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Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
To speak on things one knows nothing of
takes either hubris or innocence: I lack
neither now. I just speak sometimes,
                       I don't know. Nevermind
me, the amnion was not blue, I chase
nothing, I will not **** myself, I will
not drown- I don't like that
kind of music anway. I am not blond(e).
                       Sometimes, though, Frank
got me and I can't sit down for days.
Not in the ***, just an ocean, always,
sometimes. Nevermind. Baby blue.
Aug 2017 · 147
Poem.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
In which we drink ourselves
to a certain happiness, alive
      as always, I think, to wake
is such dreaming, sleep to me now
seems such a reality I don't know
      why to continue walking
in afternoons evenings mornings
      what is sleep
(Nas says, *****, finger on ur trigger
                               it is the cousin of death,
                    *****).
                              ­ I still don't know
but everything feels so much more real
with my eyes closed, in which
                  we drink ourselves
to a certain happiness:
       something so quite unlike death
that we must call it life
     (some American college students
       sing some drunken Karaoke in China
       and I promise things will be okay thereafter
       in which the sun might shine again
       despite the eyes being closed and all).

Please remember,
                                I love you.
Aug 2017 · 148
Poem.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
My entire totality consists of Beethoven,
                                                   Kanye West,
                                                   Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Aug 2017 · 133
Poem.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
There's these moods I'm having,
   life cinematic,
I don't care much about grammar,
   ***** are you listening.

Rabbit, run run
    Poets see things other people can't
Don't
Want to
Where were your eyes, my eyes, where
         do
Rabbits run, run
                               Back then I wanted to kiss everyone
    (everything).
All the pretty girls in their summer dresses, always
    Rabbits, running, run, ran

                        Look at how the world goes by when you
                        walk in these moods
                        Mr ******

***** are you listening to me.

What was it that you were looking for.

     Rabbits run run.

Lives were lived across those school fields the rabbits ran.
                                            I missed those moments of encircling.
                                            Arms of yours.
So soft.
                There's the small body of the Chinese girl
                I wanted to take.
God.
                Shame does not concern me no more.

If you look hard enough there's always a somewhere.
Aug 2017 · 141
Poem.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
Personally, I do not really want to talk
of that kind of madness; to distort
                                            to be distorted
is punishment enough, I think; the world
is far too slow enough as it is. To love
is to see too far sometimes. Too near
is nothing but a kiss, which should occur
                                             with closed eyes
                                             signifying nothing.
                                             It is so dark in here,
my love.
Aug 2017 · 118
Poem.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
To breathe is a desperation,
it afflicts us all until it is artless,
a noose or a collapsed lung,
the wrinkles giving way to a baby
that never cried. Hush.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
Whether or not you could've foreseen it
Whether or not a ***** had dreamed it
I dreamed it, somewhere, possibly
   dreamed it, multiverse hypothesis

-dreams, of course, are a common *******
catch dat alternating history, it is discography
of movement of movements from Romantic to Classic
**** it, I know I went backwards

I'm backwards, because, I never look forward
I'm bored, oh god, it's already the morning?

                    oh god, it's already the morning?


I die pretty like a girl
Ophelia
I die prettly like a girl
Ophelia
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
I don't write love songs no more
You then ask what is this for
I said that I really don't know
But either way would you come home
                               come home
                                                       come home
                                                            ­        
....Yeah yeah yeah yeah
Yeah yeah....

Baby I got it and no not ironic
The way that I see you go way past the logic
All of the girls in they summer dresses
Got me rappin' without none of the stresses

Blessings on blessings I'm countin' them: Chance
Sonnets to hip-hop that modern romance
Fly me to China, I teach you Setswana
Drinking that wung zai 'cause batho ra tshwana-

Pink: pretty girls like trap music
Think: of who got dat music make movements-
That's me, that's real, any other nig gotta deal
got 'em feels, give 'em tissues, take no issues, under heel-

Step on 'em: let 'em know that I'm only one
Tell on 'em: got the screenshots say I'm the one
Did on 'em- right **** I hit 'em with dat beat
Pretty picture model sisters never follow though like you

See I got you boo
Like no one else luh you

Some people want it all
But I just want you

Yeah, I got you boo
Like no one else luh you

I also got dem views- and ****-
all of dem views's you


                                              *

What was the joke that we thought was so funny?
Can I hear it again? Can it touch me at night
and make me feel again?
Aug 2017 · 258
Merriment.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
Best friend and I swing by in small rollercoaster.
I miss my childhood but I don't miss me.
I hate younger me. Terrible child, worse teenager-
too many affectations. Swang by, we did, and we
smiled; I could have kissed his face, but, then,
I liked girls too much. I still do.  
Intimacy is so often unbearable.
I'd just rather stick my face into someone else's
then call it a day.
Maybe, after, talk a little bit.
I loved you, my friend,
watching the world go by the way we did.
I would have kissed your face if you let me.
I would have I would.
Aug 2017 · 239
Poem.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
Poems, bars: people, stars
Eyes lookin' Life on Mars
Boy wonder looks at mirror- Blackstar
Boy wonder looks at mirror- Blackstar
No time for jokers cause I keep it Nightwing
Fly 'til early morning, next day, coda, swinging
Pendulum, swift; please acknowledge the kid,
even though he skinny like Syd
What a future: even if it Odd
Grimace in my face like I'm General Zod
But I keep it Clark Kent with the moral sentiment
Merriment when I'm flying over all Metropolis
Heaven sent? God bless. Still stressed.
Still flex. Morning breath. Kinda fresh
I guess with your skin under your dress-
aaaaah, where was I again?
Are we having fun anymore?
Not really? We still friends?
I'm sorry we not talking anymore.

