I am a Ghanaian girl born on Basotho land. I ask you why my relatives know how to speak Twi and I don't, it was then when I was aware of the decision you had made to keep me away. My family has been filled with Ghanaians who can speak their native tongue but you made me the only different. When it's all set and done I do not know my native tongue. The truth is my I'm filled with Basotho air rather than the identity of Ghanaian princess. I was born to you as a citizen. I am trying to join them but I am stuck. Also, I wonder, who am I?I haven't come to a conclusion. I am forever shopping for a new identity. So I am an actor, I did Drama in high school and usually I have my props on stage but in this poem all my props are gone. I'm just revealed with nothing to hide asking myself who am I?I could say I am diverse but then again I think not. It's sad how I can't even pronounce my own name.

Some girls like me are full of heartache and poetry and those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves instead of running away from them

We all have become so exceptionally good at faking our happiness…We no longer know when we are actually happy or when the smile is only for the world to see and not to be felt.

Thank you for seeing museums in me where i saw empty hallways.

“Introverts, man. We’re weird sometimes. Like, “I love you, but I need to go over here by myself right now.”

later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt? it answered everywhere
everywhere

Dear Monday
I come to you
Burned and bruised with sins of yesteryear
Covered with the blood of disloyalty
My speech cluttered with tones seeking salvations
Battered with tales of remorse
Seeking pardon to all I've erred
I come to you
Bare
Without riches
Heart yearning for change
and I ask that you lead me closer to redemption

It starts out as having "fun" and then all of a sudden you are doing more things that you wish to list but secretly of course. He would never go public with you. I guess he will never see you in that way. His touch makes you forget the holy thoughts you guide yourself by. You do your best to contain but it is hard to retain yourself. You want to go there but then you remember you don't even share his last name.

I hate how I am one of those people who work hard and gets mediocre marks. I absolutely loathe it. I am sad and devastated.  My soul is slipping away.

Put the pin back in the grenade, it’s time To stop walking on broken glass just so you can destroy yourself faster, leave the lighter on the nightstand, it’s time to change

Its time to leave your sword in it’s sheath and walk to the battlefield to make peace, because this war you are raging against isn’t hurting them half as much as it’s hurting you

you tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him traveling away from you in his dreams
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.
”
— For Women Who Are Difficult to Love

There are downsides to living in a small time,
And I’ve seen every single one of them
Because there are only so many roads you can go down
And so many store corners you can duck into to avoid seeing that one person
There are only so many ways to get home
And only so many houses
And when you’ve been in the same place since you were born, there are only so many ghosts you can outrun
And these days
I’m getting really tired

Have you ever sat down and thought " wow how am I this unhappy? ! "
You sit there not understanding. How am I actually genuinely unhappy like this ? Also , why am I still breathing ?

Tonight I find out that I have 3 more siblings.
Tonight I find out I have been lied to for 17 years.
Tonight I can't believe how naive I actually was.
Tonight I angry that my mother married such a man.
Tonight I am angry that she doesn't know.
Tonight I am furious because she doesn't deserve any of this.
Tonight I will sleep next to her feeling guilty.
Tonight I shall get myself some pills.
Tonight I shall make sure I don't see tomorrow.
I don't want to anyway...
I want to be in my home, a home I call a grave.

"I don't like being naked, my skin has been through too much." - Naledi Raba

I wish I was sad because then I can be happy again.  Unlike depression where you hurt yourself so much the previous night and put on a phasade the following day laughing with your friends.  Ive lost myself alive. Depression,  my favourite nightmare to be lucid in. I die in it and I feel myself sinking into a void.

I love black and people ask me why I respond and say that's my soul.  I am forever thinking about our conversations, thinking  of the almost I love you at the back of my heart.  Too often,  I love you blindly.  I fear that once you see who and what iam will have you crippled.  I want to open the doors that will lead you to my soul.

you may not accept my demons of the secret place and I do not want to chase you away. Every compliment you throw at me takes a piece of my soul. I want to submit to your love.

too often, I love you silently, too often I go on about how it doesn't last long. I put such little effort in trying to be happy and when I see you, so much comes out even though I may not show it. The ink, it runs out.  You are poetry to me and your name is by far my favourite metaphor.  You have left a fingerprint on my soul and it will forever stay there regardless of when you leave. Maybe, I like or love you too brutally? I forbid you to have anymore involvement in me.  You are going to leave anyway in the winter.  You are going to claim to be hurt when you leave but I am going to stay here bleeding.

