In the August of 2013, my therapist taught me how to feel pain.

She sat me down on her couch, put her hands around her knees,
And said that I was ready to learn about the juxtaposition of love and self-degeneration.
She recited to me as I was perfectly amended, and wrote down a scripture on the walls
As I watched from her susceptible whole-draining couch.

I began to litter my mind with an effervescence as she talked,
I pleaded and broke my solar plexus to let it shine within me as she spoke fluently about where I will be in times of darker days.
I listened, and let cognizant dissonance transform into regular dissonance,
As we feuded over some emotions that she claimed to know better than I did.
When the dissension was destroyed with my evenly wild dismantled separation from depersonalization and reality,
She stopped scribbling in her book and looked me straight in the eye.

She asked me how I felt and I told her that I did not.
I told her that I am a vessel for the supremacy of a mind that looks at prominent self-worth
the same way it looks at the particles underneath a shoe or the water at the bottom of an under-gated puddle. I told her that I have never opened my eyes since my father figure transformed into the door I used to hide away the tears of the woman who raised me up. I told her that I am a conundrum with a voice that is shadowed by the memories I witness and replay over and over again but have never actually ...really...experienced.
She looked at me like she expected to hear every word that came out of my mouth.
She was more a carnivore in my eyes, and by the time I realized how much an allure surrounded my depositing of impressions into this woman's central nervous system,
I was already telling myself that I have never really needed sanity.

She professed that the boundaries of my life were created by an inner turmoil,
And I would notice its symptoms and prognosis if I would just open my eyes to its horrifying truth.
By the time the room was filled with lies, I had already told enough truths to let her believe that assistance and recovery were the things I came into the room for.
She told me that I was a functional disorder, and I told her that that was patronization.
At the end of the session, we both seemed to feel equal over the fate of a sequel to a previous encounter with our regular conversational dissonance...
She gave me a piece of paper.
And it became a burden.
With a despondency I created out of her bickering and my dejected submission,
She ended the session and let the emotion run free from the tone of voice she used to impractically aid me.
I picked up the paper and picked up my serenity and created more demons out of the gracefulness inside of me,
"Open your eyes, Mzwandile."
I casted hope upon my pocket, crumpled it up until it meant as much as it usually did,
and exited the room with a prescription for a new life.

Google tells me it's an eight hour time difference.


Already absent,
my heart already fonder
for memories we hadn't been able to make yet.
Time is slow. You can sleep, then wake up.
Because of that: I haven't even bat an eyelid yet.

Unblinking in these unholy stretches
of distant poetry where I am God, I  
watch our oblivious universe. Make something of it.
Fashion us a happy ending, if you will.

But you're there, and
I'm here.
So...


                               ...would you mind

                               if we talked

                               about infinity...

                                                               ...tonight?


Google tells me it's an eight hour time difference,
so tonight is meaningless to you.
You see the sun, I see the stars.
But who can say
one of us is more blind than the other?

Who is to say what is wrong
and what is right,
when we live in a world
where I, Romeo
and you, Juliet
can commit suicide
when it's both day and night?

Such things are preposterous...
even more so than I pretending to be God
with my pen of hormones and heartbreak...
Who am I to think that I could  possibly... make something of it.
Or fashion us a happy ending, if you please.

I am mere, and powerless before the rotations of the Earth
just as I am powerless to my impulse
to click the refresh button
over any one of your profiles,
thinking it's somehow better to read 'About Me,'
then to ask about you.


Refresh.


Google tells me it's an eight hour time difference,
and neither Romeo or Juliet are dead.
Though they never lived as nothing more than characters;
we are people. You and I are not tragic concepts;
we are merely circumstance to
an arbitrary mixture of romance films, evolutionary biology-
all subject to the Earth's curvature, the Sun's shadows,
and the mocking Moon's stolen light. Simultaneous.

But because I am self-aware
I can be the **** of my own jokes
rather than the ****-end
of God's lonely, bored cigarette...

...It always has to end with
depressing existentialist philosophy,
doesn't it? More reflections or rejections
of purpose or meaning
of heaven and hope
or whatever will close the golden gates
of happiness to me. It just always
has to end that way, even though I'm not a French writer...

... I could still romance you with my words
and hold you as comfortably as I could my favourite book.
Not too tight. Not too loose. Lightly, effortlessly-
that's how it felt
to kiss you Goodbye
and all of that jazz.

And now after all that, the blues.


Refresh.

I would like to describe my heartbreak.
But,often, the words are collective and too sullen.
They breed in herds, one after the other, and rip themselves to pieces like my thoughts commanded them to do so.

My mouth is a cavern,
And it holds vessels upon
What ideas have managed to
Escape it.
When they tell me to speak,
An abyss grows throughout its edges
And commands features of it to be
Progidies, of masterpieces that only
Hint up out of their true meaning.

