllables remain the same in different parts of the poem. Music to my ears. Yeap, so I'd count the syllables to see if they sound off melodiously. Music to your ears.

After circulating the idea that we should write poems that have 23 lines (in honour of Ghana), my friend Irene tweeted at me saying I should rather write one of 233 words. So I checked to see how many words were in my original poem, and there were 205. Only 28 more to go. I added a couple of lines, kept an eye on Microsoft Word's word count and voi la, we had our poem of 233 words. Can U Say #233moments right there? :-) You can read the poem here. Is it too much to ask that my wife is a fan of Zouk too? "Tell me what you like".