i cut all the strings

so why am i still
your marionette?

their spines are straight -
two different trees in two different woods.
people like them are not meant
to come face to face.
is this the first time the distance between them is silent?
emptied of political din, hoarse
shouts of protest in market squares,
flags unfurled not in love for a country
but in hate for the other.

are enemies still enemies when they are of the same space?

the two girls recognize
that their hair curls in the same way.
they don't reach out to touch
but a curiosity forms a thread between them.
a thread. their fingers tingle, flutter
spooling and unspooling
this new connection, this new thread.
their eyes swing like pendulums.
how new, how strange to breathe
in air that is clean of artificial hate.

they are curious, spooling and unspooling.
what will happen to this thread?
for threads are too easy to break.
and each knows the power of governments,
their ability to dangle them
then break
and break and break.

the two girls wonder. the two girls stare.
they look. they look and look.

but their spines are straight -
two different trees in two different woods.

the smell of a hospital
disinfecting hands and
identities
placed on the counter.
a passport-size ambition
a fingerprint of luck.
you have arrived.
you are here.

you came in
a bus full of languages
funnelled into the room
'welcome to - '
lost and found
in translation.
you cannot understand
you will try
to understand.

your newness.
new you.
you are new.
you do not understand
you are here.

the girl with the blue hair
bled outside of the lines
like the overdose of colour in the
comics that she read.
big eyes and
big lips - the girls on the pages
had hearts for eyes and tears
of fat diamonds.
their sadness so precious.
their affection spans shaped
like rainbows in the
big big blue.

she liked all the colours.
the girl with the blue hair
painted her lips
in the new york cold for
life should be livid, life should
be vivid.
and she
wanted the colours
inside of her blue.

like inking a sketch she
filled herself up.
i was silent when this meant
she threw herself at countless walls
to call
the carnage 'art' -
see how

the girl with the blue hair
became an artist.

the tenderest thing. the tenderest thing.
is stumbling
in the hollow between
life's collarbones. it feels just like
velvet.

innocent. a moment.
crushed-soft, caught you unaware.
as vulnerable as hot
breath
alighting on your neck. his
fingers lacing round your ribs.
a moment.

innocent.
placing lunch plates in the sink
getting washed by sunlight instead.
a glow on metal
so bright, so clean
you think of a baby's skin.
warm.
like love.
like love exists
in everything.

the tenderest thing. the tenderest thing.

sometimes love is not relentless
but like the soft smiles we keep
safe for goodbyes
it sleeps. a playful
child gathering breath.
don't you see that i love you?
but you will know it
in the ceilings of uncertain places
in the fingerprints on your beer
in that shirt you forgot about
but you'll wear it today. now.
our hearts will look onwards.
we are only at rest.

five minutes can fit
a magnum opus of sound
between them
so believe me when i say
this
five minutes can make
a shotgun out of our two
glances
like the thickness of honey
squirted into a glass
five minutes are viscous
slowing time into drips that
entrench sweet shrapnel
of this miracle bullet
in our hearts and our
heads.

five minutes
between us

we're in love and we're
dead.

home was grandiose in the poems
so it didn't exist.
it had to be fantasy
where there weren't tears on your tuxedo
but the alcohol stains of acceptance. and love?
love couldn't fly away on an aeroplane;
love stayed.
and clouds didn't swell into
empty promises; they
gathered their things and rained.
yes, you don't believe in home anymore
but god, you miss it.
so you'll drink beer at the ballet and pretend
that home is in the poems you've written today.

i thought

i was more his
than my mother's

as he shouted at me
as i shouted
to him

lost
behind angry.

la poésie est une manière de créer la
distance

où l'amour
entre nous
est trop pur

you do not need to fit in their beautiful
because it lies
that one size fits all.

you were not made
so powerfully, so tenderly,
so naturally
to smooth yourself into
a magazine cutout.

remember
you are not a puzzle piece.
the only place you need to fit
is inside that skin of yours.

let me tell you
the sky was a piece of cardboard.
i was 16, painting
it black.
something precocious.
a beginner at beautiful.

i sat under this night i created,
waiting for someone like you
to nod and hold my my head and
tell me, tell me, tell me
you're it, you're all the ocean rushed into one
you're it.