The tongue within it shakes,
Often reminded with all I am
Combined with all that I fear.
The thoughts, they run away,
And, When they tell me to speak them
I collect only their memories,
Like they would leave an impression that counts as something meaningful.

I run away.
When they tell me to speak,
I am in the forest again,
I am watching the trees, the leaves,
And i am about to burn it to the ground.
I am holding the lighter, and they are calling out my name.
They are staring at me.
They are staring at me.
But still they call my name.
And my words are in a herd, collective and teeth-bared,
But I'll never open my mouth.
I will just leave the wolves growling within me.

When they ask me to speak, they will only hear their echoes.

"I am made up out of dreary routinely aspects."*
.
The afternoon always spans out throughout each morning,
And I awake within each in a bed I have spent eternity within.
I unveil the sheets, stand myself up onto the ground,
And rub my eyes of their tiredness.
I adjust the straps of the clothes I wear, and stand up
And just wait there.
The room is usually empty and often I feel like I am apart of the paint of the walls.
Like I am stuck upon them like a rock in the concrete or a figure that can be scraped from it.
I un-mount my position like a fly un-mounts a jar and swindle across my bedroom to
The door and go through the unfamiliar house to the kitchen where I collapse onto the chair.
I stare at the table, and caress its granite. I stand up and fix up the coffee in the corner.
I listen to the whistling of the kettle as it replaces the birth of an old silence.
'Its cold outside' it reminds me. It's always cold outside.
I pour the coffee and add the sedatives that would otherwise leave my thoughts racing within me,
And sip from the cup as I stand in the corner.
I leave it, sit at the table, and stare at the granite again.
The wind outside is not whistling, but rustling the leaves. I am reminded of thunderstorms.
Lightning, thunder, clouds, lightning, thunder, clouds,
I sip the cup again.
There is an old familiarity behind the noises outside the window,
I **** myself uselessly to infatuate a rhythm to the steps of the branches of the winter trees.
The kitchen is filled with the noises of these audacities,
and once, perhaps last year July,
Their repetitive sounds would escape their waves and induce me frightened alone in my kitchen chair...
But now, they do not frighten me.
Not since last year July.
I pick up the teaspoon from the side and enter it into the cup,
Neither have been washed from their last usage or usages.
As I stir, I hum a melody that is quieter than the rustling. A melody that is quieter than me myself.
When the coffee cup is empty, I lay my hands onto the granite and force myself up.
I stumble towards the door and through the house and back into the bedroom.
Sometimes the days are loud, and sometimes I am a figure to its silence.
I enter the bedroom and sit at the rocking chair that would of belonged to someone else
In another world where there was furniture for the restless women who stayed awake...
And I do not rock, I only sit.
My sleeping gown covers my legs,
but if I could, I would imagine a dress much shorter than this.
Showing the scars, the marks, the knees, the bones, the skin layers, the worn-out
Wrinkles and the sighing thighs.
I would picture their lengths dominated by the visibility of threads of cloths that
Are for some other woman in some other world.
I sit up and almost fall,
Then use the armchair to balance me as I mount onto the carpet,
Where I stand again and tremble.
I walk towards the bed,
Then turn around. I exit the bedroom.
I walk through the house and past the kitchen and enter
The bigger room with the chandelier and the grand piano.
There are picture frames in this room, but they do not show faces-
They only show sentences.
Scriptures,
and I ignore them, and sit myself at the grand piano.
Middle C has turned from the ivory color to
Brown. And I blow the dust away.
Ave Maria begins with the note G,
But I play the highest note on the set of keys
With my left hand,
Then roll across it one by one as if I'm playing an infinite scale.
And watch my fingers as they shake upon each valorous key.
'One, two, three' I whisper
Then play another note.
'One
Two
Three.'
I put my hands to my side then realize that there are tears rolling down my cheeks.
There is no window in this room,
I hum again and now it is the loudest sound in the house...
But it is still, oh so quiet.
The furniture in the room is all in standard condition,
As I stand up, I close my eyes and remember them without having to look at them.
As they are, as they have always been.
I walk to one of the walls that present four picture frames.
All of them show a man and a woman in each-
And all of them are blank.
There is a quote underneath one of them that reads, "The house must be tendered well-
for now home is where the heart is."
I read it out aloud, repeat it, then read it out a third time.
"If home is where the heart is," I then say, "then my heart must still be in July."
I look around...
"Last year."
This is my house... And it has not been tendered in a very long time.
I walk away from the wall again, face the piano,
Then walk out of the room and past the kitchen to the bedroom again.
There is a bathroom to the side, I remember,
I enter it and place myself fragilely at the sink and the mirror.
My face is in its center, and the tiles around of me create a green shade to my pale skin.
There is little hair left on my head, but I brush it away and look deeply into the shallowness
Of my eyes.
I hum again,
and I am echoed by the tiles of the bathroom walls.
But I am still oh so quiet. I hum louder.
Then I turn to the bathtub in the area of space in the corner of the bathroom.
There is still water inside of it from the previous day...or week.
I walk to it and realize that there are no windows in this room.
I enter the water, and sit in the bathtub.
The dress floats at the surface.
I am still humming.
I submerge my head within the water,
then bring it out after a few seconds.
I submerge it again and keep it in for longer,
then bring it out again.
I submerge myself within it again...
It is drastically cold and it's temperature permeates my bones and leaves me feeling
Bloodless.
The water enters my nose, my mouth, goes down my throat and suddenly,
I am out of it again and choking at the head of the bathtub.
I bring myself out of it, weakly and exasperated, onto the bathroom tiles.
I exit the bathroom and walk back into the bedroom.
I collapse onto the bed and then pull the sheets on top of my dried shaking body.
I exhale...
"The sheets used to love you." A voice in my head says.
"If you were to veil yourself every-night like a queen in marriage to a dead man,
Then no one would blame you for never actually showing yourself."
And I listen...
Then that is exactly what I do.
I think about the loss of my neurons,
Then append my thoughts to race under their sedatives as I pull the sheets around my entire body.
Eventually, I stop shaking.
But when I open my eyes, I realize that only my body has.
"I wonder how these memories would feel like," I whisper again,
"If they were in the mind of some other woman,
In some other world..."
I close my eyes,
I close my mouth,
And I go to sleep.