I will let it be and let you go.
Till whenever.  Goodbye.
I am angry, sad but whatever.
I hate that you know how I feel.

There are always going to be talents that you want to have, looks that you prefer over yours, intelligence that you crave, and people that are beyond your grasps. Life will never fall perfectly in your hands and you will never be the ideal person that you imagine in your head. There is always going to be somebody else who you wish you were. But you don’t need all those things to be a good person. You don’t need to know how to deliver prose like melodies or how to write words into stories to realize that kindness is one of the few things you can learn to control. You don’t need to look like supermodels or Photoshop masterpieces to appreciate the fact that no matter your appearance, who you are inside is what counts. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that compassion goes a long way and you don’t need to have hundreds of friends to know that it’s more important for you just to be one. There are so many things that we wish we could change about ourselves but in the end, none of it will make much of a difference if we cannot say that we are proud of who we are within.
— “Not everyone can be a supermodel but everyone can be a role model

There are some things that are not meant to be sugar coated
There are some things that are not suppose to be cleaned up and meant to look good
Do not sugarcoat the night you were ***** or the aftermath
Do not sugarcoat the nights you’ve taken a blade to your wrists
Do not sugarcoat the first time you downed ***** because your heart was broken
Do not sugarcoat when your parents hit you
Do not sugarcoat when your boyfriend absolutely destroyed you
Do not sugarcoat the reasons why you started using drugs
Do not sugarcoat vices
Do not sugarcoat pain
Do not sugarcoat suffering
Do not sugarcoat agony
Do not sugarcoat me”
— Some things should be sugarcoated. These are not it

“I write because there is a fire inside me that only ink can put out.”

Don’t you dare, for one minute,
believe that my kindness makes me
anything but insurmountable.
I did not unzip my chest to every kind of hurt,
and stagger back, wounded and alive,
just to hear you call me weak for trying.
I opened my door to Heartache–
I gave her the ******* key.
My softness for wayward strangers
has made me nothing less
than a halfway house for aching soles.
So when you open your mouth
and call me ‘baby’
understand that I am not your next victim
in a laundry list of broken girls.
You think I don’t know you? People like you?
People with mouths for hands.
I’ve got skin like topsoil
and your teeth could never take root.
So when you go looking to make a plaything
of a sunburst,
you better look for someone with less fire
than me.
Because softness or no,
I will eat you alive
before I let you make a meal of me.

I'm really sick of being me, i'm sick of trying my hardest and never ever being good enough. I'm tired, mentally dead.

Here’s to the security guards who maybe had a degree in another land.
Here’s to the manicurist who had to leave her family to come here, painting the nails, scrubbing the feet of strangers.
Here’s to the janitors who don’t even ******* understand English yet work hard despite it all.
Here’s to the fast food workers who work hard to see their family smile.
Here’s to the laundry man downtown who told me with the sparkle in his eyes how he was an engineer in Peru.
Here’s to the bus driver, the grey haired angel who almost danced when I quoted Nelson Mandela.
Here’s to the harvesters who live in fear of being deported for coming here to open the road for their future generation.
Here’s to the foreigners here to make ends meet..Here is to them waking up at 4am, calling home to hear the voices of their loved ones. Here is to their children, to the children who despite it all become artists, writers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, activists and rebels.
Here’s to our patriots. For never forgetting home. Here’s to their children who carry the heartbeats of their motherland and even in sleep, speak with pride about their fathers. Keep on...

Be proud of yourself. Remember the nights you crumbled under the weight of your pain, and the mornings you fought to open your eyes, and won. Remember how you put yourself back together, brick by brick; remember the ache in your shoulders as you laid each stone. Remember that life is often the more difficult choice, and that it takes a special kind of bravery to choose it anyway

I have died a million deaths
Became a haven of more graves than I dared to live
Became a widow of my own soul
Covered myself with the cloak of death mourning the glory of loss upon us
Dressed myself in more insults with a dash of curses than your devotion
As I dangled from the roof of your mercy petitioning for your worthy heart
Became an ambassador of your threats to disappear than your affection
But again and again I return to you
In hope that one day
you might believe that I am not what you are used to

My cousin and I get hammered
It’s his mother’s funeral and we sit around the fire, drinking horrible mixes from red solo cups
He tells me he does ******* and acid
I tell him I take Adderall and pain killers
We are both just trying to numb the pain from everything we would never quite get to do.

