Editorial | Speeches Induced By Libido; A Critical Essay By Mohamed Shamsu-Deen on Amoafowaa Sefa Cecilia’s ‘When His Pants Are Down’

“Uuh, I have a private jet under this bed; aah, I have given the material to a carpenter – to sow for you.” These expressions and more are often uttered by men when they are seeking consensual carnal knowledge.  According to the poem “When His Pants Are Down” by Amoafowaa Sefa Cecilia, men use all kinds of wheedling words at the point of making love.

WHEN HIS PANTS ARE DOWN

Worms wriggle

Dogs bark

Cats mew

So be careful of birthed promises

When his pants are down

II

I know of flowers who have lived on clouds

With plucked stars and moons

Bedding in chariots of all their fantasies

Dancing to the tune of Cupid’s best

Only to fall as rains

Into a hell of fire whose ashes flew

With airs of regrets

Into deserted forests of disappointments

So careful of dishes of promises

When his pants are down

III

They build believable mansions with words

For their tongues are the pencils of architects

Whose sheets need crumpling sizzles

And tails need your wet wiggle

In their burning passion

Whose lifespan is as short as the shine of fireworks in the sky

So oh beware

Of the sound of holes of deceit

When his pants are down

Biography:

Amoafowaa Sefa Cecilia is a Ghanaian high school teacher of English at Tamale Senior High School, President of Autism Help Foundation (GH), CEO of Cee’s Foods and a writer who blogs at www.amoafowaa.com. Passionate in all she is involved in, Amoafowaa hopes to touch lives through quality education, advocate for the lives of persons living with neuro disorders, work towards pure organic food production and write to touch lives in all themes that strokes her muses.

So in her lines built with many symbols and imagery, Cecilia warns ladies to be study when listening to what men say in that regard. The poem flows:

Worms wriggle

Dogs bark

Cats mew

So be careful of birthed promises

When his pants are down

I know of flowers who have lived on clouds

With plucked stars and moons

Bedding in chariots of all their fantasies

Dancing to the tune of Cupid’s best

Only to fall as rains

Into fire whose ashes flew

With airs of regrets

Into deserted forests of disappointments

So careful of dishes of promises

When his pants are down

They build believable mansions with words

For their tongues are the pencils of architects

Whose sheets need crumpling sizzles

And tails need your wet wiggle

In their burning passion

Whose lifespan is as short as the shine of fireworks in the sky

So oh beware

Of the sound of holes of deceit

When his pants are down

In the first line of stanza one, ‘worms’ connotes the cunning means through gentility and persuasion while ‘wiggle’ indicates devious ways men employ when they need ‘food in pants’. Dogs are symbols of protection and a harbinger of friendship, but their barking here corroborates the familiar idiomatic expression ‘barking dogs, seldom bites’, that is, mere words without action. Also, ‘cats mew’ (line 3) when they are hungry, honey. Therefore, the first three lines of stanza one are metaphors describing the traits of men in that setting. She ends the stanza with a caution and a refrain ‘So be careful of birthed promises / When his pants are down’ to focus audience’s thought to the subject.

In the second stanza, the speaker cites examples to support her claim by relating from occasions in which some women fell into the traps of such flatteries. ‘Flowers . . . on clouds’ (line 6) denote love in the air. So the ladies, under the spree of such promises, saw that their relationships were soaring ‘with stars and moons’. They lives and eat by ‘bedding in chariots of their fantasies’ and eventually, like convectional rainfall, they could no longer contain the deception in their airborne fantasies, so for seeing reality, they ‘fall as rains’ (line 10). Since such experiences do come through heart breaks, the persona likened their situation to ‘fire . . . / with . . . regrets’ and ‘disappointments’.

In the last stanza, she states the weapons and the purpose for men actions. They use their mouths as tools to ‘. . . build believable mansions with words / for their tongues are the pencils of architects’ (lines 16 and 17). And what is their purpose? They ‘need crumpling sizzles’ which connotes the hotness or warmth inside women; and their male genital organs, termed ‘tails’ are looking for women’s ‘wet wiggle’. In conclusion, the driving force behind men ‘duping’ women is to satisfy their (men) sexual desire, ‘whose life span is’ very short.

To this end, then, the poetess, through her masterful merge of poetic devices, such as metaphor: ‘tongues are pencils’ and ‘bedding in chariots of . . . fantasies’; simile: ‘lifespan is as short as the shine . . .’; repetition (refrain): ‘when his pants are down’; and symbolism: ‘dogs bark . . . cats mew’, she communicates themes of betrayal, deceit and fake love by men. Hence, Cecilia purports men seek lust through all sorts of cajoling words of promises that they hardly fulfill. So William Shakespeare consoles victims, “sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, / men were deceivers ever, / one foot in sea, and one on shore, / to one thing constant never”.

Biography:

Born in Tamale, Ghana, Mohamed Shamsu-Deen had his tetiary education at Bagabaga College – where his passion for and practice of creative writing were evolved. His works have appeared in local and international anthologies. He is a professional classroom teacher and a certified visual artist, who writes poetry, prose and critiques.