oh i never believed in you.
nor the black night which was just black
cardboard but you
came along anyway -
ambling in and i didn't understand
if you were carrying light bulbs or not
whether they were burnt out or not,
whether this was still darkness.

but we talked.
and spoke and thought and
talked. we talked.
our words became
pinholes
pricked into the cardboard.

and i saw it then
for what it was
but i tried to hold the darkness, tried
to pull the blindfold tighter.
i saw it

a blackboard
dotted with white chalk.
the sequins on my birthday frock.
handfuls of glitter
spilling through a net.
i saw.

how we filled the night with stars.
how we didn't know what it was.

yet we wrote
we would remember.
how strange, how rare, how true.
our hands enfolded
we punched the roof.

look,
a hole.
some light.

a moon.

let me tell you
the sky in fact is
blue.

the magazines tell me
'natural'
is a ***** word

like my bare skin
is some kind of rebellion.

i have laid no foundation.
no mascara on the windows.
so they find my architecture
unacceptable.

yet I think my home
is beautiful.
simply
because it is home.
my skin.
my nature.

still
i hear them whisper
'natural' is a ***** word -
and you don't say those out loud.
do you?

science tells you
growing into a woman
means a fuller chest and
hips just beginning to smile.
it's the new smell of blood.
it's thoughts fermenting
from grapes to wine.

art shows you
becoming a woman
is a series of quiet
revolutions.
a blessing to bear.
taking a little girl's hand.
leading her into
a great Somewhere.
wiping her tears
because she is afraid.

but logic and art are two
halves of one fruit.
we as humans are living proof.
with rational minds.
with paint on our hands.

so listen to yourself.

you will realize
becoming a woman
is a miracle.
a gift. a grace.
a poem dedicated to all
the little girls
and the women that screamed
for them.

snow was brittle, i found
fresh white paper
crinkling under

snow was fragile, i learned
like shredded glass
but softer

like all my edges
as they really are
not how
i see them

the words
are beads and gems
and hooks and strings

scattered in a box
somewhere in
the softness behind my breastbone

my palms are up to catch the key
whenever it chooses to land

a pandora poised
to make ornaments
from all she uncovers,
all she unleashes

one glance

and a story starts
spinning
on the turntable

your heart -
the needle dropped

this is how i travel,
with a paperback clung to
my chest, fingers wrapped 'round
like birthday gift ribbons

i sail on the syllables,
the music they make.
how many homes i have,
nestled in the spaces
between paragraphs and phrases.
each chapter an
island
where i'm somebody
else

this is how i learn,
how i journey -
between pages
and tales.

do not come to
find me

i am strong.
i clutch my ribs on certain nights
because i might split open -
i might even spill.
my fingers stay tight
to keep me stitched.

i am weak.
i seal my tears in a jar,
let it sour and congeal.
i take my success
hard.
i love
unruly

and there's something about
turning 16
and filling your lips with
the deepest red
in the mirror

how it feels
like you've become a rose
freshly unfurled from
some skeleton,
your colours as rich and
viscous as your dripping blood

yet a rose that's closed
in a glass jar, you are
turned and admired, you are
twirled in fingers
like the stem of a wineglass

because at 16,
you feel you are something
refined,
mature and flowing and
beautiful

older

but it's only
your mother's lipstick;
she too is getting old.
at night you take
the crimson off,
and the rest of you
comes into focus.
all your yellows, all your blues;
you will need to love them too

and don't you let the laughter
slide off from
your new scarlet mouth
because you're 16 now.
it will try to
and you will need to pick it up
off the floor

because you're 16 now
but remember one thing for me:
you are far more sturdy
than just a rose

you are a girl
you are every colour
you think you haven't become

somewhere
between 4 and 15,
your innocence was lost
in the angles of your cheeks

and the hardness
of your dreaming
wore itself down
like bark on a tree

now you're standing on an edge
looking over at the sea,
with softer hips and aeroplane feelings;
you know
that you are leaving

somewhere
after 4 and 15,
you learned to be gentle,
to hold yourself
more carefully

you were
a flightless bird.
you are
a girl, becoming
woman, turning
over her dreams
like tea leaves.

you know
that you are leaving
somewhere
behind.

you filter every pixel pore
you angle yourself thin

my darling, which
do you love more?