Living has become this constant nightmare. I wake up feeling like hell. I feel suffocated and embarrassed. I carry on living two lives, one for the public and one just for me. Depression is the hell that eats me up. I put a phasade of a perfect girl who has everything put together.  

I hide and put up a wall that is so high that you will never see my pain or my thoughts.

Anxiety in the streets, insomnia in the sheets.

Corruption is never beautiful, that’s something i have always believed in until I saw the way her soul looked like. It was corrupted and destroyed into little pieces but it looked like art and writing about it couldn’t be harder. Her sharp edges didn’t scare me,I embraced her with my shaking hands and hoped she wouldn’t feel the vibration of my sorry heart. she had the most unsettling poetic thoughts. she cries poetry and smokes dreams,she hopes for a better life where she doesn’t feel as homeless as she does now. she writes the way an angel does and aches the way a devil does, she wants to write to free her angel but the devil is taking control of her pen. She will break you, shatter you until you can’t see the light, but she’ll hold your hand and guid you in the darkness, show you her veins until your sight returns, you’ll see the universe in her palm, she is a creature of Venus or maybe the stars. You could never know her not the way you want, the puzzle you’re trying to solve is missing a piece. I see her in everything surrounding me,the rays of sunshine and the whispers of the night,I see parts of her in me and parts sprawled around existence itself. She sometimes seems like a fancy, a greek god you read about or a song you listen to,I sometimes feel like she only exists in my mind. She is a storm, a hurricane but for some weird reason Im not scared to drown in every inch of her soul

I have to keep reminding myself
My worst days in recovery are better than my best days in relapse
Because perhaps
When the voices in my head
Won’t let me go to bed
I still make the choice to wake up in the morning...

I am too shy to tell you how I feel so I'll hide behind my poetic thoughts and soft smile. I am afraid to ask you "why eight?".     Your reply might a heart attack followed by death.  I am so desperate to eradicate these thoughts that never go away.  I've spent hours contemplating the words to say to you but no combination of alphabet letters could ever explain how the news I heard teared my skin apart.  Gradually my soul started slipping away.

