We want to see ourselves
see ourselves
because we're afraid that nobody else will
ever want to capture us
in a camera flash- so we take our own pictures.

Click. Our front camera becomes
the one minute we had hoped our fathers had for us
when he wasn't busy on that same phone, speaking,
not clicking. Without us.

Or it becomes the one minute we had hoped
that our lovers would hold us
before they settled on to someone
with more likes,
more comments,
more friends,
more happiness...
than we could ever wait for.

We are impatient
like the frequency of data on our profiles:
here are our feelings now... here
are our feelings again, five minutes later,
performing for social algorithms
in place of photographers
besides ourselves who
see ourselves.

But our ignited pixels,
and overstuffed inboxes,
and masturbatory statuses,
and glittering timelines,
and social everything-

are popularity contests
that all of us are losing.

Yet still we want to see ourselves
see ourselves
even though we are afraid
of what we know is true...

...Because what difference
is a poem to a tweet
besides the number of characters
that we wish we had to populate our own stories?

Please let us be different,
just like everyone else.

And then I thought that
those big, endless dark spaces
between the stars in the night sky
had to mean Something

besides

how much nothing is in
Nothing.

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.

The last thing the Poet feels of her is the distinctive taste of biltong. It lingers. She had bought two packets at the café.  Their last kiss is made just before the airplane announces itself with a great roar of being. He watches it swallow her and turn her into a memory. And then the plane flies away. He can’t find a silver lining in the plane’s path, so he instead focuses on the gentle return of normality to his skin. Every centimetre that was previously pressed to his Muse is smoothing its goose bumps. The Poet’s heart goes back from verse to prose, just as how it was before she became the subject of his pen.

He turns to say an awkward “dumela” to the Muse’s grandmother. She responds with the tone of a grandmother greeting a boy who has just been making out with her granddaughter in front her: “dumela.” It probably doesn’t help that his hair isn’t combed. It probably doesn’t help that they have not met before. The Poet then asks the Muse’s brother for a ride to school. Now that the Muse is gone, it is time for him to begin studying for the colourless exams that were the subject of his existence before her. The Muse’s brother nods in agreement, and he walks out of the stale atmosphere of the airport with her family. The summer sunshine somehow manages to feel uninspired.

The journey from the airport stretches out like a goodbye that ought not to happen. It is slow, painful, and filled with empty promises of hope from her family. Her brother says she will visit during the Christmas season. The Poet knows she won’t- she can’t- but he has enough novels to keep him company.  They are riding in the same little red Volkswagen that often picked her up from school. If time is simultaneous, she is sitting next to him.

The car is full; time has only one direction, and its wheels stops in front of the school gates.

He says his farewells, closes the car door, and limps to the library to start working on maths equations with his classmates. He barely opens the library doors, barely greets his classmates, and with barely practiced nonchalance, barely explains that his Muse went off to another country. He picks up his scientific calculator and clicks open his pen to attack a math problem. Hours pass in numbers that stubbornly refuse to make sense in place of her. The Poet solves a problem, and then he doesn’t. He asks for help, and then he doesn’t. He laughs with his classmates, and then he doesn't: they have to go home now for lunch.

The Poet cannot go home. He has to wait for his mother to pick him up. He decides to walk out the school gates to eat at the Chinese restaurant. It is placed conveniently outside the school. He orders some dumplings and some noodles, and then tells the waitress that he is going to buy a newspaper at the filling station while he waits for his meal.

At the filling station counter are packets of biltong hooked onto a stand.

There was a time when your lips were painted
bright red-

but this was not when you had painted
me goodbye in the car-park, and somehow
left me grey,

as your little red Volkswagen
rolled softly away.

She captioned his heart like she captioned
her own pictures of herself:

seemingly profound but obvious
and unrelated to whatever
touch-screen-camera-phone-app filter she used
to unshade her blackness,
his blackness,
their blackness; with digital
skin-lightening cream.

As if to be dark was a sin.

And so she edited herself
to forgive herself.
Because Jesus had eyes the colour of her contact lenses.
Blue.

Because to be holy is to be arbitrary.
Because to caption his heart like she captioned herself
was easier than to just ask for his soul
through a no make-up selfie.

        Or whatever else she thinks is actually her,
        but still isn't.

Yes, Hip-Hop.
                           Because

I like music that feels like my hair texture.

Home is where the heart is but the heart is a broken place.
          I hate
how loud I must barely scream so that people can see my face:
          I am dark
and this is a time of shadows.

