difficulties

June 26, 2016

Shallow Breathing

Why do I run?

I feel that I do not deserve you.

Actions, affections, chores,

and probably all our time

contorts itself gruesomely

to fit in to the box that

I have labelled motherhood.

The box burdened

to my mother and

hers before her and all the mothers

that gave rise to me.

And the box seems to get smaller

the more we fight it,

the more guilt we feed it.

 

I was not ready

but then again

when are we ever ready?

Ready to find out that nothing

will ever be the same again.

That it can no longer be about us,

and that now our entire existence

is woven into much more than

we had bargained for on that night

when the rage of carnal desire

silenced every other voice in our minds.

 

and then there you were

with tears in your eyes

and on your cheeks,

and I thought it was a miracle

that your barely formed voice

could make all that noise.

 

Hands shaking,

mind buzzing,

heart pounding

because his little nose

and his toes and fingers

and the thought of his little

heart beating

makes you wonder if you’ve

actually been alive up until

this point.

 

Now, 2 months before you turn 4,

I realize that I was never

running from you.

I was running, I’ve been running

from myself and all the things

that I’ve choked to sleep in my mind

and in my soul so that I can cope.

My new definition of the word cope:

chocolate without cocoa,

the sea without salt,

air without oxygen,

life without living.

 

You and I

will never embody

the ideals of the perfect

mother-son relationship.

Not because we can never be perfect

but because these ideals,

formed and perpetuated by society

(which includes you and I),

are a gross violation of all

that is natural and beautiful

between mother and child.

 

I am mother and you are child.

I do not use your or my because

our existences can not be

woven into each other.

 

*”It is my first time being a mother.

It is your first time being a child”

and finally I understand that

we can just be.

 

*A quote from my aunt Clare Parsons

This is the second poem I wrote about my fears and facing them.

 

 

June 17, 2016

The Struggle

The struggle is consciousness.

The evolution of your knowing

who you want to be

but never quite being able to get there.

The  heavy chested disappointment

of knowing who you are not.

 

The struggle is consciousness.

All these questions!

Am I asking the correct questions?

accepting that some questions,

no matter how debated,

will never have answers.

Realizing that everything is subjective.

 

The struggle is consciousness.

With it comes endless introspection

made more difficult by a society

that that condemns it.

and the struggle is the dreamless.

Those who passively accept,

ask no questions, hear only lies,

are diseased by their closed minds.

 

the struggle is consciousness.

Acknowledging that there is no definition,

accepting that it can never

be reached in its entirety.

Understanding that one understands

nothing.

Understanding that one understands

everything.

Realizing that one is nothing.

Realizing that one is everything.

Bearing the burden of bringing

consciousness to others.

 

The struggle is consciousness.

Wondering whether it is a kalopsia or

whether is it orphic

beyond human understanding.

 

The struggle is consciousness.

 

January 17, 2016

You May be a Kalopsia

I want to find my way back to you.
The you you were when
We were at the park
And your head was in my lap
And we were speaking about poetry
And music and life and all the things
We hoped we would be
And all the things we hoped
We would change.

I want to find my way back to you.
The you you were when
You held my hand
And walked proudly with me
In the mall to help me buy groceries.
When you pushed the trolley
And I pretended I was concentrating
On the difference in the prices of coffee
When I knew damn well that all I could think was:
“He is here with me”.

I want to find my way back to you.
The you you were
When we spoke about my writing
The you that made me feel like
The conciousness of the whole
World was at the tip on my tongue.
The you who made me want to write
And made me believe I could write.

I want to find my way back to you.
The you you were
After our bodies were exhausted
By the explosions that had consumed
Us. And we were candid and open and brutally
Honest about things we lied to ourselves
About everyday. The you that opened my mind
To things my heart had hidden away.
The you that was my sweet escape
The you that I wanted to be my forever
The you that felt like home.

How do I get back to that you?
When you are so many different things?
When you break me, where you know I have been broken before?
When you lie?
When you make me cry? All the tears.
When you make me second guess everything
That I though was true because
How the fuck could I have been
So incredibly wrong about you.

Can you get back to something
You aren’t sure was ever really there?

January 17, 2016

The Question

In these times of solitude and seclusion
Where my mind is plagued by dejection and confusion
Where my soul is experiencing unrivaled desolation
But is also impregnated with sentimental incarnation.

 

My emotions are like all the colours at full brightness
All the hues between darkness and lightness
All the shades between blackness and whiteness.
I feel everything at its most vivid intenseness.

 

Somehow I am simultaneously apathetically empty
Every breath of every minute a disembodied formality
Everything an emotionless mix of alkalinity
Living the same day in perfect circularity.

 

At the place where emotional and emotionless meet
I am stuck between what’s contemporary and what’s obsolete.
There is a question in which I have found only defeat.

 

Freedom from turmoil is in this question:
Who is love and who is a lesson?

December 25, 2015

Caraphernalia

I refuse to keep any of it anymore.

I don’t want your pictures

And I don’t want the lighter you gave me

You can have my brush, it’s full of your hair anyway.

Take back your denim jacket,

I hope the smell of my perfume never washes out.

 

I am returning the scent you have left

On my pillow and on my sheets and in my room.

Take back all the dreams you gave me the courage to follow

You can have back all the hours that felt like seconds

Take back rap music and hip-hop

Take back the beach

No one can ever take me there again

Because every wave that breaks upon the shore

Will take me back to you.

