“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.
In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”

Poetry approached me in that chaos of raw inverted power and leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder, said, “You need to learn how to listen, you need grace, you need to learn how to speak. You’re coming with me.” I did not walk off into the sunset with poetry, or hit the town with a blaze of gunfire with poetry guarding my back. Rather, the journey toward poetry worked exactly as the process of writing a poem. It started from the inside out, then turned back in to complete a movement. And then on and on in the manner of a ripple in water, a song in the air

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

"Let me braid your hair, let's play a game of truth or dare.. Rather 'dare', because 'truth' will expose that you are broken"- Hlengiwe Mbatha

"He never spoke much, but I couldn't ignore the conversations his eyes communicated

Applying a clown face and pretending everything is cool and content.

"Some cry with tears, others with their thoughts"

"Feelings guarded, heart on lock"

“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 am sinking deep. Someone rescue me.

The villainy you teach me I will execute & it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

The ironic thing about pain is how beautiful a poet can make their sadness seem

Why do we need sanity
when we can match the
colour of our shoes with
the bags under our eyes?

Let them tell you just
how good your anxiety
goes with your depression.

(Insomnia comes free when
you buy them together.)

Do you think she’ll tell you
where she picked up her neurosis,
and I wonder if they have it in my size

I have made a habit of storing pieces of myself into others so that they have something to hold onto when they have lost themselves.
But I have learned that people are not so careful with what does not belong to them because now I am a just a walking dispensary of bruised knuckles and scarred hearts

“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.”

she was the girl who read the Bible,
the girl who put her hope in his word
the girl who still prayed even without answers

she was the girl who had a simple heart
the girl who loved God above all things
the girl who forgave without receive an apology

she was the girl who believed, who was patient
who didn’t give up and in the end, she was the girl
who was always disappointed and remained unhappy.

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.

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

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

Sometimes I feel like a wrong answer someone blurted out by accident, I’m awkwardly hanging in the air, wrong and stupid, hoping someone else will come in with the right answer and save me from the embarrassment of myself

Rap, poetry and books is how I escape reality. I just want to listen to good music, read good books and meet cool people but it is a still life.

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

"My heart have wrinkles in it from stressing too much."

They say "Your darkest hour comes before the dawn" but I am forever suffering and I still don't know what happiness feels like. I was at a funeral today, staring the coffin, I envy the person in it. When will my time to find peace in a coffin come? I am suffering and tired of waiting. I AM SUFFERING!

“I wrote my suicide notes days , no weeks, no months, no over a year ago today
But still
I stand here breathing
And there is a ghost standing over me from my past that I can’t seem to shake
So even tonight
I lay in bed
And wonder
Will I never want to take the bottle full of pills”

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

I'm the girl who lost her smile. It's gone, gone forever. Blown away by the wind.

She was the kind of girl that they named storms and stars after, the kind of girl that was born in a hurricane

The only reason I cannot stop writing, is that because I have no more tears left.. yet I need to let the burden out.

“There are enough stars in your
eyes to form galaxies but
here you are crying over
the girls and boys and other
spiteful kids who broke
your heart–darling listen to
me, you mean more to this
world than they will ever
comprehend because you
are absolutely magnificent;
you’ve got moons in your
palms and the sun in your
smile, you control the gravity
around you, darling you
make the tides turn and you
are your own beautiful
world– just because
some people don’t understand
space, doesn’t mean you should
let them bury you in hatred.”
— Don’t let them take over your universe

“These bones could not contain my breaking, I am titanium plated, I harbor a splintered existence. My breath leaves rust on my lips. I still cannot end my poems in ‘I love you’, at the end I can only find loss

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

They say old wounds heal with time but why does it feel like I could die?