Sometimes what worries me most about us
is not that we are forced to carry guns and **** our own mothers
is not that we are pulled from our classrooms back into our homesteads
is not that some of our leaders feast while we become skinny UNICEF models
is not that if only one molecule of my DNA was different I could have lived without ever knowing how to read even a single word
is not even that the smallest of things can wipe out entire villages in an instant-
mosquitoes, viruses, locusts; slave ships.

Sometimes what worries me most is that
my headphones carry more sounds of strange places
than my heart will ever know-  that not even my brothers and sisters
sold off to those strange places ever knew, as their children are hung off
the trees of Jim Crow and we call them strange fruit, and that
maybe our first president didn't marry a white lady; the white lady might have married him.

Sometimes what worries me most is that for just over eighteen years
of seeing thinking feeling breathing being I couldn't
have ever told you what Africa meant to me past the occasional 'dumela'
to my mother's mother but never, never did I know or now know or will know my mother's mother's mother's mother's mother
because
she can't fit inside the cellular America that I hold in my palm.

And this is why they call us lost.
Because home is where the heart is but the heart is a broken place.

One time, my five year old cousin said matter-of-factly
that black is ugly. In my Primary School days
everyone said I should stay out of the sun lest I get darker.

But
I'm here to tell you that I don't even bother wearing a sun-hat anymore.
I'm here to tell you that I don't cut my hair because to do so would feel like oppression.
I'm here to tell you how vivid and lovely and blessed I do feel to have been born in broken-heart home because at least it has soul.
I'm here to tell you that, yes, I do remember
that time when the whole world knew what to do about ****** and Bin Laden but never could get round to talking about Cecil John Rhodes.
I'm here to tell you that
Today, that conversation starts with a toppled statue.
Today, that conversation starts with my voice.
Today, this conversation starts with a poem which proclaims-

child I am, child I am, child I am, child I am, child I am-
that this is my day. This is my day.

The Day of the African Child.

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?

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.

LIGHTBULB.

Lightbulb; the moths flutter
and beat themselves to death against an idea.
A thought, vivid like glass, bright like tungsten-
glows.

I am reaching out to my mind again,
my wings burned and burdened...Wait.
I have lost track of my metaphors again...
But then again, like the moths,

I have lost track of many things-
except for the unknown light in front of me.

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.

I.

This year I've done nothing remarkable,
because that wasn't on my syllabus.

But,

I did learn how to make conversation
with an empty locker,

because you weren't one of the students
who'd had gone off on Exchange.


  II.

This year I've done nothing worth remembering,
because my timetable had no place for memories.

But,

I did learn how to inject meaning
into moments were there were none,

because you weren't one of the poems
in my last English paper.


  III.

This year I've done nothing for my soul,
because I'm just a candidate number.

But,

I did learn how to learn how my examiners
think. Past papers are the future,

and you aren't one of those questions
that I'll get full marks for again.


  IV.

And this year,

time will pass itself,
killing everything

but my memories,
but my final grades.


V.

And this year,

time will have passed itself,
having killed everything.

Even my memories.
Even my final grades.

VI.

As everything

becomes everything again,
the year next;

with another you,
with another syllabus.

Father checks if I'm sleeping; I wake up, and see
little tinctures of nothing night-sky poetic, I see
blandness slathered in a huge speck. Where was
that spirit and excitement and everything that life offered
not too long ago? Who wakes up to do their homework
at midnight?

O
The Who
belted out adolescent
stress
through edgy
guitar riffs
like they still had
pimples
long after they
became
famous.

And me
I
I
often forget
that
I'm
I'm
supposed to be
becoming
a
Man
or something
like that.

My hands are bleeding surely:
my guitar pick isn't my fingers
but soon I'll write these nonsensicals
in blood. But nobody should scream
out for that. Nobody should buy
my words like rock-albums.
Nobody should ask Who
is he and Who
am I because

me
I
I
often forget
that
I'm
I'm
supposed to be
becoming
a
Man
or something
like that.

While
The Who
O
The Who
belt out
out adolescent
stress
through edgy
guitar riffs
like they still have
pimples
long after  
becoming
famous

like Who?