Sorry, who are you?

Voice to void to void the void
annoyed but buoyed by white noise
helps to take the fact that there no point
as given, what difference with man with boy

he toys with himself with eyes closed
eyes opened: it's the same, she broiled
and her breath fuzzed like... white noise
fizz-fizz, hiss-kiss.
Aug 2017 · 392
Dorchester St. Quartet
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
I.
//Yum Yum, No Vacation//

Such remarkable running you did there
You look like you're out breath, where is the air
You carried around yourself, air-bending monk
Heaving this way and that like you're in a funk

Yeah, I know, promised to never comment on you or your look
No more, at least to myself, but, baby you shook
Like how you shouldn't be, like someone like me saying 'baby'
Please, I trickled down your throat- gravy

Maybe, if you wasn't lying to yourself, life would be gravy
But then again- my mind is hazy
Maybe, if I'd been more faithful than lately
We coulda ended more stately but that's just a maybe

I like to deal with certainties so if it ain't that physics
I gotta ask why, where and when is it biting me
My space and time aren't hyphenated I'm not prepared to give
Myself away like that- so, can I live?

(Eh, you prolly didn't like me that much anyway
Eh, it doesn't bother me that much anyway
Yeah, writing past that call me Hemingway
Blam, end of a verse just like Hemingway)

II.
//Beach ******, No Vacation//

Oh wow, what weather indifferent is difference
Hello Boston, with your moodiness, how is you feeling?
I'm doing fine cause I'm doing me
Shower with rain and ice, movements in your symphony

Sympathy wasn't no nothing I asked from you
But double negatives ain't mahala so hala with sunlight akuna mathata
Lion King if you really wanna know
Roaring on so bitter with this flow

like

You really gon' try play me out of this Simba
Like Mufasa didn't gift me that rhythm marimba
Whatever homie, they don't even know me
Way they actin' up, they could win a Tony

******- and I thought I wasn't good enough
I'm good, getting out of my dreams, getting out of my seat
Good- like the only house concrete after a huff and a puff
Summer- only time the lyrics get done- sheesh!

III.
//Biking, Frank, Jay, Tyler//

Watch      what you say to me
Watch      pretty clear to me
Tick-tock til' next drop you don't mean none to me
No more if you play me, see

Soft boy, hard heart if need be, breathe
Not just for next stroke, left strokes, knees
Don't get weak, leave ***** sheets hang in breeze
Last whole night b, don't mean I'm happy

Pretty nice problem if you asked him
Little boy playin' 'round Invader Zim, where his friends
at? act   like   you   -   don't care
act? act         -you do-  so scared

Of dying lonely, crying won't be done
Nothing welled in tear ducts since fifteen, no fun, so done
with this shh... where the catharsis
Hamlet complex: the rest is shh... silence

IV.
//Fourth of July- Sufjan//

O, when the crickets clunkered and thundered
I thudded against myself- mind against skull
Bruce Banner in Incredible Hulk, whisper in bulk
Ghost in the Shell, heard sorta mumbled

Skip a few weeks later she breathes on my neck
Same thoughts really I don't like how I see me
I mean, I like myself, I hate my body
Or rather the idea of a body, microphone check:

Can I finally hear myself? Am I still stuck in myself?
Can I get outta myself? Can I please get some help?
I like living and touching and I like what she did there
But imagine if could disappear into universals and share

the same space as numbers and shapes
with none of this creaking and yearning my body it makes
I am a corpse in the making- and so is she
No matter how long we keep at it I am still inside of me

I didn't finish
I didn't finish

I didn't
I didn't

I
I
Aug 2017 · 178
Poem.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
Talk is so largely masturbatory I wonder why even bother.
I thought you were cute until you started to talk.
Aug 2017 · 160
Poem.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
Maybe you do or you don't
remember that (first) glittering unfeeling you had
(as a child probably) when you looked into yourself,
and there was no mirror involved, and said
     -what the ****?-
and, hopefully, it was a formative memory
because I haven't stopped looking since
and I don't really want to be alone in this.
Aug 2017 · 224
Christmas Poem.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
Where I to recapture that eternal everything you first
glimpsed at the beginning of the end of your birth when you
screamed, for the first time, at the injustice of life, at its
beauty- don't wake me up just yet I was dreaming but wait what is
this feeling I have between my skull there is something shining nothing
and there is no longer darkness- Would you love me then?
Aug 2017 · 209
Poem.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2017
Baby cousin points at my old toy robot
Declares, 'This robot used to be big.'
I say, 'No, you used to be small.'

'What?'

She then crouches down to old toy robot's
height and smiles and laughs,
'I used to be small like this!'

