The weather outside is indeed frightful
Despite this the window is left ajar
To stop condensation engulfing
The already icy bathroom.
I disappear behind the curtain
Dressed in a much bigger version of my birthday suit.
Leaves are glued to that open window by ice.
I shiver, shaking until I have the courage
To turn the taps on-
OUCH!
An agonisingly cold burst burns my feet,
My right arm twists desperately
Until my skin starts to suffer a different type of burning,
My left arm mimics the dance my right performed just moments ago-
PHEW!
Finally the water overpowers my goosebumps
And perfection is created.
I can now unleash heaven out of the shower head.
I am being kissed by Niagara Falls.
Steam shrouds the room
And the music begins.
If only life were as perfect as this,
As perfect as a warm winter shower.

I

I am Ann, Anna, Annastasia
confined, confounded in her own fantasia

roll over doggie under my car
oh i'm sorry, i meant it
she told me, when she told me
i had to obey
a rubber stamp and electric nodes
shock, convulse and make me sway
oh make the voices go away!

II

Smashy smashy Annie
throw mummy's good flower pots
over the wall into the yard
weee it'll be so much fun
come out and play Annie!

III

You naughty girl, stand in the corner and
think about what you've done
what did I tell you about listening to your mother?
bad girl, strike yourself
iron out the creases in your fingers

but mummy, they told me , I had no choice

IV

Tut-tut Anastasia
what did i tell you about listening to your father?
trickle tears down your face
remind yourself you are a disgrace
with little grasp of good taste

You sickening little troglodite,
shower yourself cold in the dark

V

One would be so wisest of oneself, Anastasia
thereby present yourself as loyalty
pray hildegarde you navigate yourself correctly
i suspect your remuneration would be pitiful
exentuate those dentalized Ts and Ds
and for Julius' sake
mind your Ps and Qs

VI

Cease, desist, Anna
Regard yourself from your heart's eye,
be nice, be humble
lest you want to cry, *****!


VII

I can't I can't
someone help me
she's pulling my hair, ouch!

'Stop squealling for attention!'
her friends sneer,
'Better off talking to yourself Ann!'

VIII

I can't help my impulses, they meticulously
humiliate my ego and my sanity
with crude, latent vulgarity
thrown off course with profanity


'oh clumsy me,' pipped Ann,
I'm a clumsy, heavy strumpet,
I'm a couplet short of a sonnet!'

IX

hush hush hush
the booming voice chides,
'Still, Anastasia, soothe your spirit.
be calm, and play some poker
by your uncle's fireplace
you'll be a good girl,
if you hit your brother.'

X

oh cry cry all for Ann
lost for words at her chamber pan
licking the bowl clean
as her mummy told her
sweet, if not
then she would scold her.

XI

'Annie Annie, long of face
won the Ascot horses race.'

'Heaven forefend Anastasia, straighten up and shoulders back!
you'll get rickets so far gone, you please no man but the crickets!'

'****** off those others Anna and listen to me,
forget about you mummy, daddy and any, all authority.'

'Stupid Ann, drown yourself in turpentine
and stub your nose like the common swine.'

'Now remember Anna dear, no cherry trifle
until you've  boxed your sister's shins.'

'Leave me, please, I'm begging, bereave me!
leave me, please, I'm praying, release me!'

XII

Poor Ann whose been afflicted
by personality, conflicted
of her own thoughts, convicted
a most grievous war of minds
betray her deepest common senses
violate her fidelity by bathing in slop and pig feed
degenerate her innocence through foul revolt and tantrums
lest she cannot restore herself from her inner sanctum

XIII

Setting hard concussions, Anna threw a hammer at her temple,
in all hopes to knock it down.
Running low on cortisol
she burst her fleshy, brunette crown
letting all the fluid spew upon her
agonisingly, she writhed in settling timely
for a brutal death is less sinister
than eternity in sanity

Desperate, so agonisingly glutted with yearning,
Yearning to hear my voice and to know that it resounds,
So roundly that I am all at once myself, And so much myself that I remember my eyes,
My eyes that have long been forgotten in cruel glass.
Cruel, cruel glass! I have long been abandoned, and long been a veil,
But such a thin veil that always would wane,
It's falling slowly now, like a prophecy fulfilled,
Get ready to see, get ready to be seen.

A street, ruined by Council workers
Never to be repaired.
A church, the dominion and focal point
Where only Satanists laid claim.
Two shops, one sold rancid
The other, overpriced.

Five hundred people, bored and doomed
Loyalists, who took pride in their version
Of Pandemonium, of Lucifer's funhouse
Of this cesspool of glorified
Rubble, this wasteland
Where only those who had given up,
Or that knew they would die
Slowly and agonisingly should, or could survive.