the ******* the screen
or the girl in your skin?

if you took
the edge out of a storm,
you'd be left with a blank film;
no soundtrack of droplets,
no lightning
cracks of conflict,
no romance, from
air steeped in rain.

so if
you wiped away your childhood
scar, laced your
back up straight,
turned the volume **** on your opinions
and cried a little less -
what
would you be then?

if you softened all your angles
would you tell your story well?

tea
for the unfinished assignments
for the time of the month
for the boy who douses you with salt
for trying to feel loved

wine
for your tired eyes
for your loneliness, a butterfly
beating its wings on your ribs,
for trying to grasp
what freedom is.

my darling,
don't you love to heal?
don't you love to escape?

The rain runs,
spreading the stone polished
and clean.
Like this, you must
let the water slip
on the back of your unkissed neck,
the curved dips between
your fingertips,
nestle
in the soft folds around your waist
that you hate,
and stumble on your collarbones,
your genetic mistakes.

Let it slide on the stretch marks
skimming your thighs
like fog diffusing across the hills,
and inside the grooves of your too-large ears,
form little streams.
Let it wash away
and unearth these parts of you
where you don't want to look,
where your lotion never reaches.

These are the little patches of soil
you must water with care.
Flowers, flaws -
how much is the difference?
One day a lover will give them a kiss
and you will understand
why we are so tender
with broken things.

Let them bloom, and see yourself
wilder, as you grow,
for gardens are most beautiful
with some ferociousness.

She drank her coffee too
sweet
and drew herself
to the smell of new
pencil shavings,
like a pupil dilates in light,
telling itself to expand,
to drink up
more
and
more.

She fumbled
on old strands of her
self rising like mug steam
from poetry
she wrote only three months ago.
Wide-eyed,
reading "when
one leaves,
the past is a fetish"
in rounded, running letters
bubbling up over each other -
a gravy she found
herself constantly stirring.

And sunsets,
dashed with pink syrup,
are a passion
('passion' being her
'word' - a skin-colored tattoo,
a branded prayer, an incanted torch)
Sunsets.
Sour golden orange laced
with strawberry wine.
Bittersweet.
Passionate.

Her.

a rainfall of words
skittering delicately
on mind-stained pages

I first cried
where freshness itself struggled
to breathe. Outside
the Ganges,
asthmatic,
began to cower
back in fear, in
disgust, in
disease, browning
like the discarded banana peels
on the roadside below.

I first cried
in a dirt town
where kings and queens
drank to grass avenues
and swaying music in the realms
of history books.

I first cried
where those books
aged quietly
in forgotten rooms.

I first cried
where the streets bled
out crumpling homes and
cardboard stores with misspelt names,
spilling children in dust dresses
and hair matted
into rust pieces.

I first cried
where those children hung
babies on their arms
like my mother swung
her handbag, a flag
of Valentino, while stumbling on
crushed cans and dog ****
and foetid mud-water
on the way to the dentist.
And the children cried
out snot, their arms
perpetually reaching
for a rupee
from the traffic.

I first cried
where white-lit department stores
sprouted in defiant sanitation
between eczema-covered apartment blocks
in which washing lines drooped
and parking was always a problem.

I first cried
where many gods and goddesses
resided on the footpaths
decked in glitter
and cloths of rouge
as old men with
skin weathered into mottled
leather shook
beneath sheets of jute
on the roadside below
and offered tiny flames
to their gods
as morning bellowed and their coughs
grew worse.

I first cried
where stareless men burnt
their fingers
on the Chinese noodles with too much
chilli powder
they cooked and fried and cooked
for those who never saw them
but to haggle over a ten
rupee note,
on the roadside,
on every corner.

I first cried
as thread-blanketed teenage girls
with wrinkled faces
squatted amongst cows
in the middles of roads,
chanting prices, in voices
full of tar,
of the mound of peas
they were selling for that week.

I come every year.

And I'm ashamed to say
I'll never live here
but in my verses
because I can't stand the smell
of the place where I was born.

I first cried

here.
I first cried here.

No, I don't want to write a sonnet;
to self-lock in an octave
only clasping a rusty key
-volta-
leading to another office cubicle
efficiently labelled sestet
for its six undone quotas
waiting coolly for my
calculating.