Your arms are follicles of disinterest.

Though I am unsure of what their intention is,
They move around my waist in time
With a lack of clarity of what it all means
to be in love.
Affection and lust is all I feel
And when you say you love me their appendature continues
to grow whilst my waist does.
A surging increasing of whenever you touch me.
The voices that pardon me are larger
Than my conscience, and sometimes the thought of you surges
Beneath me,
like a virus or an earthquake in a shattered continent or both.
My heart becomes a state of liquid, the temperature of the air
Transforms to a prominence of length. I grasp everything you touch
I grasp you, I grasp the air. I look around and I cannot seem to
Find land where your eyes do not roam. The centimeters of everything
You've ever held combined with the emptiness of my palms.
The hollows of my retinas seeing pain when I see right through you, my crave
For becoming sub-ordinate to everything I've never known in life, a deriving
Of isolation for the way your fingers crawl so weakly against the meso-folds
Of my tense shoulders. The way they press, clutch, grab me and force them
Towards you.
Upon the shaking ground, where you lean in against my neck and
Pretend to know the secrets which have all the weight on my collar bones. Quakes,
Within you as well emerging from layers of participate, holding ashes and loving ashes,
Burning them again and convincing them that it is intimacy. Tendering flames
That induce smoke silhouettes on dancers that do not dance. Clutching their framework
As if you can make structure out of burning buildings,
'hold me' the flames whisper. From parted lips that are sighing against yours.
Burning buildings do not touch the lips of angels, but you force yourself near me.
I am nothing but a shattered window within a distraught avenue,
The fire grows and you are simultaneously caressing me and crying for help.
Upon the glass shards of my ragged edges, the tension increases with each
Sunken word you forget to say out loud.
There is mesmerization between clutching and grabbing and pulling and releasing. The sensation of us impending upon each other like runaway trains,
the way we shall crash with what we
Know in terms of devastating realization.
Sitting on the same bench as our life forces collide like they were miles apart.
At the breech of creating a history that only I will remember.
You burn everything down,
And once I am ashes you will claim to increase the passion of everything you feel towards me.
I am a burning building, a shattered window, a flame that whispers 'hold me'
And you are nearing my lips. The earth conclaves in centimeters and whenever
You breathe, I measure it.
Exhalations are beautiful but so are the seconds between us. You hold me like a chamber.
The world only rotates on the bench we are sitting on, the wood has caught fire and
So have the trees around of us. I am impending you to burn with me and every
Component of our surroundings is not pardoned by your refusal.
You love me, you say,
And just at the moment of our lips meeting,
You realize that everything impresses you in the completely wrong way.
.
The flames will not cease.
but when you stand up and leave me you do not feel them.
Your arms were once a catalyst to the expenditure of heat energy
But now, I burn ceaselessly.
You walk away as my flames spread.
They spread to the ground, set fire to the soil, and follow your footsteps in hope
That they will incinerate you.
But as the memory of love disappears,
so do you.
And the fire that follows you incinerates everything but your skin.
When you then hold your next burning building,
My flame will be there, watching you, everything you do
It will combust upon itself.
And cause catastrophe through the means of a lack of what you claimed was passion.
Your love will incinerate things that cannot be burned,
And my flames will watch, hoping that you will expenditure what you thought of them too.
Ceaselessly, they will fade away,
And you will only burn everything...
'I love you' you will say,
And then,
you will only burn everything.
...