One castle, where brave Normans
Would frown and disown such a place,
And leave, rather than stay in such a disgrace.

To this place and it's inmate's I say
"you are nothing if not ordinary".

If I didn't have you
The sun wldnt
shine as bright
The stars wldnt
make me wish at night
The hands of the clock wldnt
Move agonisingly slowly
When I'm nt in ur sight
My heart wldnt beat
Slow and fast
And I wldnt want
Anything to last
I wldnt Hv a reason
to smile every morning
And I wldnt Hv a reason
For sleepless nights too
And I wldnt ever Hv love
In life
Baby If I didn't Hv you

We fought wars,
Rough, ferocious and deadly deadly,
Genocides and Holocausts,
We killed, got killed and lived to tell the tale,
We still touched our mouths, noses and faces,
We sneezed, coughed and had high fevers,
We shook hands, hugged and kissed,
Yet we survived and lived to tell the tale at the tail-end.


Wars were fought throughout the world,
World wars and wars for supremacy,
Nuclear wars and cold wars,
Religious wars and wars against colonialism,
Tribal wars and civil wars,
Trade wars and industrial wars
Insurgencies and conventional wars,
Wars against Ebola and wars against the SARS virus,
Wars against slavery and apartheid; and wars against oppression,
Wars about us against them and them against those that are against them,
Some, really senseless wars.


We emotionless watched them fight their wars with arms folded,
As they emotionless watched us fight our wars with arms folded,
It is not our war, they felt,
It is not on our soil, we reckoned,
They are not our people, we believed,
Our economy will not be affected, they said,
After-all, we share no common Ancestry,
With pride, we developed a defensive “Them” and “Us” attitude,
Every nation for herself and only God for us all,
We never wanted to be part of others’ wars,
Neither did they want to be part of ours,
Depositing the spirit of Worldianship into acute non-existance.


Today, a horrendous and cataclysmic war has been declared against the world – them and us,
Ruthlessly savaging, ravaging and bulldozing the lugubrious world full of them and us, like a demented storm really gone mad,
A devastating and ruinous world war 3 with some shift of gear,
An atrocious insurgency against a common but deadly and hostile enermy,
A silent, ruthless and predatory bandit which intentions are catastrophically loud, heavily thudding and explosively explosive,
The wide world has been dolorously and traumatically held to ransom,
And ransom of the worst order and disorder,
Plunging the outrageous and despicable West and the rest of the cultured world on one side,
Fighting side by side in a war they never wanted to fight,
Not even side by side,
Desperately befriending my unspeakable enermy because he is the enermy of my enermy,
And the enermy of the enermy of the enermy who is my enermy,
Just imagine the symbiosis,
Just imagine.


Desperate and distressed children of the world have been unintentionally isolated and agonisingly violated,
Tightly curfew-ed and strictly quarantined against their will,
Some, with neither food nor means of survival,
All, converted into Inmates in their own homes and excuses for homes,
As the catastrophic war notoriously spreads like a ravaging bushfire on defenceless nations,
Taking with it innocent children of the subconscious and powerless world,
With some, falling dual victims of the calamitous virus and also the armies,
Little-minded combat and action-hungry armies that are supposed to be protecting them,
Siding with their own enermy and the enermy of their own people,
Shame on the children of the sorrowful soil,
Children of Kunta Kinte, Zwangendaba, Mzilikazi kaMashobana, and Chaminuka,
Children of Moshoeshoe, Kgabo, Kaguvi and Kazembe,
Children of Skwati, Sikhukhuni, Shaka and Shiriyadenga,
Children of Soshangana, Christopher Columbus, Jan Van Riebeck and Vasco Da Gama,
Shame.


A little child distantly cries elsewhere in Africa’s distant peripheries of domineering poverty,
She sickly cries her last cries for food and last cries ever,
A little bundle of a network of visible veins lying on a reed mat like a ragged rag doll,
A tiny, vulnerable innocent crossfire victim of the massive deadly disorderly war,
Last in a family of twelve, that never had food since the first day of the lockdown,
As father and mother sadly gaze at each other, tears are shed and shared in capitulation,
They cannot leave their landlocked tiny shack to go out to look for food,
Their poor offspring lackadaisically closes her tiny eyes for the last time,
Departing from the weird world in a war that was never hers to fight,
Not even her “church mice” parents,
She dies in painful hunger and of a painful hunger that was the grandchild of Corona’s making,
A child of the African dusty soil prematurely returning to the African dusty soil,
A crossfire victim of corvid19 of the Chinese ancestry,
An indiscriminate weponous weapon of mass destruction,
Shame.