I want to untuck my shirt, Whitman;
to unleash words to gather at seams
then tear them open
like bursting blood cells crowding
out of a wound.
I do not want to fit
flesh into a 'perfect' Barbie membrane,
let me stretch the skin taut as sheets
so I can feel the redness
and gouge underneath.

Clarity glazed the Classical sonata
opaque; staves of controlled fantasy
so imaginable, like an illogically
round orange, sliced
in concaves fat
with pulp, each ripeness methodically
connected by thin breath threads.

This is why we have madness, need it;
bless the ****** of brilliance in Beethoven
symphonies, the metallic muscling
of Ginsberg verses, electronic with strange beauty, holy
and unholy, every ****** mess
in between

The heart can't suffice
by merely inhaling
glitter; I can't dare remember the sane
pretty sighing of a Petrarchan
uttering; canned love,
a predictable malaise packaged
neatly in a bland tome, most likely
beige, with the fashionable odor
of bookish age

And so, serif-writing sweetheart
please don't ask
me to write a sonnet.

too comfortable to tuck my shirt in,
I won't touch I won't touch I won't touch

The sky, a plate
in kindly blue,
smooth
as the ceramic face
of this, my swimming pool;

the bobbing palm
glazing the back
of my starfish shape
like white liquid icing;

sweet, the water's after-taste;
gently
pungent smell lodged
in the nape of my neck

I will wash the blue
off my skin, in a tiled doll-box
cubicle
I will smell the smell fade
out of my fizzled wet-strung hair
just as sugar dissipates
into the hot
nothingness of drinks.

I will pretend to forget,
then forget
I was offered a plate
in a summery shade, bordered by
tree branches
I was in that half
amniotic vessel -
weightless

as a seed pearl in
an ocean or a lover
exhaling in the depths
of a kiss;

a posy of
air on liquid.

The air burns where I sleep;
you trudge in almost-snow.

The resetting of alarm clocks
let the wind slip
through your dreamcatcher.

And my sunset is all
the colours of your fall.

I write a poem;
you will awaken six hours
and countless miles later

in the cold
while I burn.

The ink lies between
the segments of the universe;
unreachable,
incomprehensible

in the fire
while you shiver.

What is it to miss
someone?
I do not know.

She contemplated death
as coolly as the opening of
a lotus.

Its light spread on
her mad-locked smile
drained
of his mournful red,
like unfinished smears
of butter on toast.

I have his mouth but
slurred and sharper; we do not
know how to converse

And the wind whips the unsteady fingers
of rain
like the swirls and whirls
of ice-cream in cones -

melting on my unsteady fingers,
on a sun-stricken holiday
belonging to a place
in which I don't belong -

until the rain and I meet
in recognition
and open fingers

I want so badly to feel
not just know
the life living within me.

Cells of my heart,
what makes you stay
and stick
and love
in such efficient harmony?
What are the series of
coincidences
constructed into miracles
by some invisible hand
to let you be?
What are you, how are you?
To drop and fall into one -
pulse-
compelling me, luring me
to breathe, breathe
even under the anaesthetic of sleep.

I crave to know
how my body cups my soul
in a mirrored glass and not
a casket
or cage, if I wish.

And why the soul cries
even so,
so

I speak
to the ever and ever lying beyond the sky.
I ask

Please?

Dreams break and lines break
but don't let
my heart break

into me.
It is living.

And I don't yet know
what that means.

alone and awake
pressing a small silver coin
between sky and glance

The poet looks
and delves.

She wonders if he ever stops,
him, this rushing-forward-breathlessly train,
if he did park himself in fantastical paragraphs;
the poet is dumbfounded at him
ceasing.

In construction sites of grammar,
where free ideas float in ruins,
poet wonders how,
how, how
he came to plan to live
up
to an exclamation mark.
And condensed so many dribbles and strikes
of strange and fruitful, even withered
paragraphs into one line and pointer -
a smile and a lope-stagger dance of a walk -
an exclamation mark.

The poet stares, once again
astounded by the little streaks of the universe
and longs to hold on to something.
Disarmed,
she can't quite put a finger on it,
his gaping honesty and his quiet one,
that contradiction
shouting in her face
while whispering in her eyes.