This is how it happens:
first comes the shock. the ache has had no time to settle itself into your bones or braid itself into your hair. it doesn’t cross your mind as often as it should because you still can’t quite comprehend what’s going on.
then comes the worst wave of depression. the equivalent of a broken-hearted-tv-and-ice-cream-binge. you’ll use a few boxes of tissues and everything outside of your blankets will feel wrong for a while. you’ll cry until you run out of tears and then you’ll just feel numb and hollow like someone carved out your insides with a spoon.
third comes denial. you try to pretend like everything is still okay and your life is exactly how it has always been. you keep expecting a letter or good news because you slipped up again and
next is the doubt.
i guess the last step has to be acceptance - what else could it be? you have to turn your light on again and throw out your tissues and actually wake up in the morning.
i think that’s how it happens.

Time isn’t going to heal your wounds. It will just make them easier to conceal to the point where you forget you have them

Every fibre of my being is tired of everything.

I woke up and it felt like suicide again. This depression always succeeds. All the time. I am tired and no, not the sleepy kind of tired but the emotionally and physically drained type of tired. I hope, I keep the faith but that gets me nowhere because yet again I feel like this all the time. I want to escape. Good things were never for me. Happiness was never for me.

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.

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.

“Two months in and all you know
is your new medication
makes your hands shake.
Twenty-four years old,
and you’re finally starting to understand
that calling a place home
doesn’t make it feel like one.
Yesterday, you learned how to change a tire, but
you still don’t know
how to love someone without
cracking your ribs open
and spilling through the fault lines,
like some kind of natural disaster.
You’re pretending if you keep laughing
you won’t have to admit
you’re afraid;
pretending like love’s gonna
solve all your problems;
pretending you’ve got it all together
when you don’t have it at all.
You have made so much
out of so little–
you built yourself tall
on the backs of every person
who told you you couldn’t.
You flew your colors in a war zone–
made it back wounded and alive.
You have done everything you know how,
and it means something
to have tried.”
— Twenty-Four

I run out of words to say but any touch, a simple taste, any dose of you really... and the book of poetry starts to turn its own pages.

“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.”

We need to move away from this constant need of coming across as calm, cool and collected. We weren’t built to be calm, cool, and collected. If we were, it wouldn’t feel so exhausting all the time. It would, you know, come naturally to us. You know what comes naturally to human beings though? Being open, being messy, being raw, being unfiltered, having lots of feelings. Why should we have to stifle our true nature? Let’s go after the things we want, let’s love each other brutally and honestly, and not worry about the consequences. Let’s release the feelings inside of us and let them land somewhere special. Otherwise, we might have a lifetime of longing in front of us

“I have lived my entire life
without breaking a single bone
and yet somehow none
of them could protect me
from splintering my soul–
somewhere along the way,
I became reckless and sharp,
shattered and dark,
somewhere along the way
I gave up on you and baby
I gave up on myself too.”

— The only angel I had fell through the clouds

I want to be with someone who makes me feel like a poem.

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.

At the very least, poetry and science are sisters.
But, more likely, they are the soul and the body,
sharing a single heart,
whispering arias to the universe,
waiting to hear it singing back

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.

“somehow you’ve made the mistake of seeing me as a writer. i am a teller of stories, but sorely only capable of the truth. unfortunately there are no lyrics here. what you’ve taken for artful is nothing more than my own beautifully jotted tragedy…”

Everybody keeps telling me that
it’ll be okay and I’ll get through this alive
and that I have nothing to be worried about
but ****– I am so tired of hearing about
how I am supposed to make it through the day;
I just want somebody to tell me that yeah,
I might crash and burn, I might crumble like
a decrepit building under a roof too heavy
to hold, I might falter and trip and break
a few bones, I might not make it out of
this mess as neatly or as happily as I came
into it– and I want somebody to tell me that
it’s okay to **** up and it’s okay to fail and
it’s okay to make a mess of my life because
I’m so tired of these standards I’ve set for
myself– I want somebody to tell me I can
let go once in a while, I want to be able
to let go without losing myself I want to
be able to fall without going straight to hell–
I want somebody to tell me that I can be human
and that it’s nothing to be ashamed about.”
— I have been hiding the human inside of me in hopes of being perfect