A hand on a throat, where if all fingers touch, the throat
turns to ash. The villain of an anime I now watch
clutches the hero with his middle-finger aired
before the vital moment. I jump
on holiday off a cliff
and my chest stumbles with simulations. My body angled
poorly as I could slap headfirst. I was warned that my feet
should sink first if I merely fall. If I dive, my fingers
should first touch the water. I am depressed
the months before. College student, America. So far off, so cold
from the landlock of my birth. And the summer
study-abroad, double-abroad. In Italy
I was watching the Creation show itself on old ceilings
in marble-rooms, looking for some culture
that might have been ours if not for the pillagings that brought
gold and bodies to shape that gold into buildings like this. So I jump
and fall. And shiver emptily. It is the same feeling as the nights
on the bed thinking of futures without this self. Thinking as if
I did not exist. Ignored emails from therapists. And here this
feeling!: it made me want to live. So I jump again
on the higher ledge. My friend afterwards asks if I'm okay.
I'm shaking slightly. I'm without words. I laugh
with the same absence as any birth. A baby's confused cry
without tears. A long way down. What blue-green water,
as if dug for in the earth and sold for courtyard dances.
It glimmers all over my body, frizzes
up my hair as my ****** curls soak it, squeezes it down my face,
down towards my neck like fingers.
The villain walks away. The next time the hero sees him
he should be careful. He will have decided to **** me by then.

I.

Let me tell you right now that red is my favourite colour
But I got it on with blue, some would say that that’s a blunder
I wonder is… infidelity the vibe of this poem?
Some secret guilt in my mind, that I’ve decided to be owning

Up to, I've got to, spill it out of my heart
I've had no idea what to say, but I've commited to start
A statement that’s an indictment to romantic commitment-
So let’s face it: when it comes to love, haven't all of us been sinning?

At some point, nobody can claim to never ever have smirked
At their own version of the colour red in hoping that it might work
Even though your girl’s colour is blue and you know that this much is true…
You kinda now desire sunsets instead of plain skies; and thus seek a more maroon hue


Skies change with the sun, time influences that
But listen, honestly, what I feel, it’s deeper than that

Blue and red seem only to be opposite colours of the visible spectrum
But actually flow into one another, from point A to B, like a pendulum

So my real problem is denial: I'm not really interested in swinging back
Because whenever I see red again…I can't help thinking that blue is just a fade to black.


And black scares me because it represents…
And black scares me because it represents…
And black scares me because it represents…
And black scares me because it represents…


II.

Literature taught me that cheating is immoral but understandable
From the point of Gatsby and Daisy it’s not even that reprehensible
The thing is, I still see the American Dream in another colour
No red, white and blue and great starry flag of wonder

But being honest to the context I should only omit the white
And keep red and blue; so it follows that my greed is merely self-directed spite
In this way I am suggesting a hint of hatred towards myself
As I’m unable to colour-block my view of my colourless self

I mean that I'm disappointed in being able to reduce
Myself to old, novel characters…as a result I have deduced
That blue and red don't matter when my true colours are grey
I’m ashamed in having even having tried (and failed) to pick (just one).
But all the same…


Skies change with the sun, time influences that
But listen, honestly, what I feel, it’s deeper than that

Blue and red seem only to be opposite colours of the visible spectrum
But actually flow into one another, from point A to B, like a pendulum

So my real problem is denial: I'm not really interested in swinging back
Because whenever I see red again…I can't help thinking that blue is just a fade to black.


And black scares me because it represents…
And black scares me because it represents…
And black scares me because it represents…
And black scares me because it represents…


III.

Though I'm still wishing that… her sunset becomes my sunrise, and envelops the sky
But regretting… her blue fades away, painfully, I’m left to die
As the sun will too soon turn to night, driving me to gentle panic
I know this now: colourless people always beg for a rainbow because they can never have it.

...******.

I apologize to blue for making her feel even bluer.
I apologize to red for using her to make me feel better.
I’m sorry to myself for making myself so bitter.
So suddenly has my soul, become colder than this winter...

Thus the part of the poem where I conclude with the theme
Of the echoes within me which of course are only dead dreams
I had looked to you, red and/or blue, in hoping you could redeem
Me to your world of colour. But present reality is different, which can only mean
That...


Skies changed with the sun, time influenced that
But listen, honestly, what I felt, was deeper than that

Blue and red seemed only to be opposite colours of the visible spectrum
But actually flowed into one another, from point A to B, like a pendulum

So my real problem was denial, I wasn't really interested in swinging back
Because whenever I saw red again… I couldn't help thinking that blue was just a fade to black.


And black scared me because it represented…
And black scared me because it represented…
And black scared me because it represented…
And black scared me because it represented…

There's always that one girl

with the astonishing smile
and the little sly gap
      between her front teeth-

charming because it screams of mischief.