Me : bye.
bad habit: bye?
Me : yeah. They say it takes 21 days to get rid of a bad habit. Tomorrow is day one. So for now, bye.
Bad Habit : what bad habit?
Me : you.
People too, can be bad habits.
Day 1. My brain kept yelling at my heart, asking her to stop weeping over a love she won’t receive. Brain warned heart and heart didn’t listen. The rest of my body tried ignoring this Civil War, attempting to find ways to keep me busy. Heart wept so much it worried Brain to spending the night numb to everything but my ears just to make sure Heart wouldn’t give in and stop pumping blood or convince Lungs to stop breathing.
Day 2. I spent my day locked up in my room browsing the Internet and having consecutive naps but you kept running in my mind and weighing me down. You are the reason I am weak, not the lack of food. I went to see my best friend at dawn because you shout in my mind and stab my heart when it gets dark and I was actually afraid of being by myself. I couldn’t witnesses parts of me fighting because of you all night again. I kept thinking of how I shouldn’t be thinking of you. My mind is very upset with my heart.
Day 3. I spent the day with my friends and we danced all day and you weren’t in my mind until a handsome guy came my way and all I could talk to him was about you. I thought I was getting cured but it seems that my mind is playing a cruel joke on me.
Day 4. My knuckles are ****** from all the ways I tried to stop myself from texting you. Eventually, I had to delete your numbers and block you from every social network to stop myself from talking to you.
Day 5 : I saw my doctor today. I have to go to Pretoria for further mental evaluation. It seems like you did more damage than I had presumed.
Day 6 : We could have been so much better together. I was ready to grow in love with you. I don’t understand how one can fear commitment or love itself so awfully. Am I the only one who felt the fire we make?
Day 7 : I found myself thinking of you with other girls. I feel sorry for them. You will look for me in every girl you come across. I am not replaceable. They will find pieces of me left behind inside of you along their attempts to love you, they will keep bumping into me.
Day 8 : I talked to your brother today. He said you say I’m a warrior and you are happy I’ve moved on but really, I am weak. I could cry an entire ocean into existence and swim across it if that would bring you back into my life. I am not without you.
Day 9 : I laughed without you today.
Day 10 : when I woke up, you weren’t the first thing on my mind. I fell asleep on my mother’s lap.
Day 11 : I stopped wearing your t-shirt to bed.
Day 12 : maybe I love me more than I think I love you.
Day 13 : I spent the whole day in your t-shirt listening to our favourite album and cried whenever our favourite parts played. I’ve forgotten how your touch feels but your scent still quivers up my nostrils when I hold onto myself for long enough.
Day 14 : Maybe we will meet again next life time. Maybe it will work out next life time. Maybe I should get out of bed, take off your shirt, take a shower and have a warm meal. Maybe I will lay here in the dark until you return.
Day 15 : I remember the night you kissed my neck and carved “forever” on my left thigh with your finger tips.
Day 16 : I miss you quiet terribly.
Day 17 : How long does a human being go without food or water again?
Day 18 : I cry but the tears don’t come out anymore. I cry in silence. Mother begged me to have breakfast this morning. I asked for coffee instead. Two sugars, no milk. Just the way you like it.
Day 19 : My mind won’t let me rest. My mind is trying to find you. You promised me forever. I’m still here. Where are you now?
Day 20 : I finally got out of bed for a shower. I put your shirt back on. I cannot let it get washed. Too much of what I had with you has been washed away already.
Day 21 : I swept the piles of our memories together in a neat lump behind my heart. I’m expecting your visit...so i can tell you i did my time, Goodbye.

now close your eyes,
and please understand
that you are still young,
and the universe is endless,
and somehow,
everything will be okay

You’ve been so brave and
stitched up all your old wounds, be proud.
It’s time to go back to everything you loved, it’s time to pick up all those hobbies you regret stopping.

My cousin and I get hammered
It’s his mother’s funeral and we sit around the fire, drinking horrible mixes from red solo cups
He tells me he does ******* and acid
I tell him I take Adderall and pain killers
We are both just trying to numb the pain from everything we would never quite get to do”

He used ink that bled from his wounds to write poems about her.

“I dug through the landfill of your chest
and found the meadow where
the sun god goes
to rest his eyes.
I thought, this must be where Mother Earth
pressed your heart between her hands,
because I could feel her fingerprints
seared to the curve of your ribs.
I pilfered your dark places—
the ones where the moon likes to hide.
I found the parts of yourself
you thought you were supposed
to be ashamed of.
I kissed all your secrets.
They looked too much like mine.
Truth is, I have no idea
if we were any good for one another,
but I know our demons all got along
with each other just fine.”

One day my hands will settle inside themselves.
I feel most free in the dark where there are dozens of bodies
and no one knows me. I’m trying to text this boy
but my nails are wet with paint. When scientists tell me
there is the possibility of another universe I think yes
and I am better in it. I want fresh flowers on every table
and for tomorrow to be a gentler crime scene. My twenties
are teaching me that no one is ever as busy as they say they are.
Like, honestly, where you going with all that debt, honey?
I don’t know how to describe my kind of loneliness.
Maybe open wound, maybe stepping into a dress
with a broken zipper. I wish my lips weren’t dry for attention
I wish I was tough and hard like men. I know exactly
what you mean when you say you can’t wait to get out of here
but you're here now because money because god or fate
or whatever. Sometimes I just want to say what I actually
******* mean. For someone who thinks she knows it all
I say I don’t know a lot to save my own ***. Am I crying
on this bus right now or is that just the sun. I go
an even darker shade of brown. I go and hide the body
which is really just my body. My friends say self-sabotage
and I say honest. During the quietest hour, it rains.
My heart is full. J pulls up in his car. I am lucky
and the night is behind us, laughing.
— Girl, Why Your Heart Leaking Like That?

Holidays always hurt, I know. The
bandages on your wounds always seem to fall away this time of year. Let the wounds air, it’ll do those you love good to see how they’ve changed. How you’ve changed.