Amidst all this, songs get sung phonetically in different languages and tunes,
By different nationalities of different nations and nationalisms,
Touching and emotional songs, embodying and incarnating just but one and the same theme,
Coronavirus, corvid 19, the heartless witch which is son to a heartless witch,
Where do we run or even crawl to for safety?
Where really, at this humanity’s tattered and shattered darkest hour,
Our hour no longer our hour,
We have fought worse wars with worst enermies than you,
More titanic, more ravaging, more calamitous, more faceless,
Albeit, we lived to tell the tale,
The fearless warrior children of the fearless warriors that we fearlessly are,
We do not fight to fight another day,
And we cannot just fold our cold arms as you recklessly scotch our lovely earth to oblivion,
Rapacious Corona, it is just a matter of time,
Just a matter of time,
Corvid 19 – obnoxious bandit father of an obnoxious bandit wizard,
Heartless dissident son of a heartless dissident witch,
The epitome of prolific disrespect, involuntary solitude and proliferated solicitude,
The personification of convulsive misery, spasmodic destruction, and multitudinous deaths,
What goes around, comes around,
Just a matter of time.

Johnny can't join
his daddy has no car
Michael can't join
they don't like his shoes
Ahmed can't join
he has a funny name
Bobby can't join
supports the wrong team

"What's going on?"
bellows the red-faced teacher
"You can't treat each other like this!
"Have you ever been excluded?
"Yes?
"And how
"did it make you feel?"

He ushers them in, muttering
though somewhat gratified
by the shame in their eyes

Then herds them through
to assembly
where the guest of honour
is the minister
who proceeds to explain
to the obediently seated rows
that if they don't see things his way
they will be eternally,
terrifyingly
and agonisingly excluded
from the great big party in the sky

And the teacher hangs his head
in baffled complicity,
defeated.

You are witnessing a prodigious talent and promise, and to a lesser extent but still to the degree whereby it should keep you awake at night writhing in cold sweats, your life, slip agonisingly through your open and clammy palms. Promise means so little if not actualised. You have been granted chance after warning after fortuitous escape yet have blithely spurned every omen and will one day fall, swiftly and perhaps terminally. You are almost certainly depressed. You say you love your girlfriend, and you mean it wholeheartedly when you do, but you worry that the relationship perpetuates as without her there would be no reason to rise with the sun. Even if the relationship is  unstable, and at times verging on the unhealthy, you believe you love her but are too great a coward to consider decisive action if that belief is to reside or subside. Your friends range from kind and honest yet deeply flawed to somehow toeing an inextricably thin line between dependability and duplicitousness. Conversations with a certain few of your friends necessitate decrying every undercooked ethos you've every conned yourself into believing you hold (you could well be the most hypocritical liberal to walk the earth, for you are innately and irrepressibly selfish) yet you still nod placidly as your conscience squirms. Grotesquely, like a beaten spouse, you crave the gaze of those who have treated you with the most insulting derision, but are too proud (of what?) and, a running theme, too cowardly, to stoop to a simple detante. You must change, for it pains you on a most base level to have to accept the feeble, whimpering, simpering spectre you have become. You must be bold, brave, unashamed in your convictions, anything but pursed and silent lips. You have a voice, and you must now speak loud enough for them to hear, for that which has become blunted must be whetted, sharpened, readied for battle to be unsheathed at an utterance. Heed the signs and change, for our sake. You, a milksop who attentively notes the sophistry of courage, you can still be brave, and you must be.

For one day you will be swelled with a courage and fortitude to fill your sails taut, enough to leave this place, forget these people and bear you away.

Waves of sadness as you wave in my direction. I see you go, I watch you leave. Just as the seasons appear and dispose of me. We take turns walking away, from people we never talked to. Wondering why it hurts the same. Hating that it hurts as all of these people go. Sudden realisation hit us one by one. As we wonder, and walk, and wonder around all the topics we may have avoided. The thoughts we’re apparently devoid of. Introspect, retrospect, dissect ourselves in this critical moment. Nostalgia knocking us over making us think and  making us feel, for once. A remarkable feat, it must be applauded. Ovation, overjoy, overwhelm. Over this. Over them. Over it. Time moving so agonisingly slowly, wishing away the years. Needing to escape, yet wanting to eternalise the way they make me feel. Nothing lasts forever. Maybe you should’ve, yet you didn’t. Now you’re all that’s left tell me how it feels. It doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t even seem right. Yet it’s a must and a miss you. The question has to be asked: why are you crying now? After all these months, why are you letting it hit now? Stay strong, be strong, be you. Be fearless and young. The golden years fade away into shades of blue and black skies. I wish you all well, and a happy birthday. Get well soon, get there soon. It’s all getting to me too soon. It’s too soon. How are we already here? We were all the way over there yesterday. Faces flash and second pass by with smiles. Frowning back, the question must be asked, why are you so sad?

