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  Dec 2014 mzwai
Tawanda Mulalu
Sometimes I like to wonder,

does my pen move
the same way as yours?

Does it
             dance?
Does it
             sing?

                        Does it
impel a grateful piece
of paper to smile,
and laugh out
tiny bubbles of its dream
to be admired in the Louvre?

Or does the paper bleed
angry droplets of deep-coloured
ink-blood from its ink-heart
from its ink-soul; or does it cry
little black tears
from its dark fountains of literature?

Does the paper feel
all of these things
as you sketch your last
line
or as I write my last
word?

What then, when every one of your pictures
makes words in the thousands?
How many more chunks of eternity
can you paint versus my poetry?


                    Yet you say I understand you.


Sometimes what you paint
flickers like in the movies,
and every frame

makes me wonder

if the way my pen moves
is just something someone animated
in her free time instead of studying.
Maybe then it wouldn't be too much
to say that sometimes
you sketch me into life.

Maybe then, this is why, sometimes


                    you say I understand you.


Even if I can barely hear your oxygen
over the noise of glittering pixels
that often disappoint us when we seek
more
than these strange profundities online,
where emotion is a commodity
and not ink... not paper...

It doesn't matter.

Because maybe my pen
was sketched by you.

And maybe
your poetry, your art
Dances. Sings. Smiles.
Laughs. Bleeds. Cries.
                                     Breathes.


                    So you can as well.
Everyone needs a friend.
mzwai Dec 2014
There is no whiskey in his room tonight...

Instead,
There is a half-empty glass of-
Rock shandy, Pepsi-cola, Dr.Pepper,
Or something black.
Something minuscule,
even though he has not sipped from it.
He has not looked at it- his tongue
Was only dry for two minutes before he
Locked the door.
For the only presence that made it hard for him to swallow
Was in the form of something that he was still trying to release...
at 2AM.
Release at 2AM.
There is a typewriter in front of him and he is feeling as permeable as
The glass that is sitting next to it.
'as permeable if it had a closed lid made up out of carbon' he thinks.
'Closed lid', 'Carbon',
'Closed lid'
He does not know what to type.
As distance diminished it's existence throughout the years,
He began to realize that Letters were starting to transform themselves
Into Diary-Entries and vice-versa.
The art of belittling seclusion through the method of fictionalizing himself
Was turning more into a hobby than an art and
he did not know what to do except to accept it as a tragedy
That nobody else needed to know about.
"Tragedy:" he types.
"I don't know how to forget about you."
'And etcetera,' he thinks.
In his minds eye he sees a girl in a school far away.
She's holding a camera and a textbook and a picture of a boy
That isn't him.
She's walking into her new life and one day she will go a week without
Thinking about how it feels to know interest and feel it shared
from someone who thought it never existed.
One day she will go a week without thinking about the boy who stared at empty pages
And wrote letters about bitter meals that his tongue thought could never be tasted.
One day she will go a week with just the thought of how glamorous a life spent alone is...
Before she meets someone there...
Who will make her taste something that is less bitter than him himself.
'I hope that's where my story ends.' He thinks.
And then imagines himself embedded into
Dark bitter things.
(Tobacco, caffeine, dark chocolate.)
He sighs and stares at the words he has already typed.
He can imagine these bitter things spilling into his glass and changing its taste with each
little drop.
"You were dead to me before you even walked out of the door..." He decides,
And puts it onto the paper.
He lifts the glass and takes a sip and then puts it back down again.
'One day she will go a week without thinking about me..."  He thinks.
Release at 2AM.
  Oct 2014 mzwai
H.P. Lovecraft
Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.

I have whirled with the earth at the dawning,
When the sky was a vaporous flame;
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.

I had drifted o'er seas without ending,
Under sinister grey-clouded skies,
That the many-forked lightning is rending,
That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons, that out of the green waters rise.