“I am totally nocturnal. That comes from waiting for your parents to go to bed, then doing what you want. I’m secretive — I still behave like that.”

My thoughts are jumbled, lost in a haze. All I can do is look forward without fear. Wishing I could travel back and hit reset. But the past is gone and we are here. I cherish those days, man do they go quick. Just yesterday it was 2012 when we were in S2 and now we in S5 saying bye.

They can make the chemicals for love in a lab. I know. I’m sick of hearing how unspecial it is that I exist alive with passion.
Listen. The world around me is howling and the moon is sick with our worries. We are all in a flood that wants us to sink without screaming. There is nothing in my pocket but debt and shadows and the teeth that have been knocked out of me. There is nothing in my future but cubicles and temp agencies.
Let us have love. This generation is dying. We are sweating out the innocence we were supposed to grow up in. We are all stumbling around with our hearts pounding in desperate fire alarms. We are all smothered. Let us have love.
Let us love each other wildly with our pictures of girls laughing in the passenger seat. Let us hold onto the images of our friends on the beach with sandy knees, of bonfires, of blurry drunken singing, of stopping for shakes and slurping them over bridges, of a shy look over one shoulder, of the sun setting, of selfies that show: I’m alive right now. I’m happy. Let us keep that. Let us keep proof that we are happy.
Love can be made in a lab. “Let that sink in,” he tells me. I say, “I knew that already.” So can basically anything. I want to stop questioning myself. I want to love so wide it breaks your measuring systems. I want to love her until she shakes, I want to touch him until it breaks me. I want to stop the cynics in their tracks. Everything is already so sad.
Can’t you see? Science doesn’t make this boring. Science makes this amazing. Everything that’s dancing in my head when I think of the people I love - it’s so real that they can read it in chemistry. It’s not just fantasy. It means I feel it to the very cells of me.
Let us have love. Let us have our dopamine, our seratonin, our oxytocin. We are surrounded by poison. Give us our delicate balance. Give us something we can believe.
”
— Love is scientifically explainable. That doesn’t mean it’s not amazing

“What they don’t tell you
about the gentle ones,
is how we keep all our hurts in cages,
and line them up like circus attractions
on the inside of our own chests.
We carry the weight of them,
and call it surviving.
.
What they don’t tell you
about the ones who grew up
walking tightropes,
is that we only look so graceful
because we never learned
how to climb down
and we call this
remarkable.
.
What they don’t tell you
about the illusion
is that I am as much lion
as I am lion tamer.
And I got good at inflicting pain
the same way I got good
at soothing it.
This, we call unfortunate,
but inevitable
and sure.
.
What they don’t tell you
about the gentle ones
is how raw we all are,
just below the surface:
how the roar of the crowd
feels like a city burning;
how we love like immolation;
how we leave nothing but dust
in our wake.
.
We call this
poetic justice.
What they didn’t tell you
about us
is that we’ve learned so well
that we only have to be cruel
once.”
— The Gentle Ones

Searching for refuge in this world of uncertainty. Now I know what it means to be on the other side.

I styled my hair with dramatics
cracking wishbones with prayers
wanting heat on my shinbones
kisses on my chin and knees
let’s be a haystack
mangled wildness on the sheets
using poetry as our roadmap
my thigh as a street.

“I claw and scrape across my veins
in an attempt to find a release,
but no matter how hard I try,
the substance that seeps out
is not you.”

I'm done trying, I'm dead. I'm dying and nobody's crying. Feelings are gone, no connection of reality. It's just me stuck on the dark side of the earth.

“The world forbids me to live, but I am forced to breathe

Please stop trying to fix her.
Broken girls are vibrant sorts,
with eyes that glow with sadness,
but also with a gift for understanding
lost souls like themselves.
They endure sleepless nights
and learn about trauma young,
to help others when
they endure the same
They understand the power
of a random act of kindness
more than anyone.
But most of all.
Broken girls
know how to fix
themselves,
without destroying
Those cracked parts
through which the light
shines through.
So please.
Stop trying to fix her.
And let her fix herself.
”
— Broken Girls Are A Gift not a Burden

You’re growing; I can see it. I can see
you’re okay with not being okay and it’s
beautiful.