iN tHe sTiLL oF thE niGhT

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Mother

I can hear the tears in your voice

when you speak and sigh.

You cry with your voice.

You, Mother, are so tuned
to me and I to you that even now,

as you weep, I can feel your pain.

I know your tears as you know me. So deeply, I lay in your womb, as you cried yourself to sleep. I knew these tears even when I could not see you. I did not need to see so that I might feel you cry.

Your tears tore through my brightest smiles as I nestled in your nest.

Smiles of naivety

and its happiness:

Happiness so unknown, undoubting, and so sure.

So sure was this happiness, that your voice

proved to be like a blade sharpened to cut threw me.

You cut threw my happiness.

I felt each cry, Mother.

I felt you smile into my heart

with a heart of content peace.

I smiled inside you Mother, when you smiled out.

I smiled, Mana.

But even now, as I smile my own smile,

I can feel your cry.

Even when, now the cord that once bound us is broken.

I cry with you, Ma, I sigh along with you and I weep.

Dear Sweetness

Sweetness, you are a poison that infects.

Contagious, you are transmitted

in every smile, every blush and every wink that I receive from you.

Yes, you are absorbed into my skin through its very pores

when you seep, sink, and stir into my soul.

You sweeten, even, the very salt of my being.

Sweetness, I wish to wake with you.

I wish to wake up with you on the puffy pillows

of feathers that make up the cushion of my love.

Sweetness, do you not wish we could wake up together?

Every morning?

I wish to see you, Sweetness.

I wish to wrap you up in the envelope of my heart.

Home away from home

I am imprisoned

This is no home

It is not a home to me

I walk upon foreign land

I feel alien to all the people here

I am alienated and singled out

for being different or "eccentric"

I am not blind

but I do not see how we relate

I can see

but I am blind to what you call family

YOU are family

but I am alien

I am imprisoned

My spirit wishes to breath

but I am drowning in a sea of stone

So cold

Freezing my spirit

Suffocating my soul

I cannot fight

what they call family

I am imprisoned

In a sea of stone

Drowning

Dying.

Cold thought

Frozen and preserved

Preservation bites frost into the warmth of my blood

It ices my thoughts into blood clots

Thoughts clot the passages and blot out the messages from my mind

It is confined and imprisoned in the ice cube

Dying in the vein-train of thought

that is trained and taught

Owesifazane waphambuka

Ngikhohlisiwe.

Ngigwetshwe kuze kube phakade

Kodwa ngikhohlisiwe.

Mina, siqu sami, nginguSiqalekiso.

Ngihamba umhlaba nje, ngiyisono

Mina, muntu owesifazane.

Ngoba ngalandela emva kwakho

Ngoba ngibunjwe emva kwakho

Ngaphutha phambi kwakho,

Awukhohlisiwe wena,

Awuphambukile wena.

Ngikhohlisiwe.

Ngigwetshwe kuze kube phakade

Kodwa ngikhohlisiwe.

Akusho lutho ukuthi awusiye uAdam.

Akusho lutho ukuthi angisiye uEva.

Okubalulekile ukuthi

Mina, siqu sami, nginguSiqalekiso.

Ukuba umuntu owesifazane,

Ukuba umuntu owesimame

Kuyisiqalekiso sami

Kanye nesono sami.

Konakele ngami.

Owami umlomo

awufundisi,

awukhulumi.

Eyami inqondo

ayiqondile

ayiqondisi

ayiqondeki.

Ngikhohlisiwe.

Ngigwetshwe kuze kube phakade

Kodwa ngikhohlisiwe.

Ngiqanjwe

unomaqhinga

unomkhuba

uPhambukile kuze kube phakade

Kodwa ngikhohlisiwe.

Strange Love

The love of a stranger is hard to find

But this strange love is not for any mind.

To love because you need.

To need because you love.

Strange love!

That's the kind

That leaves you breathless and blind.

To fall in love.

To love to fall.

Your stranger is out there

loving you

the kiss

The kiss that you breath when I breath so we breath.
The kiss that played, stayed, prayed and stained upon these lips.

It is the kiss

of the serpent’s hiss

of his witness to weakness

‘Tis the kiss that hypnotized and victimized me.

Surprised me

‘Tis the kiss that took me and shook me
That time
that tick
that tock
that stopped,
spun

and stood still
as I feel. So real.
The kiss where you and I parted lips to pray
as palms closed in prayer do
saying, “Father forgive our sins,”
as we close our eyes and further sin begins

The kiss that burned a virgin Mary singing gospel in church
and turned her to the devil Lucifer
to lick the wounds of her hurts

'Tis the kiss of a lover.
No other,
but your whispered kiss
that blew my thoughts back
into the gaping mouth of my mind
When, as if you took them from me,
you sold me my own words
and I bought your heart
with my heart
and you said,
“I love you,” at the start of this kiss.

The part that I missed
was the part where you kissed
another lover
And I with this kiss,
married a polygamist.

Confronting

My mind has been forcefully raped.

Forcefully Entered.

Penetrated.

The venerated virgin mind

pushed and pulled over to the edge,

torn through,

bluntly broadened

and beaten out of conformed thought

leaving an open gaping gash.

A slash.

A cut.

A wound.

It will heal into the scars

of lessons learned.