The poet laughs -
laughs of, in, out
of sleep.
Summer is here.
And she chooses to notice.
He laughs too,
but he's always been noticing
and the poet writes down how
she learnt to bite and chew into the fruit of the world
and taste

it sour runny sweet cold explosive lingering
just as him.
The poet saw all
colours rolling in one
strange song of limbs.
She did not like the music
but she made herself a blank white canvas

and listened
and laughed

clean, silly laughs
fluting out of the incongruity
of simple,
simple
moments.

Fun life, easy stretch of the mouth -
it is possible to smile down at
what a clown pain is.
He declares this boldly
without saying a word
or two.
The poet is dumbfounded at him
being.

She did not see and had not seen and now only began to picture
but she was blind.
He said he was blinder and that
was true. The poet
did not smirk but giggle at the irony -
he lived in pop-bold spectacles,
she slept in black and white films.
But both were blind.

We cannot see and
we
are blurs.

The poet likes that life scrapes away at her
because she can see chinks of white sunshine
through all the sheared-off layers.
Clean, clean,

bright, bright -
he teaches her in a beam
without a hello.

The poet writes poetry
on breathing action prose.
And she laughs -

You are everything I don't want
but I'm curious.

It was orange -
spherical symphony of segments
I liked to
             cut
up,
      peel off the skin,
lick the surface
while you
       stared
and
       shouted
and
       clapped your hands

and called it Art.

We both devoured it
anyhow.

I spat the seeds into the air,
you waited for  
                         gravity
to catch them in
your wastebasket.

I noticed the sour
before-taste
    dripped into
sweet
    -bitter
so our fiction of
pulp
melted on the
tongue
into facts of juice
running down our chins
until we were
           hollow-hungry
no more.

Facts like
frightening
words -
you may decide which.

It was orange
      like
the globe
     of irrational truths
some people pray to.

Dropped out of a tree
       into our mouths
but we bit into
everything
       but
nothing.

It was orange.

making coffee, burnt
toast; blind tuesday 4 o' clock
you fear you're in love

the shadow picks
a nice path on your face;

across planes,
                        in wells
I never drank from,
                        on a pink bud
from which I stole
sugar
        instead
of
tasting.

Where words slipped
I thieved, not
                       kissed.

shadow hovers
as a bee
             searching
for pollen
in darkness.

It loves all
the places
                I missed

because

I substituted French phrases for
your limbs;
spoke to your
light
in a language I didn't quite
know yet

but

sounded
         like
              like
the poetry found

in light's absence.

Do not abort words from love's womb;
she will choke herself
because she could not be a mother.
Stitch lips together. Let silence,
nothing,
be purity.

Words end.
They
are hot and furious, oozing
sores relishing in their own
blood.
Organisms,
dull black embryos, eyeless
until
roiled on red tongues;
spluttered, screamed, snaked
out into being.

They heal themselves to death by the hemlock of Time.
Dying is a definite thing - words are not
immortal, not greater than us.
Not love.

Autopsies reveal varied, unwanted truths:
either
heart splintered too swiftly
or
poison turned flesh to gore,
cell by cell.

Do not abort words from love's womb;
you are wrapping the umbilical cord
around your own neck.

Insipid darkness
is no better womb for
thoughts.
Decent thoughts, maybe good
GREAT thoughts.
Thoughts that will flow
like the lava of imported electricity
not-but-should-be circulating in Gaborone's veiny grid.

But who cares?
Well, okay, your mother, now swearing
at the singed-black TV screen
(she's missed her daily soap).

Mother Darkness breeds thinkers.
Tell me, in the scramble for your cellphone flashlight,
did you find your inner Plato?
Ah, no, you surely became
a lightbulb,
humming with the shocks of unwritten words.

It is these minutes of lightless inertia when
it's best to tap your swollen top instead
of lighting a candle.
See, sun rays and tube lights dull the finish of ideas;
corporation-induced darkness provides more suitable conditions.
So you must tap the glass globe on your shoulders
and feel, yes,
feel the grey filament
within, buzzzzzzzz

Electricity.

Edison's 'Eureka!' finally
happening, as all 'Eurekas!' do, in
(literally) colourless mundane.