Maybe, just maybe I'll have
one of those little things
and teach them about stars
and boys and girls and words,
but I already told you
I can't live like that,
I think.
Jul 2017 · 174
Poem.
Tawanda Mulalu Jul 2017
denouement matter matters
nounema matters matter
scatter, sakura flower bossom
autumn, not pink here, but something
very close to a red (orange).
Bankai.
Jul 2017 · 218
Holograph.
Tawanda Mulalu Jul 2017
Stiffening, flaccid, shriveling, plastic
     croissant, towel knot, water
recycling- shower steam, forehead sweat, snow
     caked the bicycle to a streetlight pole.
Turtles, to the shore and back, beach eggs,
     chicken-thought first before, all the way
down- shadows on a wall after stiffening,
     flaccid; your hand- what is it?
And where did it come from
      to throw away the light like that?
http://www.anilaagha.com/all-the-flowers-are-for-me-sculpture/
Jul 2017 · 392
Poem.
Tawanda Mulalu Jul 2017
Wherewithal of sight: light
gasps for air in morning: mourning
for                                      
       form, firm, not silhouette of hand, slight
of hand, offhand words of
                                                    eyes-closed,­
                                                    tombstone
  ­                                     (kiss).
You are not much I didn't say. Often
                                        wish       I did.
Matisse.
Tawanda Mulalu Apr 2017
Awakes, crack of dawn, morning
breath. Mouth opens, wonder
what sound  made first by it.
Song.
Tawanda Mulalu Mar 2017
God,
for some of us it takes a long while,
      doesn't it? Voices
stunted from first primal primordial scream, ***-slap
      at birth, howls at the moon
in silent chest-beats when no longer an embryo
      looking,
at it, the sky, awe plastered onto face-canvas,
      suddenly you're a poet   but
God,
for some of us it takes   but a long, long   while
      for anything,
if anything,
      to be born from our ever-screaming
primal primordial airless silent empty
      ***-slap mouth-breath hand-wrought
song
      to sing, to be sung
to sing,
      to sing
                   to sing
                               to sing
                                           to sing.
Mar 2017 · 1.2k
Gaborone, [Botswana].
Tawanda Mulalu Mar 2017
A zebra burns to ashes in the middle of a traffic circle.

The University of Botswana was built by cows.

Chickens made music in the nighttime.

A goat glittered in the sky.

In the middle of Sir Seretse Khama International Airport, an elephant stands.

Do you like worms?

Sala sentle.

Tsamaya sentle.

Ke tla go bona.

There are many ways of saying goodbye in Setswana. It is okay. Go siame.
http://theharvardadvocate.com/article/800/gaborone-botswana/
Feb 2017 · 645
Many Sad Songs.
Tawanda Mulalu Feb 2017
There were words once.
Meant to be heard and said across
various distances, sometimes
an eternity, seemingly, continents
pushed together into one, sometimes
a whisper, momentary, finally, lips-
they say things that very often mean
nothing. Nothing she says. What's wrong he asked.
Many things. Nothing at all. You press play
and something sings in your ears and you
wait for another flight to somewhere.
Nowhere feels everywhere at once, always,
which is why we built these planes. Sometimes
out of paper. As a child I did those things.
Watched how they gleamed across the tops
of my eyes- never too far they went.
What a title! right?
Feb 2017 · 1.4k
As a Movie.
Tawanda Mulalu Feb 2017
My jet-lagged self sleeps early,
wakes early, sleeps again, reads.
Having watched one movie too many over summer
I relish the sounds designed above- a click
of a door handle, bare warm socks gliding
across wooden floor, the scrunch of toothbrush
against the rusting metal straightening yellowing teeth,
the few lone cars across the street, that hazy
early sound that only light can make as it
becomes aware of itself in my dorm room. What
kind of camera lens would make this moment more
livable and is it already dead?
As is as is is as.
Feb 2017 · 868
March.
Tawanda Mulalu Feb 2017
Today, we marched, or rather, I watched him,
my friend, next to me dream. Of what futures, I'm not
quite aware. Some orange man has overtook
the american government everyone in their right mind
and heart
cried,
and a square in Boston was filled with lively
dreamers
with placards and gleaming eyes and faces
that said no! not again! A few toddlers
sauntered around the feet of their parents
saying and shouting and muttering and playing
with words and slogans they don't understand
yet in their minds,
maybe their hearts,
in them they know. Next to me my friend grabbed
an abandoned placard and I felt lost. I only
came to watch how the words of the orange man
came alight. I was afraid we would catch flame.
A grey-haired woman had earlier skipped across
the crowd in front of us to show us a different route and
told us useful things- we were fresh I had explained-
and we carefully avoided police but there weren't many.
It was cold. Not the orange man. Somehow we
met my friend's friends and we started a chant
in the crowd below us, perched atop a crumbling
history of a church. Pictures were taken. Instagram.
We dabbed to the beat of Hindu chanting and tambourines.
Muslims prayed towards Mecca beneath Christian statues.
Amazed. I felt a certain emptiness.
Then my friend joked,
'I'll make a social justice warrior out of you too!'
Why am I not angry? The orange man is wrong.
A fool, a jester. Yet our testicles are in his hands.
Sometimes, rarely, I feel a meager sad frightening pressure
between my legs. Some have already been castrated
in confused airports. Accidents of birth have left them
stranded in a great barren womb of this world. What
is a state? A foreign policy? Man? Woman? Child?
How much time do I have left to ***? On whose
face can I do it on? Is the orange man aiming for
mine? Ours? The veiled woman? Is the immigration
counter camera pornographic? What awkward things
to do with one's time. One's body. One's mind.
One's heart.
I am ashamed.
Instead of working, I am thinking. I am lazy.
I spend scholarship money in restaurants
away from the college dining hall so that the noise
around me will be something I cannot recognize.
Still both are the same bubbles of safety. Different
stages of cocooning is all. I am a caterpillar surrounded
by butterflies eating steak and salmon. I am ugly. So ugly.
Nothing beautiful at all.
It's an orange president, Huey Freeman.
Feb 2017 · 523
The Fucks I Give:
Tawanda Mulalu Jul 2016
I am not a difficult child.
You are not a difficult mother.
But,
sometimes we have things to say
and
sometimes we say nothing at all.
This,
I suppose is where we are difficult.
Because being human is difficult.