(TW: Self-Harm and Suicidal Ideation)

I wish the night was more than a fleeting mirage
Coming one moment and leaving the next
I wish the darkness would surround me in its velvety cloth
Not the absence of light, but the absence of life
The darkness of total and permanent nothingness
I wish my capillaries, veins, and arteries would peal open
Slowly, agonisingly
I want to watch the final drop of crimson drain from my body
Creep slowly down my finger
Trancing the path already traced by his brothers
He will linger at the very tip of my nail
Before falling
Plummeting
Careening
Into the tiled floor
Only then will I shut my eyes
I will let darkness trail his supple fingers down my body
Encasing me in his eager embrace
He will wind himself around me until there is nothing left
But for a small white corpse upon a brilliantly painted floor
And no one will find me
Because no one will be left to care

there’s something so deeply and inherently terrifying about romantic love and attachment; it’s like giving someone a neatly written postcard detailing all of the various ways in which they could take your heart and pick it apart into a heap of broken fragments.

it’s the fact that you were so agonisingly in love with your sadness that i became (always was?) an afterthought. it’s like mum always said, “you are powerless in the face of someone who doesn’t want to be helped”.

i wanted to soak my skin in your madness and chaos.
to take all of the mismatched jigsaw pieces of your mind and will them to fit together enough to love me back even a little bit.

one day that you will realise that they are just boys. they are boys with closed-off hearts and cynical minds. with their inherent need to drain and empty you of everything you have to offer; with the burning desire to be both fixed and left alone all at the same time.

i actively avoid thinking about the estimated number of minutes i spent trying to burn the imprint of your fingers out of my lungs.
oh honey, one day all these valiant notions of self-sacrifice are going to get you hurt; you won’t know how to tell him that you are in pain.
                                       that every time your knuckles brush against my lips my heart feels like it’s going to give up on itself.

i don’t know what to do with the knowledge that i am heartbroken over someone who is indifferent to my plight, someone who watched the cracks deepen and spread yet still chose to walk away. that’s the problem with feelings; you can’t simply pick them up and store them in a jar for later.

you left and i’m stuck with limbs which ache from the sheer weight of the feelings that i can’t shake.

with gentle fingers full of promise and parted lips you drew confessions from me that i swore would never come; you were messy and indignantly proud of it. your mess leaked into mine and for a few precious minutes we coexisted in our state of disarray.

your hands knew me far better than your heart ever did;

it must have been so dark up there, on the pedestal that i nailed you to. a martyr for your cause, i tried to tie your wrists to mine in a desperate fear of being alone again.

all i wanted from you was to coexist but you were never shy about telling me that, for you, that wasn't enough.

I don't know why now, however I was gazing at this picture in which I was dressed in a black dress and your arms are snaked around my waist, my head inched towards your shoulder and your gaze falling on me,  and suddenly it seemed so agonisingly pleasant how happy I was in that moment. And somehow all that happened between us didn't mattered looking at the picture, yes we aren't together now. In that frozen moment you holded me and I would have preferred no one else. In that snapped picture it was you and me for each other , loving ,caring , filled with affection . that moment captured in the photograph , I realised will remain like that always, that in that picture you and me will remain forever, lasting till it needs to fade, persisting in memory , in frozen times, in pictures ,in stares.
So maybe we are over now, but in some plane where there is no reason you and I still exist together, where there is no need for explanations, of lost love and evaporate feelings. Where you and I will last forever.

sit with me, just for a while
tell me everything I did
to deserve this tragic fate
that is your love

tell me why, after all the good that I have done
why my life came to this
to you
to us

isn't it just cruel?
those endless nights I spent with you
trying to save you
when I couldn't even save myself

the sleepy days that were filled with your hateful words
your spiteful attitude
the insults and the way
that I was always wrong

you found pleasure
in leaving me lonesome
and almost broken
yet still agonisingly alive

and now that I am happy
and have found myself to be
at one with the world and her love
you think that you can come back?

for you can try to hold the past against me
and you can try to put me down
but months on
I am happy now

and I am the real winner here, my dear
because since you left
I have escaped fear, and all of his friends
I can smile proudly and truthfully

I can say that I won this battle
and it was nice to see you lose
because after everything you put me through
I no longer deserve your abuse