But the air is growing cold. As cold as the angst of beginners. I am not that scholarship girl in chapters and parts. I keep on forgetting to ask her how she is. She keeps on forgetting to tell me. There’s a paradigm shift from her. From the seat of her lava smile to her oracle-textured and mother-in-law-spicy laughter anointed with virgin garments and coconut oil on her hands. She’s never said she’s fought for me. The architecture of her bones stays in my mind. Life with daughters, life with son, life with grandchild mocks me. This vanishing tribe of family has left me to see the existential world. The glass is half-empty. The foliage celebrated by dirt and gravity. All I can see is this downpour of grieving in my heart. She wants to take everything. She already has everything. But the light saves me at the end of the day. So, I’m tired of this loneliness. It is my heart that is supernatural-uttered. I want her to remove all of her sin off me. The sin, the sin, it lingers like shouldering vertigo.
Her lack of love speaks to me of romps in decay, a wild dagga swamp where the sunlight was a harsh mad-cold. It had no maps.
No roads. Only stability in a facility that had no coastal views.
Offered us no freedom. Once I lived in a different world. I was free then. She was the ghost and I was the darkness that she dared not speak of. She, the divine feminine. This bone bouquet. This flesh, this lovely olive-skin, but I’m ashamed. You see, I’ve always been taught to feel ashamed of the colour of my skin. Freedom breaks, just like a wave, just like a branch, breaks away from the trough meeting peak, and I dream of the fastening of my mother-tongue fastening itself upon your mother-tongue. You are muse, you know. I’m coming up for air. I think of the high care ward at the posh clinic I was that. How I overcame.
African blood is powerful that’s why I write the way I do. Ankles are deep in water. The sea exists to flow for another thousand years. Its purity lit up at night. Jenny Zhang, Dorothea Lasky give me back the illusion of the modern-day glamour of the contemporary female poet.
The sinful phoenix in my life (my brother) wants to get away to Canada like a thief that comes in the night.
Brother, you look as if you taste of prayers, mantras, your sad guitar playing an altruistic gospel affair. Brother’s soul was as brief as the ocean and he followed this the decay of the flaming lips of his lovers (see the exit barren is a plant, moonlight like the steadfast fall of snow’s downward spiral into waterfall). Read this ignorant joy found on blue hills, the love story of the sea’s forsaken rapture and vision. I’ve known circles of pain to poison. Who you love can make you feel beautiful from the inside-out? Your tiny bones like the stimulus and vigour of waves. Your smile promises me speech.
Brother. Nietzsche. I think of his catatonic state towards the end of his life. Of how when dad went to church in his wheelchair my brother was nowhere to be seen or found. That was his act. To destroy the river in my father’s eyes. I don’t like how he speaks to me. When he speaks to me, I wish I was dead. I wish that you could understand me.
I’m frightened of living now. I am fossil adrift; the shimmer of flesh and I go bone-crazy doomed valleys. You’re like chameleon music in the valleys of my inner world, my sanctum. You’re hope.
Little earthquakes inside their heart. Glass bastards every one. They eat her alive until they’re sated. Animals. Carnivores feasting on her. They give burning driftwood, a name. Monsters. The beasts. The kiss of death on her lips. Once again, the violent phenomena of child rape in the morning newspaper, or, on the evening news. The end game, ice and glass in their eyes. It is a mad, dark sea. Hyperactive boys.
Hurt and pain brutally articulate. Electric pangs of hurt are the price every poet must pay. Indentation of men on her otherness body.
Flames of violent emotion. Traumatic flood of loneliness. Obsession with vice, and the surgical instruments to put her fleshly parts back together again. Light me up. Light every woman, child, boy or girl up.
They have done something bad. Something evil. Currents of evil flash through the air. All ten fingers and all ten toes glimpse at what is not natural. Nocturnal devils’ devilish desires. Echoes of poison, hysteria’s grace. They want her to beg for her life. The drugs make her high. Intoxicated. She’s dead inside. Her soul withers into a numb cold, indifferent country.
They make her think it is all in her fragile head. That she was the one who made them do it to her. Out of the black comes a crying in the rain. Little earthquakes like spokes on wheel.
The sea flows lava, flows and flows, and the sea is favour, the river is grace and forms of radiance. I invest leaves into the mimic-cry-wolf of winter news that appears with the snow. I’m falling into the arms of rain. Look! The traveller has arrived. He hides the weak force of his noise in the river. The snow storm, the winter nights whirls cloud-like supported by the fresh and new threshold of the self-portrait of the reflection of Diana Ferrus, the South African poet. I watch the news. Child rape on the news again.
Tragedy-tragic-breaking me into a million burdens. In each house there’s either a rape or a tragedy. I choose to go to the sea. I choose to burn up and adjust the heat of the sun. I choose to live there. Drinking in the refuge of a tornado, the summer tunnels made out of paper beckon. I believe in you. That you’re a custom-made reckoning made from the woodland-rib of Adam. You’re no longer sin.
You no longer have a sinful nature. Take this liberty. Take this.
Lines composed of nature, composed of the natural. I wrote sonnets for you. You puckered up your lips and kissed me.
Calling me your Zelda Fitzgerald. Your Clarissa. I gaze upon your possessions. Kneel to receive you. Give your body all the praise and worship.