I cannot imagine why so many years ago
you chose to have us. Not because I think
you do not love us, I know you do, but
because of the sorrow my sleep brings to you
on the Sunday mornings I sleep in. Love,
I imagine, is returning from church and
still bringing bread to those who wish not to
consume it in any meaningful sense at all,
or, if consumed, to satisfy hungers so basic
you marvel at what that converted energy
is used for. I have failed still to explain that
I pray in different and marvellous ways that
I don't think are invalid but will still hurt you
nonetheless. This is part of growing up.  

There are many dances that you and my
grandmother have surely danced that I
do not have the rhythm for, but there
are many dances that you and her and I
have that are the same, just as in the Old
Testament there are so many prayers and
blessings and cursings and legacies passed on
from one child to another to another child.
During these passing-ons there are surely
missteps
where some son is bound to step on some mother's
left foot as the rhythms change on time's dancefloor.
There are many examples of this that exist
that don't need to be said. It is all the same.
It is all different. I have pointed these things out
before. Before I finish, let me point out
that when I point out these things
after laughing it is not because
I am making fun of you, but only because
I love you enough to point out the seriousness
of everything in this world with a smile on my face.

How else could I possibly repay that great push
you gave all those years ago
to allow this poem to breathe in this form?
Happy Birthday Mama.

Side Note: RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER RICHARD WAGNER
Tawanda Mulalu Apr 2016
Pale-skinned girl from Indiana,
with freckles,
yes, freckles, on your cheek,
this is who I am. This is my story.
It is only coincidence that I sing it
to you,
but sing, nonetheless, I do. One morning
amidst the restlessness of my top-bunk sheets
I heard a whispering and thought it might be God it was
me. My unconsciousness begging me
for nourishment, silently loudly attacking
my awareness with questions: it asked why
I neglect it. Pale-skinned girl from Indiana,
with freckles,
yes, freckles, on your cheek,
is this, too, why your body vibrates
when your thoughts are feelings? Because you too
have recognized feeling as thought? That that
faculty of wonder you hush about as if a
***** secret of forgotten childhood memory
is something that is as real as
the metaphysical pores of a skin you cannot touch,
but know is not some foreign, distant, effacing
thing, but is thick, is thick, thick as words
creaking like old wood in a library filled
with students who read so much ******* to get into
college but never venture forth for such skin
in the skin of those unconscious voices in the
shelves? Selves: we call them books but they breathe.
The ideas wriggle in your veins like
a worm. They block your blood yet move
your soul. The stillness of your speechlessness
is some movement in itself. So I suspect of you,
pale-skinned girl from Indiana,
with freckles,
yes, freckles, on your cheek.
                                                So I suspect of myself.

I do not understand how else I could have been born
without eyes which we call eyes. I cannot see
why else.
                I cannot.
                                 You cannot.

There is light over there in that darkness.
               A glimpse of it- a sliver of silver
has shocked you into your paleness. Into my
blackness. It is the same difference. A different
same.
            
Line break:

A mirror tells me things with my eyeless eyes.
My brownness ***** me into journeys with
tunnels so deep that we call them pupils.
In the distance that I gaze into I find
myself gazing into a distance I gaze into. Fathom
it. Do not. Will not will it will it will not
willed. Touching it will wilt it without touching:
this is the soul you said does not exist.
              
             It is not there. It is.

In Indiana.

Where's that? asks my blood.

In Indiana.

Over there? my finger points out the window.

No. It is.

It is. Not.

Suddenly I smell something and it is myself.
It is not Indiana or freckles or pale-skin.
I ask you where it is.
Suddenly you smell something and it is yourself.
It is not Gaborone or curly-haired or black.
You ask me where I think it is.

