Sometimes we don't know if we're going to be okay
and even that is okay
One day at a time while the grief subsides
if it ever does

Maybe there is love here for me
Maybe there is love
Not in the way I want to be loved
But the past 2 months have taught me a lot.
That maybe I shouldn't expect too much
Maybe I don't need to have perfection
Books as gifts and always being there
Maybe just the occasional laugh and being comfortable is enough
Maybe I'm not settling for second best
Maybe I'm being okay with being okay.
Maybe my mother and father had a love story
The kind of one you read about in novels
Maybe they were more than soulmates
I don't know why I'm using the past tense
Maybe my dad always tucking my mother in at night was enough
Maybe he didn't have to buy her flowers
Maybe him just talking to her was enough
Maybe she loving him was more than he ever wanted
Maybe bare-bones love doesn't always mean lacking
Maybe I needed to learn this
Maybe we're all enough for each other

People always say there are some things too terrible to build beauty out of
I am lying down on a couch in the prayer room of a hospital
Facing the huge cross I don't pray to staple-gunned onto the wall
Waiting, while my battery dies, to hear if my father will live or not
I'm not trying to make this sound poetic or romantic or even bearable
Let's just agree I've never felt so lost in my life, not even when I had no friends and I fought daily with my mother
If my father dies, so does she, and I never pictured myself as the protagonist of an Orphans Plight story
Certainly not with two younger brothers to care for
I feel guilty, because I've imagined him dying sometimes, I always imagine it as a relief but I feel nothing now, not even numbness
I wonder if God is punishing me for those thoughts and wishes
I'm trying to out-pray those thoughts, counting the blessings on the lines of my fingers
Hoping to heaven someone up there will take pity on me and save his life
This evening I told my aunt I wouldn't care if he came back whole or not, I just want his dying-seal laugh back on the dinner-table

It is a windy night and the hospital beds are all filled in my mind
with loved ones
lonely and aching in the dark
I've never seen my father cry and I never want to
My brother has regressed for the night back into childhood and is sleeping in my mother's room because she has two double beds unfilled
An empty home
An empty tower
There is so much silence I never realised was there
Usually covered up with yelling
Fighting
Usually me
Usually my father
But one of us is missing and this home has dissolved into a graveyard
I never realised I cared this much
You Know
Just the other day I stared at myself in the mirror after a crying jag and saw a red face, ugly and disappointing
I always wanted to be someone who cried delicately
Well, today I was on the phone and somehow started crying without realising it, my face did not redden and the tears looked elegant
I never want to cry like this again
If God is out there He knows I've been angry and hateful
Hating this family like a curse
Wanting out
But right now, ******* hell, right now
I just want my father home

The world has dropped to its knees begging our white male dominator's to let us be
Guns swinging from your belts as money stuffs the lining of your clothing
Do not **** us, we begged you
Your power is a travesty, unfair
You would be better off sharing,I promise you
You are not worth more than I am you monster

We will not beg anymore
Because you are inhuman
un-hearted, unable to reason
More animal than animal
Demons with hell-fire in your eyes
The word loss has been shaking in my mouth for years
But the worlds collective stance means they taste it too
When genocide is permissible

Because the people you **** are not wealthy
Brown-skinned
Veiled and not passive
Because you own us, the media
our collected information
Our collective memories are worth nothing
Genocide is permissible
But ******* if you think we think so too

If you think we will go down without a fight
The history books will have your names remembered as villains
And the devil will have a special seat for you
You monsters

When genocide is permissible
I see not the end of hope
But the fury than keeps us going
You are evil
We are purity
We are loss and loss makes strength
We are dignity
Beauty
More than genocide

I don't know where to begin with this

All I can say is that I am tired

I was given dreams
dreams like fresh fruit
Ripening in my palms
My world was blue skies and
orange slices
litchi juice on hands
climbing the jungle gym

My youth was flora
sprouting out the earth
branches picked clean

we were absolutions

I don't know when that all disappeared

Grown-ups are supposed to know everything
When did I start seeing adults crying more often than I did

We are grey specks in the sea
tumultuous
overwhelming
absolute

We are droplets
whirled into the horror of bloodstains on the road

I am lonely
Endless
Mattress on the sea
Floating
Sinking
Drowning

This is carnage
terror
silent genocide running through our veins

The hours are passing

The air is smog

the trees are dying

the fruit is gone

I was born in a hospital bed in a pretty city fresh out of Apartheid where my skin colour wouldn't matter any more

And my mother saw me a few minutes after the sweat had spilt out of her eyes and said
"Thank God
She looks like you"
looking up at my father

With his skin like cream and roses
And his hazel eyes without a bit of green
My mothers eyes are chocolate and just as warm

I opened mine
And my mother and father wondered where they had come from
Inky black like a void
I have always been proud of their darkness

My eyes are the one part of my face that is truly mine
Not a gift from my parents
I was born with light skin and dark eyes
And I prefer the one I shouldn't

I grew up in a town that told me to stay out of the sun
Don't look like a tambi
Old auntie's I meet and forget have snarled at me
Their wasted faces and bodies are a source of pride and shame
They gave it all for their sons and husbands
But it shows
and it shouldn't show

I was not a packaged child in ribbons and pink
I was not cute
And I think my mother hates me for that
She shows it sometimes
She's made it so clear that if a bomb fell through the kitchen roof it would be okay because only I would be in there

I grew up in a town that told me I wasn't worth the carefree love my brothers were
I had to be careful
Count up the brownie points like air pockets in a submerged car
Don't breathe too fast or it'll disappear
Walking on eggshells in my own house

My mother told my aunt who wanted to know why I was going to a university in a different province
That I wasn't a guest in my home
"We don't have girls to marry them off"
Those were words stolen from my tongue
when I had had enough as a child and told her I didn't want to get married, I was enough for myself

I don't think I've ever seen her so shocked, not at the wisdom in those words but the fact that I even thought that

I was born and raised in a place that painted me on a wall
And told me I had to stay there
I'm now old enough to know I deserve more