Take back consciousness

And I don’t want Paulo Coelho anymore either.

Take back all the poetry I have written

And all the poetry I’m going to write

The whole fucking lot of it is about you anyway.

Take back the teeth marks you left on my skin

The ones that made me smile for weeks after.

In retrospect, you can have the smile to

I’m not really using it anymore anyway.

 

I’m drowning in your memories, in this saudade nightmare of all we are not, all we could have been.

These things that you’ve left me with keep me in a nostalgic depravity

My soul can’t take another moment of falling into your gravity.

 

December 15, 2015

Innocence II

In the incandescence

Of a cheap candle

She blinks lazily.

The bed holds her

Like her own mother did

What feels like a million

Years ago.

When her soul was

Flowered by the innocence of childhood

And her spirit woven by vitality.

It will burnout,

As it always does,

She thinks.

And a fiery, dreamless sleep

Takes over.

 

Behind impeccant eyelids

Eyes that have only seen wonder

Sleep peacefully

Stirring only when

There is a disturbing fusillade.

Or when he dreams.

when he fly’s too high

Or when he feels the spray of the sea.

But suddenly

The sea is on fire

And he can’t get away.

And there is an inferno

In his tiny lungs

And the air is like fuel.

He can not escape.

His wings can no longer carry him.

It was supposed to be a dream.

But then he allowed the fire

To get to the bed

And now everything

Is consumed by

Angry flames.

 

The words are trapped

In his tiny throat

All that can escape when he screams:

“Mama”

And she wakes

To a holocaust.

 

*the second poem I’ve written as a dedication to the burned baby, whose case I assisted with

December 14, 2015

Love in the Past Tense

Finally you have convinced me

That I am the convincee

Who has been convinced by you

That convincing someone to love you

is not something I can do.

And I have also been convinced that

The love I have, I can not contract

Nor distract, nor retract

All I can do is interact

With the memory, without hope to contact

Or be contacted.

You are the kiss on my inner thigh .

The one that makes me grit my teeth, and whisper my sigh.

But you, you fucking monster, only make me cry.

December 2, 2015

Thoughts

I have told people that I’m jealous. I’ve always been the girl that actually feels resentful when  I see another female that my mind deems prettier than me. But what many don’t know is why I am the way I am. I was conditioned, from before I understood that I was even female, to compare myself to others. My mother and other females in my family constantly obssessed over their weight. They bought magazines with slender, sexy women on them and in them and moaned about being fat. They went on diets all the time. They complained about how much weight they had picked up at family dinners. Everybody got super excited when someone had lost weight. They wore clothes to try and hide their fat tummies, big bums, or thunder thighs.

I was constantly compared to my cousin. This bubbled over into my school years when my cousin was more popular than me: Girls wanted to be like her and boys wanted to be with her. I was just the chubby sidekick who people called  “ironing board”* and “shwapha”*. I was the quiet one where as she was like a beautiful storm.

I had small breasts (of different sizes) and a small bum and a chubby tummy. She had big breasts and a wide ass and a flat tummy.I did my first diet in grade 6, at the age of 11. In retrospect,  there is something fundamentally wrong with that. At that age, I already understood how I had to look to “be beautiful”, I understood that being fat was not a part of that ideal.

My mother always told me I was beautiful. She used to say “You are so beautiful, but if you could just lose a bit of weight…” or “You’re so pretty, you just need to be a bit smaller” or “Remember how pretty you were when you lost all that weight”. How do I blame her? She grew up in a society that dictated that ideal of beauty to her too. She didn’t understand the dramatic effect that those double-sided compliments would have on my self esteem.

A close friend once pointed out that I look in the mirror way more than most people. I have never seen myself as vain, so this comment disturbed me a bit. After thinking about if for a few days I realised why I do it: when I look in the mirror, I am constantly complimenting myself, not because I think I’m the best thing since sliced bread but because I’m trying to fake it till I make it. I have to convince myself that I am beautiful, size 9 feet and size 40 waist, acne, flabby arms, different sized breasts and all. The best thing has started to happen, I am starting to believe myself.  For the first time in my life, I can look in the mirror and genuinely like and appreciate what I see. This doesn’t happen all the time but it never used to happen at all so I know I’ve made progress.

I still put my body down and I still compare myself to other women every day of my life but I like to think I’m getting better. I read this status on Facebook “you don’t have to be pretty like her, you can be pretty like you”and I swear it was my saving grace. I say that to myself every time I catch myself comparing myself to other women and that’s one more battle that I’ve won against my mind.

I also make a great effort to avoid putting my body down infront of my son because I don’t want him to learn to be that way. I always tell him he is beautiful and that I’m proud of him because fuckit he will not grow up hating what he see’s in the mirror. I don’t allow anyone to talk shit to him about what he chooses to wear or play with or eat. I am careful about the nick names I allow people to call him, and I try my best to refrain from making him feel like certain clothing or shoes or accessories make him look better. I want him to know that he is the most lovely when he is just him. If I have anything to do with it, society will not impose it’s unrealistic, cruel ideals on him.

I see that I needed my son, so I could have someone to love myself for, besides myself.And I’m learning and I’m growing and I’m hopeful.

 

*Ironing board: a term used to refer to people who are seen as having no curves, small breasts and a small bum.

*Shwapha (isiShwapha): an isiZulu word used to refer to a person with no bum.