What the **** do we know?
Science!
Feb 2016 · 1.5k
Valentine.
Tawanda Mulalu Feb 2016
I stopped writing love poems when I met you,
and started writing psalms instead: I took
your lips as the body and your hips
as the blood of a Holy Spirit you’ve been
hiding in your eyes, your eyes, your eyes
that I’ve been praying to
worship, worship, worship. Some would call
this feeling blasphemy, but since it is winter,
I am willing to take a little trip down to hell
to melt the cold in my bones, especially
if that means I can walk you back
to Heaven. But don’t take this all too seriously
because
I stopped writing love poems when I met you,
and started writing psalms instead: I took
your words as Gospel and raised them to my
tongue and matched it with yours to bathe
myself in your waters to wash away my sins-
and yes, I am a sinner, for I have undertaken
many a Crusade to prove myself worthy
of you. But the blood of my enemies is your
hips. The lips of those I have left for you is
your body. And still in your hell I find Heaven.
But
don’t take this all too seriously because
I stopped writing love poems when I met you.
By request.
Feb 2016 · 606
Not a Poem XXII.
Tawanda Mulalu Feb 2016
It's not my job to give answers.



Yet.
Feb 2016 · 3.5k
Ratios.
Tawanda Mulalu Feb 2016
Perfect: I used that word once to talk about you
as if you were a doll with limbs made of plastic:
stiff and whimsical and subject to the niggardly
commands of the conscious- yet you, who thinks
as aggressively as any doll-house builder do not
construct your own set-pieces; instead you
pirouette into one carefully constructed day to the
next as you delicately
stride
from bed to shower to wardrobe to mirror to desktop to
window to mirror to mirror to
mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them
all-
and the staid look on your face when the mirror gives no
answer
because it can’t. Checkered skirt, sharp eyelashes, wary
jumper, almost heels. Perfect, you might think
for a moment before your eyes roll gently from self
to mirror
to self
to mirror
to mirror
the self. What was
it that you were looking for if all it does is lead
you back to your skin? Meanwhile, the snow
stutters softly from above as if God had dandruff-
perfect- and it all gently glazes the spongy surface of the world like
flawless coconut icing on some sorry party cake- perfect- and the morning
bell rings impossibly on time like the last
breath you thought was your last- perfect- and somewhere in
America I use words to remind you of the little
unreachables
of perfection that both start and end with your perfectly
snow-pale skin, where somewhere in
America and somewhere on
your thighs perfect ridges of red have formed themselves like
plastic scratches on a Barbie which we both think
are little but we both know
are big
because you are not plastic.

                                               At nighttime our feet
skip on the icy brick pathways that lead from
the dorm-rooms to the library and we shiver
as the snowflakes bob in and out of our bodies
like thoughts
that seem funny but aren’t quite- they melt away
as soon as they stumble upon our skin. From our mouths
cloudy puffs of being flutter out- little butterflies affirming
out listless snowflake-filled minds, sperming out ice-clouds
from our mouths, our mouths, our mouths; birthing friendship.
Breath, visible, is laughter. I trip and swear and momentarily
skate
across a sudden ice-surface as you speak another ice-breath. We
arrive
at the library but dart towards the empty right-side, the science
classrooms. We hope
to examine the thought-skirmishes on your right thigh, to turn  
and change this hopeless world-spinning into centrifuge
separation-
make apparent the light from the dark
                        the firmament from the void
                        the flesh from the plastic, the-
here we are as you talk
about your family and I
try my best to look you
in the eye so I
can become
your eyes
even when
normally
I
am
so
vehemently
against

staring

at the soul-gates of another being-
here we are as you talk;
God is still missing from the centrifuge
of the endlessly turning world- your
axis
is your skin yet
you trust it
not. The salads without dressing,
        the weighing scales,
        the taste of bile at the back of your
throat-
all for skin that
       you
do
not
      trust.
All for flesh that you think is plastic
so
     you
     cut.
      
             Enough
talk because the bell cuts through the flesh
of our conversation. Enough
talk because the world insists on
turning still
and forcing us to revolve
with it. Enough
breathing, enough
snow, enough
life. I remember you saying
that the ratios of your face are wrong;
that certain equilibriums do not exist between
your cheeks your lips your eyes your life…I remember the science
classrooms where parts of you were as mathematical as the architecture... I remember how
you keep thinking your flesh is plastic… You forget how
inglorious the nature of these words is. The problem
with human thought, with the ratios of your face, with the
geometric structures that cut across your thighs, with the
statistical neatness with which your family decomposes;
the problem with our conception of perfect is how
awkwardly it both exists and does not exist for us to
see.
The ratios of your face which you think are broken are
the same miracles I wonder about as you laugh. The incorrect distance
from your cheek to your eye which you think is wrong is the same
lightyear which separates the stars from the planets. The curvature
of your stomach is the bending of a spacetime to accommodate
the way the air must move to let your body occupy the space and time in which it
exists.
The ratios you speak of spring from your own limitlessness, your own
perfect imperfections , imperfect perfections-
strange oddities and unfathomable beauties and yes. Yes,
even the ridges across your right thigh are minute, red,
gasping
grand-canyons of
flesh,
of human, of breathing clay
flesh-
           never
plastic;
            always
worthy.
            
              Recently the voices in my head have been getting louder,
telling me all sorts of things about how the snow ought to bury me
in its mercilessness. They mention also that my words bear no meaning,
my thoughts even less so. Assumedly, the ridges across your thigh
carry such spectres as well but, I messaged you before you went to bed
about coming out and having an adventure because tick-tock-tick-tock…tick…tock…tick-
the last bell of the day is going to ring soon and the voices and ridges
will assert themselves again with the bedtime silence, but check your Facebook
messages and come outside and let’s go skipping with your friends across
the century-old polished prep-school brick pathways that smell archaic because it’s

snowing outside and it’s lovely.
For a friend.