There's always that one girl

with the literature voice
and the Zimbabwe speech
    sneaking in through her

points, arguments, metaphors. Identity.

That one, inexplicable, eccentric
     girl

who somehow teaches you
how take to take a selfie in the dark
nighttime balcony of an African university.

And somehow by the end of it,
as you are carried away to tomorrow
by the sound of her new sim-card voice,

you wonder why some victories
cannot be gold medals you can take
back home to your parents,

as she bus-drifts away back to that
spirited mother land
that hatched her onto a podium.

Then that new sim-card is discarded.
And some smiles you cannot forget.

When we grow up,
I will let our daughter
cry herself to sleep.

That way she will never
need nor expect
for her father's or her stranger's arms
to hold her so that she can fall

gently, gently
asleep.

When we grew up
our daughter never
cried herself to sleep.

That way she never
needed, nor expected,
for her father's... for her mother's
womb to hold her
so that she could stay

gently...

gently...

asleep.

Our dreams were born in a coffin.
You made me promise
to always, always
dry her tears
if I could.

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.

Morning:
how to undo a bra-strap
(almost-girlfriend).

Afternoon:
how to use chopsticks
(former drama-teacher).

Evening:
how to know if she hasn't yet let go of her baby
(mother).

Prometheus gave fire
to humanity and had
his innards guzzled
by vultures for it.

You gave me the sun
and I
unduly set myself
wholly
to the task of tearing
apart your insides.

Top to bottom, I stripped you
strip you,
will strip you
of all that makes you you and
I don't know how to stop
turning your yellow
to orange
to purple
to black
like my innards too. See,
I too once gave fire
to people and lovers and friends and
then
I set myself to the task of
tearing up apart
those various necessities that made me
me. Things like basic human kindness.
Simple rules like don't
involve yourself with so many girls
that you lose count while never losing
count. That sort of
thing, y'know.

Do you know how long I've been
trying to write you a poem called
Darjeeling? I've been trying  for
so long that I drink coffee now.

I've been trying for so long that
when the restaurant menu finally
reads 'Darjeeling tea' for so and so
price, I don't pay it and order
some mediocre hot-chocolate instead
(and even a Strawberry milkshake. What
does that say about me, I wonder?).

It was lukewarm. It didn't scald
my tongue like you did.

I suppose it never will.

Thesis:


There's an easy way to disprove
that ignorance equals bliss:

                              Your eyes

were puzzles of space-time,
studied through conversations
fervent in their background noise-
where I looked for one single oddity
in what might have been the ordinary,

except it wasn't. Space-time
distorts around things of great

                                        gravity

and your light-consuming pupils
pulled me towards you. Complexity,
hidden in some unsuspecting darkness
that I was dragged into...
things I didn't understand
until I reach our event horizon

      and you and I are one.


(As for my thesis: what great Nothing would we have been
if I skyrocketed away
for fear of the unknown?)

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?

And what you'll find is, your highness
Can paint a picture that is vivid enough to cure blindness
                                                       ­        - J. Cole, January 28th*


And because they have never before seen a naked soul,
they ask me
if I am being deliberately provocative
with my pen.

And then I paint.

So that they too can undress
that mental amnion that has cocooned them
since birth; which itself became still-born
as it was followed by an undying funeral
of parental expectations.

And then I paint.

So that they too can reclaim
that aborted clay and mould their burial
into gestation, and shatter
their amnion coffins
from the asphyxiating breath of non-existence
to the respiratory lust of Being.

And then I paint.

So that I too can remember
that I am they. A victim
******* into the darkness of lost light,
dreams deferred at birth;
who still focuses his pen on this canvas
to cure his own blindness, to see
and paint his naked soul before me,

which we then call Life.

(for children)


(1)

I heard a big word once. 'Armamentarium'.
It's a word with old parents. It means things
like medicine and how doctors feel your chest
for beats that don't quite fit. It means red
and the things inside your body that need
hands to help you. My hands help by wandering.
I tap my hands on tables, I comb my hair,
I pick up flowers, I hold up faces
of people I love when I feel blue. But my favourite
is red, because it is inside me, beating.
I learned a big word once. It was my name. I said it and it sang.


(2)

If you peel me you will find songs
as thick as grapefruit. I am red inside.
I take some time. I am always late.
I am best in the mornings but at night awake.
I'm from a place that is not as green as here.
Our grasses are yellow and say so with the wind.
My mirror is both my best friend and enemy,
sometimes a lover, often a bully, either way
hands are caught. I like to read. I read
so much that I think of my skin as grapefruit.
I don't even like to eat it. I just like the red.