I have plunged like a deer through the arches
Of the hoary primoridal grove,
Where the oaks feel the presence that marches,
And stalks on where no spirit dares rove,
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers through dead branches above.

I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things, I care not to gaze on again.

I have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,
I have trod its untenanted hall,
Where the moon rising up from the valleys
Shows the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot endure to recall.

I have peered from the casements in wonder
At the mouldering meadows around,
At the many-roofed village laid under
The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble, I listen intently for sound.

I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
I have flown on the pinions of fear,
Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages;
Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.

I was old when the pharaohs first mounted
The jewel-decked throne by the Nile;
I was old in those epochs uncounted
When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.

Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
And great is the reach of its doom;
Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.
mzwai Oct 2014
I go to public places to be alone...

I sit amongst the crowds,
listen in to their instigating alluring words,
Exhaust myself with the false pretense of social-comfort
And think about death.
As it has always been and how it will always be-
More potent than human interest, temptation, enticement or fulfillment.
In the depths of these crowds I surround myself with
The culture of the unconscious.
Nothing has ever mattered but the collected cognizance of
The fact that no human being has the internal ability to become immortal-
And nobody who belongs to the crowds worries about that. As,
To be comfortably existent means to be uninformed about your own
Insignificance.
When I am aware of my own body I am more afraid than when I am not.
I watch myself from a blackening screen,
as I destroy what I was born into until it becomes
A habit instilled within both perspectives.
I let the crowds ruin me with glances and words and drunken love
That they will not remember.
I exist as a vessel, and let the pain of my future determine the pain of
My present.
I seek to hide within the dark of a night like this that has experienced my absence and enjoyed it but,
Their glances make me feel so present...

..I can only hide within myself
by pretending that I am outside of myself..
Watching from a blackening screen...
  Oct 2014 mzwai
Esther
Distant cries on cheery nights;
That ever-growing sense of creeping destruction
When all is well
When all is too pleasant.

It rises from the hearth on chilly days
Like fiery remembrances of past decays
As pain found its way
From comforting warmth
To a slowly sizzling burn,
And the heat of water turned to rot
On ceilings lost to decades of neglect.

It is fleeting eyes and unsteady hands
During summer weeks
Of seemingly nonchalant song and dance
Where the next step
The next breath
The next laugh
May be the last.

And no hand upon the skin
Can calm the quaking of the heart
Inside it’s cage of tectonic plates
As it sings loudly to drown out
The reverberations of fate.

It is the vicious fear.

And it makes every hour of open eyes
And every dream under the dark sky
Another deadly parade of
Who, what, when and where
As the living pretend
To be alive.
Trying hard to get myself into writing regularly, even if it's not my best stuff.
mzwai Oct 2014
The eighth deadly sin is co-existence.

That is what the bible forgot to tell us.
There are scriptures of love, connotations
Of how the heart works and how it beats and what forces
It to start and stop but,
none of them explain what it goes through, when
It beats for another human being.

The arteries from the heart in a hand do not only carry blood,
But also, thoughts as fugitives of elegance which
need to be released.
The structure within them carries itself within each existent-form
On earth, and veins and arteries were made to be intoxicated
By the supplies of it in the form of what their minds choose not to remember.
It was made that way by the antagonist of memory, and
the screen on which it is displayed onto becomes eternally shattered by its strength of other loved analgesics.
Within the shards of the shattered screen is a motivation of malice,
That expresses ******* within the blood as it is circulated around of the body.

When the empathetic assemblance of the sharpness in
Both the blood plasma and the glass shards become
Heightened by the knowledge of an instigating love for illness,
It is too late for the body to blame it on anything but the contents
Of its own mind.
Eventually the walls of each blood supply will transform into thin layers of restriction,
That allow everything in,
but nothing out.

Poison is planning, and self-infection is the key to only replicating happiness.
So because of this,
whenever a man holds a human heart in the creases of his palm,
He has no choice but to bleed on it as well.

This is not for anyone else but himself...
I have learnt that today.
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