Update, 4/23/2018, the poem found a home here: https://postscriptpublication.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/ratios/   thanks to a friend.
Jan 2016 · 584
Snow.
Tawanda Mulalu Jan 2016
It started snowing recently: my first thought:
let me go skip along the ice-encrusted glass,
let me make a snow-angel: my second thought:
let me go skip along the frost-covered pathways
let me slip and fall and fall and crack my skull.
Jan 2016 · 1.5k
The Library.
Tawanda Mulalu Jan 2016
I used to laugh at my mother
when she told me that I'd go crazy
from reading all of those books and that
I'd lose my mind trying to get my PhD
attempting to unclothe the universe.
Now I wonder why she didn't laugh at me
and my ignorant smugness and speeches
as I struggle to piece my sanity back together
from the countless blows of all this learning
which has failed to make me whole.
Tawanda Mulalu Nov 2015
Memories are blurry.
Feelings are not.

I do not know what to think of this
when I think of you.
If this isn't obvious enough, this is for you Ariel who is not Ariel.
Nov 2015 · 554
Not a Poem XXI.
Tawanda Mulalu Nov 2015
I have this nasty habit of doing what I want.
Oct 2015 · 1.3k
Votre.
Tawanda Mulalu Oct 2015
I graduated fresh and ****** from my mother's womb,
a gift, greater than any other.
My sister before me too.
My brother after me was swallowed up by Him
mere hours after drawing his last breath his first.
Behold:
This is my unambiguous declaration against
this universal truth: my unparalleled defense
of the dignity of man
against the temperature-empty, relentlessly inhuman
universe unconcerned with these ventures
which characterize knowing it

not. For one day I shall call
my teachers by their first names. One day
they shall call me doctor. This is the totem
declaring the worth of the living and the dead,
my sister and my brother: myself. The totem
of the disenfranchised and  barely and disabled
and black. Even also less including I guess
the enriched the cup overfloweth and mighty
and colourless. Our skin and bones and graves
and blood and ****** and lust and chest and
******* and being and nothing and isness is

beautiful

regardless of everything. It is mine.
It is yours. It is yours.

Votre.
Oct 2015 · 564
Untitled
Sep 2015 · 514
Not a Poem XX.
Tawanda Mulalu Sep 2015
If I start writing again it'll become real again.
Sep 2015 · 2.4k
'Murica.
Tawanda Mulalu Sep 2015
Uncle Sam sometimes whispers a little bit too close.
I’ve felt so many scraps scraping against my cheek-
those numerous numberless things he carries in his
beard by ‘accident’. So many things get stuck there
and I feel them all, whenever he dares, and he dares
often, to whisper alittlebittooclose. One time the grey
beard leaned in and touched me in my sleep and
planted in me strange dreams of faraway gothic towers
passing off as libraries: Harvard dreams, Princeton
dreams, Yale dreams: I haven’t quite slept since. The
shaggy scraps stuck to the forest of strands on his face
would never let me. They scratch away at me often
even in the brightness of day, and claw jaggedly in the
darkness of night. Little heart of mine has lost its own
beat. It beats to the beat of a beat on a beat from a beat
with a beat by a beat which beats those beats and beats
beats that beat not of my beat. Little heart of mine, when
did you lose your own pulse? Why won’t you tell your family
that Uncle Sam’s whispers are more than whispers? Why
won’t you tell your family what Uncle Sam does to you
in the brightness of day when everyone is smiling as Uncle
Sam pats your shoulder? Little heart of mine, why doesn’t
your family know what Uncle Sam does in the darkness
of night as he whispers whispers under your whispers and
what he does beneath your skin? Didn’t you know, little heart?
They have laws that say that greybeards shouldn’t be digging
into little boys’ insides, don’t they.

(Uncle Sam has travelled
far and wide, far and wide to tell me lies.
Recall that this is not the first time…)

But little heart you know why. This is not the first time.
It is the natural progression for a Coconut like you:
darkness of night on outside and brightness of day on inside.
Your skin doesn’t matter; you all taste the same.
Cut you off the homeland-tree and cart you all away.
Then, in this way we can say and say the homeland is “Rising”-

Uncle Sam tells the world of his diversity in selection
of little boys to touch with strange dreams.
And I like the feel of the scraps in his beard. Maybe
I can become one of them. One with them.
So... I'm yet another African scholarship student in America.

What else is new?
Sep 2015 · 496
Reminder.
Tawanda Mulalu Sep 2015
It hasn't even been a month yet but
I look at pictures of you sometimes
and wonder what it means to forget.

