Your locker is empty,
much like how I imagine
I and the concept of you and me
will be.

              You're going places;

unmistakably graceful
in your already absence.

Meanwhile
I'm trying to find a meaning,
a point
              in my stasis.
                                     I'm stuck

looking for a purpose without a you.

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?

We laugh
at the racism
of our parents
like it doesn't secretly exist
between us.

How else, does
1964
become
1994
become
2014
while staying the same?

Stagnant freedoms.

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?

Southern hospitality. Biscuits. The delicious
slur of various r's
into meandering sense-making
when mouths open, blonde-wide and
future-fat heavy. I love this. Then
all of a sudden in some history the r
goes hard, ******.

Because I'm young I tend to forget
that the world still turns
when you can't see yourself.

But you sleeping is how God reminds me:
flowers bloom best in the morning.

I am not distracted by trivial things.
     Butterfly.
Over there is a glimpse of something worthy.
     Bus light.
An ontology of god's glories: cup overfilled.
     Water-bottle.

A GOODBYE MESSAGE.


When the last girl broke my heart, I had died a romantic
-Shakespeare was getting old anyway.
Sleepless and young, I withered a while
And tireless sweat formed dewdrops on my skin
-I see you.

Wait,
what I meant to say was...
I died for nobody's sins
and came back for nobody's hopes...
nobody's hopes but mine.
Hoping
that I could and can still see you.

No.

I don't agree with the opening line
-it really has nothing to do with her.
What I'm trying to say,
What I'm trying to say...

Is that it's better we talk over the phone.

See the last time I broke my  heart, I had died a romantic
-I thought Shakespeare was getting old;
But it was really me of course.
But God you look so timeless right now
-I can still see you dancing in that dress (right now).

And the turns of your heels are kaleidoscope
-You shift from one dress to the next.
Or is that just a way of saying
That my inner clock is a slideshow of you?

I had died a romantic
and was reborn a realist,
and I'm very, very lucky
Because there's nothing...
nothing that's realer than you.

Though

what I' mean and I'm trying to say...
what I mean and I'm trying to say...
is that it's better we talk over the phone...
that I like it when we're on our own.

Goodnight Darjeeling.

The people are humourless; their scrotums' tighter
than a clenched fist gripping whip- a lash
on the back will make you laugh on the back
of a history not yours no matter how much hip-hop?
What a question
this country is--
no one can even answer it!

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.

AN INBOX.


I watched our brief memories shatter before my face,
          and wondered

About our inherent chaos and implicit shapelessness;
         crying now

Before me. I meet grey scars in your heart-broken eyes,
         cataracts,

Singing a siren’s song that drags me to drown with you-
        I hate you

For bringing me back…my head had just broken through your waters…
       I miss breathing…

                                      ...so, so much.

Memories are blurry.
Feelings are not.

I do not know what to think of this
when I think of you.

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?

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.

AS WE THINK OF WHAT TO SAY NEXT.
                
                                    
…


The quality of this silence
   is as grand
      is as wonderful
         is as eternal

                                           is as everything

as the sudden crescendo
of a piano on the moon.


…


For words are useless
when it comes to such things.

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?

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.

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.

I suppose that's how they live,
like suicides. I dream often of them
without this body. I resent
this creaking, of course, but you
once looked at me in that way
I wanted. When I look long ago enough
sometimes you still speak. It's the heights
and the grey that gets to me. The stairs,
and the stares I give down to them
when climbing more floors. This cocooning,
I wonder it. Its ending.
To leap undiscovered for a few seconds
and flutter. Couldn't.
I'm living. The child's pretty silence
of match-playing, that light, that living, that
no-reason of everything looking
like this at all: this strange
clicking, the pulls of the iris,
the lens-widening, the swallowing
blackness the center of a looking that
I once thought was new. Like it,
the skyscraping growth of any tree
deciding against earth, I look pretty.
And short.

I feel like an unnecessary pause. In the grand poetry of the universe.

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


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

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

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


                               ...would you mind

                               if we talked

                               about infinity...

                                                               ...tonight?


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

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

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

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


Refresh.


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

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

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

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

And now after all that, the blues.


Refresh.

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.

Gatsby's green light was orgastic, unreachable,
distant.
              Mine is a little dot on my chat screen,
also green;

your being in some corner of reality
that, perhaps, is also

                                   looking for stories,
  looking for me.

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?

CLASSROOMS.