(Note to self: Write a thank-you email to that pathetic power corporation for your rebirth as a glow)

Thoughts.
Thoughts and thoughts, thoughts,
thoughts.
                 thoughts,
   thoughts,
thoughts and  
                            thoughts,
coming in viscous gallops,
extra voltage baby, thoughts!
Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts,

IDEA.

You are no longer living!
You exist as shards of yes, one GREAT whole,
one...brace-taste the word now...
idea.

You are glimmers of something greater.
You are hot charges of energy your country failed to harness.

Sparked at the flick
of a lazy corporation's switch:
they

cut the power which
cut the flow in the varicose veins of Gaborone which
cut your bedroom's plastic brightness which
cut the bored-contented moment you were wallowing in which
cut your breath (still-half-scared of the dark, you) which
cut the blood flow to your grey matter which
cut the oxygen supply, replaced the fuel with electricity

and then you could think.

Thoughts
and  
thoughts
and

what will you do with them? If
you dare the sun's brilliance,
you might land up as some poor Icarus;
if you wait a half-volt longer,
I'm afraid the fuse will blow, madam and
your mother cannot comprehend these blue-light shocks,
please find a paper and a pen
immediately.

Ah.
So the electricity must, after all,
power something.
And in the crackling dash
to eke out your blow-blaze-brim-burn words
onto something that will last longer
than today's ration of blackness,

the power comes back.

Mind chars into itself.
Snuffed too soon, you pathetic power corporation,
why did you put me out like that?

Your mother turns to you and mutters
'Thank God.'

You send me a song every Wednesday,

a soul offering; a slice of the strange radioactive
lunatic madness -
love-
growing inside your wonderland.
(It is not a cancerous tumour, please stop calling it that.)
You say it is dark, the Arctic's lover;
I say it is dark, like
velvet punk music and
stained checked shirts and
almost-blood wine (in shared glasses); like
the colour of your skin.

Come on.
We've both been more fascinated by the depths of the ocean
than the blue glass surfaces.
Isn't that why we fell into bottomless black holes and called it
love?
Isn't that why we branded ourselves poets,
seared the red hot poker labels onto our backs,
so that we wouldn't have to say we're just
sad...?

Yes, we are carefully disintegrating;
the world already gave us a head-start
by curling our spines into the snakelike 'S'
It was preparing us
for our careful meandering
into a river mess:
living.

No doubt, in the pool depths of African evenings,
you drink,
*****-tinged cereal or tea,  
the glass Roobios surface reflecting
a lover's face and the boredom of sadness.
No doubt, I drink to you,
coffee or warm milk,
to try and wake myself into
dying without a purpose.
No doubt, we both drink
the night itself.
And let it fester in our veins,
to curdle our blood into that same wine-shade of
darkness.
We drink.

Virginia Woolf had courage,
Sylvia Plath had courage,
Ernest Hemingway had courage,
you and I don't.
We are too fearless to live.
So we drink
and clutch at each other desperately
without reaching out a single finger.
We form shotguns with our hands, make pacts, go
home again.
And drink.

We are helping each other to die
and live
at the same time.
We are helping each other to try fit the day
too
into our arteries.

You send me a song every Wednesday;
this song will save our existence.

How strange and violet and giddy
that you are a boy
and I am a girl,
and we sit here, there,
you with Plath and I with her lover,
pretending, pretending,
pretending-
they are not the poets.

It is you, the boy,
and me, the girl,
writing to each other.

I commit myself to the homicide
of my thought-flowers.
I indulge in the **** -
Killing my darlings
for the sake of art and sanity.
What a paradox.
I have bloodied my hands
with it even so.

No more love-lite poetry!
No more adolescent chinks of the
pseudo-heart!
No more infantile fork-stabs
at the plate of kid-intellectualism!
No more Wikipedia pages
on thoughts
that can swallow computers
whole!

I'm killing my darlings
for the sake of art,
for the sake of sanity -
what a paradox.
Blood is flowing.

I'm a murderer of ideas tonight -
today I will write
about many of life's very few truths.
Like trees.
Like soil.
These are the only constants in mathematics.
These are the identities.

In my garden, I reach out
to crush an
almost-crimson hibiscus.
Petals squelching with skin and nectar -
no perfume.
The hibiscus roils, unliving.

Red pulpy mess;
heart out of chest.