Then the emptiness comes back.
Just so you know.
Sep 2015 · 1.4k
The Early Days (1)
Tawanda Mulalu Sep 2015
World watch me,
aflame; hear me
roaring strange emanations
of inner dreams made external,
made vivid made real made me
made world. Watch
and wonder: How
did mere mortal learn
to speak in godly tongues?
World I'll learn, world
I'll learn. Just
wait, wait for me
to

grow.
Away from home and dreaming.
Sep 2015 · 942
Mother.
Tawanda Mulalu Sep 2015
My mother would rather have me
quietly contemplating worldly nothings
instead of losing my godly everythings
in turn-up bottles tonight. My mother
has learnt too carefully to frame
newspaper tragedies into final family
photographs waiting to happen. Poet,
who drove you home last night and
at what time and why night and
you've gotta realize when you're
taking the whole art thing too far. Poet,
you have to learn how to listen you're
naive you're young you don't know what
life really is. Poet, look at me when I'm talking
to you. Look at me when I'm talking to
The usual.
Aug 2015 · 8.7k
Lingerie.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2015
Physicists are perverts. They keep
trying to peek under Mother
Nature's dressing gown- asking
Her questions like "why
do electrons behave as both
particles and waves?"
when what they really want
to know is

if Mother Nature's lingerie
is red or black, and which
she prefers to wear
on Fridays.
Science is fun!
Aug 2015 · 4.7k
Hermes.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2015
I would have rather been Orpheus,
travelling to various hells for you
and singing songs to save you
even though you couldn't save yourself:
stop looking back. The flames aren't worth it.
Let my eyes burn brighter than the abyss.
Just whatever you do don't turn your face
away Eurydice. Hades will have his Persephone
and you are not her.

It's better this way I guess. I would have looked
back at you and watched you crumble into
a shadowy pillar of salt as did the wife of Lot
when she looked back at *****. I am faithless,
which is why I cannot sing like Orpheus. I am faithless,
which is why I would have watched you melt into
a shadowy memory of the underworld even if I could.

Instead, I was a messenger of these strange myths.

Wings on my feet, I raced against the multitudinous
skylines of the worlds I do not inhabit, skipped across
volumes and volumes of rows and columns of planets and
stars written by dead old men and women. They spoke presently
of the voluminous presence their absence had created, and did so
without having known of the secrets of this absence when
they wrote about their respective presents. Presents conferred
to winged-feet wishful thinkers who spiral uncontrollably with their mouths
to sudden and dangerous depths: Every serious reader remembers
the time they stopped whispering controversies and started shouting them
without knowing that they were shouting them: Ideas are messy things
that don't need loudspeakers: Decibels violently shudder themselves out
of being the moment you mention to your mother that God
might not exist and Camus said so: Existence itself implodes outwards
like how plants produce seeds that make themselves when novels
start at their ends which are really their beginnings: Children
**** their mothers through birth: Boys with wings on their feet
take the library too seriously.

This is
          how
and
          where
I flew towards you without a chariot

and found you in your various hells, one book at a time,
and why I would have rather have been Orpheus
because at least then I could have sang you songs
before you ended up retreating back into your various
selves. It could have been my fault then for looking back.

It could have been,
   could have been,
   could have been
you that was Orpheus. You who looked back.
You being the reason that I crumbled into a pillar of
shadow and salt because, as did Lot's wife, I looked back.

We both did, and watched the whole world invert itself
on its axis, then turn and twist and shift itself
into superimposed images and shapes and dreams
that changed you from muse to poet and
dream to dreamer
and Eurydice to Orpheus
and to Lot then his wife
and to this: which you always were.

              Those wings on your feet: When
the librarians changed the positions of the bookshelves-
and therefore our imaginations: our movements
and stanzas and scenes and days and nights-
               Those wings on your feet: When
that happened they must have stopped fluttering
for a second. I tried flying again and fell.

I haven't been much of a messenger since.
Mess, mess and more mess I guess.
Aug 2015 · 700
Little Girl.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2015
You are so tiny but so large.
Many oceans you carry in your bloodstream.
More than I can ever hope to witness.

Even the tears forming on the very edges
of the pinkness of my eyelids cannot touch them.
And you've always been so gifted. So much so

that knowing you becomes gift in itself. So much so
that even the tears forming on the very edges of the
pinkness, the once grey pinkness of my eyelids

speak now, with rain-drops. Pattering metaphorically
into your heart. I can't even bring myself to read
the whole of your goodbye message before rain-drops
become floods.

Congratulations, you did the one thing that
not a single one of my adolescent girlfriends could ever do:

You turned me into a cloud on the very edge
of turning playgrounds into cemeteries.

And still those will not be oceans, Little Girl.
Even when you say goodbye to me-
I have nothing of my own to wade in as you
drift, drift, drift,
and never sink

in the mad richness of your effervescent soul.

Little Girl, you remind me of how I used to be
and I am not even an old man yet.

You remind me that there's hope in this big, big world,
Little Girl.

And you thought you didn't matter.
To Bipolar Hypocrite.
Aug 2015 · 870
Not a Poem XIX.
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2015
I have this mad dream of getting the Ninth Symphony back onto paper. I want it to scream even louder because I put it in a cage. The cell will be overtly tone-deaf and unmusical in the most obvious of senses but will still roar without complete complacently. After which I will know that I am Man. After which I will know that I am God. After which I will know that I am Me. This is my truest and deepest ambition as a poet.