(3)

Planes have mouths. They swallow people.
They fly them away. They spit me out.
Sometimes I do not know whose stomach I am in.
Inside the planes I dream of reds as dense as
roses. When the planes land I give them to
me as myself. Let me explain this better:
my accent is a grand liar because my
country is blue. It never rains there
but when it does you will find my mother's throat.
I croak with such dryness that the sounds turn to words.


(4)

When I see me I see soil. I grow roses
in my skin. People who don't look like
me first brought those kinds of flowers
to my country with ships. Kind of. We do not have
oceans. They must have walked so far for me
to speak with things they then planted. People think of me
as oceans reflecting the sky. I say I want the sunset
petalled perfectly into soil. My skin. When you see me
you must adore me because of your planting. I am not
your garden. I bloom.


(5)

When you hear words do not forget that someone
taught them to you. Maybe your mother
who read books about cats in hats to you
at airports. Maybe your father
and his stories of his childhood with feet
twisting through thin sand as roses dancing.
Where I am from we do not have soil
for those kinds of flowers. My father still grew
and my mother still grew me. Peel my skin
and you will find that sort of red beneath. If you ask me
where it came from I won't say. I will sing.

This was once all that we knew.

A world in parts before we knew

     it

as such subdivisions as this, that and

more beneath that still: there was

once good and evil, god and them,

the rest of us, and

Jesus, simply looking upwards after

he flung himself forth from the dust

to the sky and the light was bleached

off and the colours leaked from our

eyes to our canvases. What more

can I say before we take more

of ourselves away from each other? What more

before you implant me into some other's

body, and the prayer completed,

and I am finally a computer? In

the meanwhile my eyes will look and

my neck will strain as the sun sets and

so does my little life: how long have I

wanted to see you again, o lord, since

my first scream of myself all so long

ago when I left my mother's salt

and was flashed into the flood of your

      world?

How long, o lord, will you have me here

to see your work through these ceiling

songs, such sonorous ringings, fleshy

twists and turns of paint as muscle

and what's that behind the cloud?

     Your finger

appareled in such golden rays?

Endless. When your ships brought such

dark skin as mine across these

times and spaces, what?, where you

surprised of my dreams to see it,

     this,

all engulfed in flames?  And

yet here you are and here I am and

here is the quiet my birth your

glory your joy the brushstrokes

the colours and the full fleshy taste

of my non-belief, leaking into my fingers,

sticky, frisk, and always.


    When I leave these, they will fall

and crumble. It will all go. In the hallways,

as I walk away: several big windows:

     Rome, sunset.

    When I leave these, they will go

and disappear. Into salt. Those large windows:

blue-shadowed branches begin some small slow dance.

     When I leave these temples they will dust

and return to dust the soil of our hands.

And the trees remain beautiful.

Quaint Acacia tree forest:
******, unblemished as it was
when my grandparents first met here-
mountain school.

The chapel beside the administration
office
is locked.

But just as holy are the dark coal
mountain
rocks
that sweetly fell from God's hands before
Jesus set his feet here.

He didn't.
This place is lovely nonetheless.

If things don't exist until we see them-
then everything must be poetry.

Clementine deleted Joel
from her mind. Joel tried to
forget her; he couldn't, so
he got rid of her too. You
try, I know, to get rid of me. I
try, you know, to pretend that
the world isn't spinning so fast
in the hope
that we will fall of its spinning-top edge
and stumble, clumsily, gracelessly, into
each other. We're spinning so fast with it-
the world- so this is unlikely, so we both
pretend that it's an accident when we fall
into each other,
again and again, as
We play spin the bottle while
The world spins instead.
Suddenly.
Now that that same world has stilled itself for
us: we don't know what to do without its
rotationary madness angling us
towards old age and crumpets (together?). That
same world has stilled itself until
tomorrow when that same world will spill
itself out from day to night to day again
as we take our respective first drafts
of our poems written about each other
and

Edit.

out that same mad spin
that made us
us
just like
Joel and Clementine forgot-
on purpose. We forget, on purpose
with purpose
but,
we'll still meet each other in Montauk where
that same world will still itself
as we wrap our fingers around each other's
fingers
in the cold
where you might finally reciprocate
my lacklustre
confessions.

You too,
right?

I don't remember when I finally figured out
that racism is real. But when I was much younger,
I think I was somewhat uneasy with how
the white girls
were always the prettiest because
we saw them on TV,
having adventures
in pink dresses.