My Connoisseur

he appreciates me in him

he values me highly enough to recognize and like the qualities of himself in me

and me in himself

he understands something about himself in me

that I cannot understand in me

and he cannot understand in himself

but in each other we understand fully

he understands fully the meaning and significance of my every situation

and I too understand of him...he feels gratitude

he is grateful for me as I am grateful for him

he acknowledges something in me and in himself

he accepts that it is valid

that he is in me what i am in him

he gains in value

as I gain in value when we gain from each other

he increases in value, especially over time

as he matures and i mature

so we mature within each other

to become finer, richer, bolder makes of each other witin each other

he is the expert

an expert in an area of the fine art of being with me

without touching seeing hearing smelling or tasting

he does all this by simply believing in me

he is with discriminating taste in such a specialty

the French call it connoistre, to "know" someone so well, so deeply, so richly

and in Latin cognoscere, the "ability to acquire knowledge":

the mental faculty or process of acquiring knowledge by the use of reasoning, intuition, or perception

he reasons me

he intuites me

he percevies me

he is my very own reflection

my mirror in the wall

my connoisseur

Do Not Dance

Don’t dance:
The rule that bound a good woman.
A woman married (bound) to a man.

A man who danced…
Around tables
With any table-dancing thing
That was called less…
Of a woman
Because she was free.

Free from the seal of virginity,
She embraces her nudity:
Her liberty.

Free to be
With the men who danced…
Around tables
Around her tables
As she chose her next conquest,
The men conquered her:
Making her un-marriable
And setting her free.

Free from the rules:
That bound a (bad) good woman;
Bound her feet together.
Free from the rules
That were bound and unbound
By a man who danced…
Then said,
“Don’t dance.”
Don’t dance

Staying on the green

I am stuck in a colourful village garden trying to find out exactly what it is that I am meant to be doing with my little one-in-humanity life. I have just been born into this new world of reality. The (hyper)real world where dogs eat dogs? Or do they just really bite? This world where virginity holds no value in the face of my peers except an attitude that perhaps virginity and anything that challenges one’s own morality is maintained by those who believe they are “holier than thou”. I have made myself very familiar with this world where “everything that is meant to be bad makes so many people feel so good and all the things they tell us not to do are exactly what we would.” The world where there’s a cry for rebellion! Every rule is meant to be broken. It is so hard to see right from wrong, white from grey and grey from black.
My life used to be about taking care of Dad, cleaning up after my brother and getting my head around school. A world so small and yet so big for my fourteen-year-old self who had no idea what life had coming for me. Now I am studying how far black I am and what makes me a woman in the ethics of identity and reading the letters of Timothy to find that God would have me be silent and humble and promises my salvation in my womb, my faith and my holiness. I seem to be chasing the elusive in an attempt to find the answers. Why must they evade me so? Love? Lust? Identity? Me and what I am against the contrasting context of the world as I know it?
It is easy to drown in the muddy dirt of all the questions and answers that the world will give as a guide. I have come out coughing up filth myself. It is inevitable to struggle in the swamp of it when the innocence and naivety that once held you like a baby to a breast, slips away when you are “not 12 years old anymore”. You just grow up. You live. You are alive.
This real life of mine has taken on another colourful reality and I am contemplating what life will be like after 20. I don’t know if I want to be “17 again”. It is a long and muddy road through being a teenager. It is still quite dusty even now. Looking behind me, I see how my life has been decorated with flowers of accomplishment, around the mud puddles of pain and the pools of tears that still turn the dust to mud and waters my flowers to bud.
There are flowers though and patches of green in this ugly place. I find them and they find me. It is the vicious cycle that is also the village garden.

A defining moment

I was still blank in disbelief. My mind was in disorder. I went from confused to disbelieving within seconds. It just could not be. This wasn’t happening to me. I felt sick to the stomach with panic. My stomach had knots in it and the acid bitterness rising in my throat filled my nostrils making them burn. The sourness in my mouth seemed unbearable. I could hardly breathe. My body was trembling. I wanted to ask whether I had heard correctly but I couldn’t bring myself to formulate any words as the questions came flooding into mind. My thoughts were so overwhelming at that point that even I couldn’t comprehend them. I could see my brother crying in my uncle’s arms but I seemed to hear nothing for that moment. My whole body seemed separated from my mind. Even I felt distant from myself. I didn’t want to be in my own skin. I didn’t want to be experiencing what was already happening to me. I just sat there vacantly glaring at my family weeping.

Darkness had fallen over me. A shadow was cast on my thoughts. I was recovering from my disbelief. Gathering my strength, I focussed on my uncle. Some how comforting myself with the idea that maybe I had interpreted all this incorrectly. “Sorry. Could you repeat what you just said?” I wished the earth could swallow me up because he gave me this sorrowful look of pity and I felt the comfort of uncertainty crumble as the shock seemed to freeze the blood in my eyes as they itched with the burn of tears. The silence returned. How could this be? How could this be happening to me? Why? Why now? The questions seemed to fade into infinite oblivion. I became a victim to my body’s reaction. I cried. I cried because I realised how terrible the truth really was. I started to wonder what would become of my life. Feeling empty and distraught, all I could manage to do was cry. The pain was so severe. I couldn’t bring myself out of it until my eyes dried. I couldn’t cry anymore. Sitting there waiting for my mind to clear up, I rubbed my swollen eyes and looked up and saw the rest of my family.

“Dad has left us,” he said one last time. It came as no shock when he said it for the third time. There was a thickness in the air of the room. My hearing had improved and I was suddenly aware of how quiet everyone was as they watched me in pity. There was a feeling of loneliness even though so many members of the family sat next to me on my bed. None of them could even touch me although their hands were on my skin. I could not feel them. Numbness went through me as I glared through my eye sockets as if peeping through the scopes of another child’s eyes. I wasn’t there. I was physically intact but somehow I didn’t feel like I was there.