Well, until tomorrow when her name comes up again: Haha!
*hums Ode to Joy*
Aug 2015 · 628
free writing 2
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2015
when i was about thirteen years old and had the beautiful luck of discovering that hip hop music wasnt all so bad and could actually be called music and was really living poetry and had little touches of jazz and wow i like that beat it doesnt have to be all about *** drugs and women but its okay if it is because at least it can actually be music i happened to notice kanye wests ever so important message of dont listen to anyone trying to bring you down and thought o thats a really ever so important message i should keep fighting and keep or start fighting something so i guess now thats writing and i supposed ive been doing that ever since but now i find it kinda funny that the message the ever so important message of dont let anyone ever bring you down dont listen to them theyre haters suddenly turned into dont listen to anyone and i think thats more than slightly tragic sorta like how i told myself for a long time that id always have everything about me together still at thirteen and that i wouldnt ever touch a girl at high school but gosh ive touched more than a girl so i wonder what was up with little me and whats up with sorta big me and if thats more than slightly tragic how id always wanted everything about me to be together in some tightly knit structure but never could never could fit until i joined debate and learned how to put coherent arguments onto paper and then speech and then started winning trophies but more importantly attention and affirmation that yes im important and interesting and love me exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark love me love me love me more than i love myself or loved myself ive always loved myself i think anyhow debate taught me a bit about structure and soon my ink bloodied all over the notebooks debate points that adventured all over the amazing lands margins i mean of my paper learnt how to be put in tightly placed lines that sometimes had horizontal arrows pointing out links between one piece of evidence to the next then one day while i was speaking well actually afterwards more than one person asked me what happened to the old me i used to have this special fire on the podium an untouchable energy spirituality youth exuberance passion exclamation marks times infinity and i told them that i was just trying to me more calm and logical and better and perfect and now i think thats more than slightly tragic but really more funny because now that i learnt how to put myself into a box i discovered again that i cant ****** fit what the hell so now im trying to write without any grammar or punctuation marks in order to get my heart out of my skeleton and my blood out of my veins and my being out of my body and maybe dissolve into the universe and be
Aug 2015 · 593
free writing 1
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2015
finally came home from kgale hill and a weekend with my baby cousins and my head is throbbing throbbing throbbing heart is sobbing sobbing sobbing have i always wanted to become that good like all those big people or is this a recent thing i do not know i stare at peoples poetry like how the hell did you write this and not me and i even do it with big established dead people  like ts eliot who i used to spell like ts elliot until everyone kept correcting me including google chrome spellcheck
Tawanda Mulalu Aug 2015
He asks himself,
To ask himself:
    
    “What’s self-referential humour?”
Always had mad love for this one.
Jul 2015 · 1.2k
Grahamstown Wind.
Tawanda Mulalu Jul 2015
Musk. Wind

whispers mysteries in the form of it;
it thickens thin air until it turns black,
black enough to

hush. Wind,

being black, absorbs your thoughts,
makes violent curls of them; thickens,
thickens thin air until it

transmogrifies
into pages and pages
stained black with disaster-
as if a hurricane crumpled

those could-have been white aeroplanes, potential
papered to fly, and flung them
into the pit of your mind to
sink
             deeper
and
                            deeper
and
                                          deeper
until
your poems were written and the casualties numbered:
each line a suicide of a thought that could have been,
each syllable ink-stained and bloodied black
by artistic integrity, or madness: the same.

This wind is your hair.
This wind is your territory.
Not mine. Never could I have met you here,
in this place
of your solitary being: where real poets exist.

I am not a hurricane: and I am not your disaster.
I have learnt and re-learnt how useless it is to define you
in terms of myself; how useless it is to define you
at all. A rationalist like me can never truly understand
what it is to be part of your endlessness, the sheer
mountainous immensity that constitutes your thrill.
Yes,
your hair fascinates me as much as any ancient,
spiralling, far-away Andromeda- but the fact
that even now,  I've already tried to limit you
with words
shows the absoluteness, the solidity,
the density
of my misunderstanding of your... your...
And

real poets know that rationalists are fools.
You know

I am a fool.
I write these meagre verses
with unreachably cold computer technologies
thinking
that these words could somehow save us. Yet,
simultaneously,
I am some drunken nuisance knocking
vehemently
at your door, who turns and strolls
away
right before you finally
answer.
I am a fool

going home and seeing clouds
in the darkness. It is my first
time seeing them in the sky. First
time in nearly a month.
The moon illuminates the clouds,
and so do
the towers of highway lights in the middle of two roads.
One road leads forward, the other backwards.
As the car passes the towers,
the two lamps attached to each of their heads glow.
They streak on as the car speeds on homewards.
They leave fading tails like shooting stars, except they do not travel.
They are stagnant mind lights, peripheral memories; unmythical,
artificial.
They are not like you.

When I pass you,
You....
You...

You.

Please,
never believe-
for even a whisper of musk
to yourself;
for even a black hush,
to yourself;
for even one sliver, one strand
of Andromeda hair, falling
towards yourself-
that
Grahamstown
didn't mean anything less than Eternity to me.

It does.

I am not a hurricane. I am not your disaster.
You are far too much of yourself
for me to be even a zephyr
to you.
Those nonsensical similarities between us are irrelevant. You are you and nothing more.

I'm the problem.
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