Of course one had to wonder
where one could see himself or herself
on a TV screen without being made
a secondary character; a black
Shadow.

They said that all that glittered was not always gold
And even your star-struck eyes couldn't be sold
for much of a profit; we were worth a little bit too much
even if half of us couldn't be bothered to give a

piece of the soul to the great big unknown
so you danced to the music and stayed within your zone
but your hips didn't quite move and your behind didn't quite shake
Exam season had you thinking that the last turn-up was a mistake

So you turn't down for everything to become a Top Achiever
and gave your soul to Cambridge because it's clear that you're a dreamer
And that's why your eyes became so suddenly star struck
And how suddenly a past paper was worth a little bit too much

But it was worth it because

Even if one year of your life passed you by...
Even if one year of your life passed you by...
Even if one year of your life passed you by....

...You still wrote your candidate number in sneakers looking fly.

So even though not all of us can become an A*
That doesn't mean that not all of us in life cannot go far
As written in the constellations are the particles of our star-dust
the whole is more than the sum of its parts and so are you my little star-struck

former IGCSE candidate.
See? You really were able to manage it.

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.

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.

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.

Just as how a little stick-man could not perceive the pencil that drew him
I could have never seen God and didn't see him when he had molded me
from His depths of clay, profound as a rock- that is to say still, solid,
silent, cold, old, disquieting... All fancy words for 'not much.'

Here's the point: there isn't any, but
just as how this little stick-man cannot perceive this pencil that draws him
closer and closer to the last panel of his, this, comic or graphic novel:
beings of smaller dimensions know nothing
of those so much higher, smarter, and more poetic than themselves.

Does this have to do with why you disappeared onto an airplane
like a bird searching for her freedom...?
Am I, in this mess of metaphors, your little stick-man who couldn't
get out of his paper sheet and fly with you...?
Of course, in existing on a dried white flap, I could not, cannot, fold
my own two dimensions of existence into even one crumpled paper plane;
so I could not, cannot, follow you through your freeing air
and ask you, or beg you, to answer my silly questions...

Because I have both length and width, but no depth;
no depths of clay.

Though I figure the answers to these questions are the same.
The truth is that, in this mess of metaphors,
neither of us got to pick what we didn't want to be, bird or stick-man.
In reality we had only one choice: to hold hands when we could.
So we did.

And when we did- everything became dimensionless;
and Everything made sense because Nothing did.
Because the value of the distance between our hands
meant that Nothing was our Everything.
And from that dense Nothing our Universe was born-
Bang. Thus tiny strings of new Everything rippled throughout old Nothing...
making Everything matter, almost literally.
We then made our stars, our galaxies, our planets; our classrooms,
lockers, and lovers: each other. All of this brilliant Creation until
we only had one last choice: to hold hands when we could...
...so we did...

... again and again,
in the distant dreams of a troubled theorist
who chains together pages and birds of poetry,
looking to find you, again and again,
in the mess of metaphors
of our Universe,

and I did.

                    Almost.

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?

Bathtub music and drums played on the surface
of Davy Jones's mirror: the ceramic holds
the sea, the sea, and all within it: ***** me.

Scrubbed you off my skin again for
the umpteenth night in a row. Row
row row our boat away from the constant,
constant rows. Stormy arguments and
weathered mistrust. You'll break me,
won't you? I'll break you, won't I? Won't you
come drown with me Ariel? Won't you
come up with me to the kitchen and lock up
the door then lock up the oven then lock up
ourselves in carbon-monoxide poetry?

But then how does cooking gas end up as sass
in a library? How did sustenance turn into
asphyxiation?  Why are our hands on
each other's throats instead of being binded
by the absoluteness, the certainty, the assuredness
of palms within palms and fingers interlocked
and question marks dispelled.

Splash! as way in and over my head
is the bathtub music
and my absorbent curls are
drinking, drinking, drinking, thinking
about the why you only call me when
you're drinking, drinking, drinking; thinking
about the way I cannot suppress you when
the cellphone has long gone quiet and
your Hughes of blue are still loud but
your red is dead.

Ariel, Ariel,
I want to be your dark-haired prince.
Ariel, Ariel,
my country is landlocked but I still see you in the sink.
Ariel, Ariel,

gurgling away as the bathtub music fades
into ugly brown rings around the ceramic
pause button
that shows no hope of continuation
Ariel, Ariel, you are the final splash!
as the false sea drifts away, the final splash!
that scatters bathtub music past the drain
and into the air. Ariel, Ariel,

you are the false rain
that my landlocked country never prayed for.
Ariel, Ariel, toneless, begotten and forgotten
Ariel, Ariel. I cannot sing for you. I cannot.
You will not sing for me. You will not.