When eyes meet, lifetimes flicker
into brief birth, in seconds.
They then disappear, switched off
fading from glow as they look away.

And those small daydreams,
memories and ghosts;
diffuse off, dead.
Like momentary winds or clouds
shadowing the sunlight, sweetly.

...or the times I should have
talked to you but didn't.

Instead we had then looked away.

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…

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

--> if the primary purpose of art is to reflect beauty and moral truth

--> and if beauty and truth are associated with one another

--> but violence, as ugliness, implying its antithesis, and the consumption of violent art as therefore a yearning towards beauty and righteousness via its opposite

--> then violence, in art, can only be meaningful precisely because we think it is wrong to hurt

--> therefore it is perfectly concordant with moral aspiration to consume violent art

--> we should consume violent art

She kissed me and her lips tasted like my French grade:
somewhat romantic, but still mediocre.

Day happy. Day sweet.
Day sunshine. Day me.
Day you.
Day home soon.

Day was gone.
Day was missed.
Day now seen.

Day glow now.
Day rise on
horizon.

Day still happy. Day still sweet.
Day beautiful. Day still
me. Day still
you. Day still
day.

Day still day.

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.

Museum. Utter me as wind
with mouth-*****. Consent
to it as deer in headlights, smacked
all up on the floor, smacked
give me some more. Head
-crash gorgeous a finish. Love.

Drink we me! Regale me
with song! Breathily
transform me as seed
and meter. Ruin me
as ancient crumbling
tower. Marble. Pose
in certain frame and
snap and post as private
adventure. Swallow.

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

Believe me when I say that I will float
with you
to eternity and beyond.

But life is finite,
and so are we.

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?

Listen...

at least...

at...

the end of the day...

I learnt this:


I'm the type of person who

can have everything he wants in the world,
everything (yes, you)

But will jump to give it all up
in one second,
one ****** second,

all for the sake of adventure.


Take that as you wish.

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

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

so were trying this new thing of written freestyles and its pretty good i quite like watching the world go by this way just sitting and speaking and playing so gently loud w/ sound im proud to be playing around like this fun fun fun fun til her daddy comes and takes her awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

She's as spry as a slice of
young ginger.

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.

God lit us into life
and enjoyed us for just over seven days-
when clouds were still white puffs of sweet nicotine
and a volcanic eruption was just another blaze
in a series
of ***** inhalations.

But then God coughed his lungs out
and realized that Humanity is a cancer
which divides uncontrollably into a collective
body without a head to control it; a cancer
that insists on tar-

-ring its own pathways
along pre-existing pathways
of life-giving oxygen
(cities replace forests just as
carbon monoxide replaces oxygen
in red blood cells' haemoglobin).


...Evidently, the pleasure of her eyes was not enough,
so you sought for some clouds and volcanoes.
But then again, the absence of that same pleasure was what
drove you to become God in the first place.

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.

Before-

my life is
a waiting list for a dream

-deferred.

There's this bell that rings redbrick on days I stay in.
This bell that rings sings to me as a clubfooted horse.
Brassbeating hooves are as a chest at nightfall: Russian dolls are as real
as people: Everything is all alike as the "and"
and "and" that Bishop feared. There
is nothing in us from catching fishes then returning their swim. There
is nothing in us from drinking from seawater, from moth-tear, from
the moonlight that creepers in there when your mouth
     figures itself
as bell or foot: I should wake up. I should wake.  
I should, I should.

My eyes are a constant glitter when such dreams
pop up. It's nice to feel that way again, still,
after the endless march of time separates the wheat
from the chaff. Guess which one am I:
the one that doesn't get exported, which makes sense
because
My eyes are a constant glitter when such dreams
pop up. It's nice to feel that way again, still,
after the endless march of time...

And what exactly is that glitter?
Stars? Ghosts? Memories?
Or the final flicker of a bedroom light bulb.
Or the last swipe of now-dark screen.
Or a distant goodnight from chaff to
wheat; fertile land to barren desert, yet

still planting himself to the irrigated seas
of Spring, where burning sun was still growth
and when one looked forward to growing up
like this.

Winter has never felt so warm.

Nor wheat and chaff so warm
and and
like the thoughts of you and me.

What good is an olive branch
if used to start a flame?

What good is a dove
if its an enemy plane?

What good are hellos
when taken as goodbyes?

Awakes, crack of dawn, morning
breath. Mouth opens, wonder
what sound  made first by it.
Song.

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.