The final splash! past the drain and into the air
is you Ariel. The false rain.

The rain song of our endless games.

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.

Oh yes, but this song is for empathy. For the grasses'
leaves' greens being yellowed. For when winter  
says, "Hello": A song as this might add to its start with an opening
chord or two. Oh (yes), but this song is for me: Hello.
A greeting is an affirmation of one thinking thing
to another. I greet stones. Tie them to my feet when
I jump into my own blood. Drown for a bit. Wait
for a response. The stones don't say anything. Flowers
do sometimes, inspiring a heart to do a little lilt
within itself. So much to speak of about flowers: Thick yellow grasses
swirling around like the sounds swirling within a severed ear.
That's a good painting.
But that painting is yellow. Blood is red. Water is
blue, or the sky is
blue, or our minds make them
blue, so where should I jump? Upwards towards the birds
or downwards towards the fish? If human embryos look like fish
then wombs might be oceans, but amnion fluid is yellow: Like
sunflowers. Was Van Gogh a yellow man if he had a gun? And am I
blue because words
sometimes sing?

So long as there is time
something will happen. On this earth,
small and interesting place,
constant new statue,
glaring eyes from a corner (ambivalent eyes
perhaps calling for a maybe, perhaps
making eyes at another body as soft screaming). All
summer the bugs buzzed. Like your hands.
You are there again.
As ghost. As ocean.
I went to a beach once and the sand
was made of fishshells. I went
to a mountain once and the stone
was made of smaller smallfish. Somewhere
else the water sings and you will
sing of me, and the birds. And your mouth,
how clear, how blue, how real,
how small. Like yours. Like hands. Like fish.

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.

He asks himself,
To ask himself:
    
    “What’s self-referential humour?”

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.

.

  I.

When the poet first met her, again,
Cupid tried to strike him with an arrow.
It missed because the poet stared
through her. Not at her.

Yesterday it was,
'Get online loser.'
Tonight she says: quick
give me a description of Paris.

She always says such things.

He says: cold
like the pin-*****
of morning after-skin. Warm
like the shiver of a hand
held soft; of lips kissed.

He always says such things.

He even calls her Honeybear,
Cupid be ******.


  II.

He liked her because she read more books than him.

Her voice always made the sound of a page turned:
Crisp, clear, passionate;
revelling in the present,
but always waiting for the next sentence.

As if a book could actually speak
like a person.

As if the hours
she spent reading alone were not
just conversations with herself.

As if every syllable
was a night-whisper with
the great American dead.

The poet doubted if she ever
truly talked to Fitzgerald because
he was a drunk too obsessed
with one spirit. She'd get annoyed.

But then again, her drink of choice
is also an ungraspable green light.

Paris.


  III.

When she put on her spectacles,
the world became less clearer:
she could only see how far away she was
from where she was supposed to be.
The sharper life's images were,
the surer she became of this.

She had her substitutes for foreign oxygen:
novels, movies, songs, poems;
but they never quite breathed the same.
He tried to force the glasses off her.
Maybe then she could more barely
make out the thorny edges of sun-dried Acacias,
and more fuzzily the general sun-warmth
that he thought was the Kgalagadi soul.

She refused, but when she didn't,
she wore contact lenses. Real,
or imagined, the thin sheet of
dream glass pressed against her eyes
could never disappear. Her soul
was where it was: where it wasn't.
So still all she could see,
even when he smiled vivid,
was a place that wasn't Paris.


  IV.

Somewhere.

That is where she thought she was.
Here, an indescribable place.
Indescribable because she saw it grey. He
instead saw dappled speckles,
and rainbows flickering across every corner.
But he was of here and here alone, he felt
the landscape's beauty in his bones. She
wondered why she should look at
sandy semi-desert instead of gravelled
culture. She wanted pathway upon pathways of
old Europe, lingering in modern cafés and bistros
like an affectionate aftertaste. He
was happy with spoonfuls of instant coffee with
translated copies of a country he would never see.
To him, a French poet in English
was just about the same as a
French poet in French.
He knew that wasn't true, of course.

But the point was to get across the idea of
a Little Paris in his Somewhere. Just as he had an
idea of her in the movies she shared; where
she would awkwardly appear as bits and pieces
of dialogue, sceneries, soundtracks and end-credits
injected into his laptop weekends atop his bed.
He knew her as old romance films on USBs.
It wasn't quite her, but he still liked the idea of it.

He liked ideas, and ideas alone
were more than enough for him.

To her, ideas were restless things
to be beaten into submission.

And so she endlessly beat life's piñata
with a stick of dream,
and hoped to find a plane ticket
amongst the false candies.

She's still swinging.


  V.

He couldn't stop her and he didn't try.
At the very least, he admired her charm;
the zest and gusto of her swing.

But she tired easily. And he didn't want
her to be tired.

Sometimes her laughter would burst into her
and she'd forget about ambition, forget about success.
Sometimes she would just bite into her own sweetness
like if a rose could smell itself. She loved her red,  
and was more intimate with her petals than her pulse.
Just as how she knew Paris better
than this Somewhere.

He thought she was crazy.
But so did she.
And they argued about this because
She thought he was crazy.
But so did he.

And so,
they disagreed about agreement
every day.

On a good day she would present a vicious smile,
the next paragraph in her never-ending thesis
that he doesn't intend to stop reading,
but somehow hasn't even started.
He never will.

On a bad day... well, a bad day
would lead to the end of a verse.


  VI.

They would always eventually get over a bad day.

Coldness takes effort; warmth does not.
The knew this, but warmth often became
an uncomfortable singeing of their safety.
They ran at the thought
of such possibilities like tiny girls
from tiny spiders. Neither wanted to put
that eight-legged flame into a jar, but
somehow they both expected butterflies.

The ecosystem is such for good reason,
and that reason is balance.
Spiders and butterflies both constitute
that effortless, life-affirming warmth.

They dance around that truth as it is a bonfire.
Sometimes they even look bright at it. But never,
never do they touch that little Paris, that little flame;
their little flame, their little Paris.
Because that love is meaningless meaning,
and neither of them wants to be, or feel, wrong.
Even if they'd be wrong together.

Their hands never meet in that fire.
Their souls never burn in night's ecstasy.
And they are almost never born,
until tomorrow, when they smile once again,
and dance.


Come online loser.

I keep wondering if what I did was okay.
If it's okay for me to take so much of you
into my left hand, then my right hand and
squeeze, and feel two motherly dots in your centres.
I wonder if it's okay for me to grasp
at your smoothness so much, from head to toe,
**** to *******, heart to lips; and breathe
all over you: I'm scared
of it. I'm scared
                            of you,
of me,
            of us,
                       your moans,
          the dark,
my moans,
          the light,
          the day,
          the night.
It all frightens me, and I wonder if it's okay
to have suddenly grown up in the ludicrous
space of time it took to leave two obvious bruises
on your neck. I'm scared that your parents
will actually send you (back) to India but laugh
because I'm sure they won't- you applied foundation
to blot out my purple lust scars.
Love bites they call them.
                                               Love...
I'm wondering if what you did was okay.
If it's okay for you to take so much of me;
every non-penetrative, ridiculous, amateur
******, and every saliva strand. Every whisper
of afro-hair that falls out of your hand-combs,
and your tongue, which -my God- is now mine.
I said I picked you, I pick you, but here,
bodies somehow body,
you are me.
                       Innocence lost
is when a short skirt
represents a different type of freedom.
And my hands under there,
is my best worst decision yet.

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.

Show, don't tell.

Show:

Suddenly he found himself smiling more, and occasionally he even laughed. His sarcasm withered away and instead, what took root was an incredible earnestness to explain his thoughts and feelings to other people and even listen- no matter how stupid he thought them previously. Eventually he figured that this odd happiness couldn't be just a coincidence: it was sustained by the way she dotted her i's with little hearts whenever she wrote his name.

Tell:

He was in love.

SECOND LOVE.

Hand-holding as the stars sing:
I think I am getting older.

I don’t believe that’s the roar of God out there,
it’s probably just the wind or crickets, who don’t
burn so bright and distant; screaming in the dark.
Sound doesn’t travel through vacuums anyway so
it’s funny

that I can still hear you
whispering through my phone.

Didn’t that conversation happen a week ago?

You’re under-cover in your bed-sheets,
hiding from your parents while mine just watch TV.
Again, this is all just memory
where sounds cannot reach us,

but I’m sure you can still hear me
as I tell you that, yes,
I’ve finally written words for you, words for me.

What will happen tomorrow?

'...I got dumped for not spending time with my ex-girlfriend  because I was in the library all the time pretending to study. I haven't told her that I was pretending to study yet.'