Just for Laughs...

hey my peeps...

I just thought I'd share this little joke. Have a stress-free weekend :)

Memory work

We have a mother who can talk in strange tongues. She gets up to read the gospel at one o’ clock in the morning. She sets her alarm clock to go off. I am still awake reading a well-thumbed novel. Andrea Ashworth’s memoir Once in a house on fire that lingers long after into the early hours of the next day or J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey or Sylvia Plath’s only published book The bell jar that scares me half to death. It leaves me with questions like am I going to end up like that? Steve Biko’s I write what I like is in there somewhere in the bunch.

It is as if I am reading vignettes from my own life story when I read anything Sylvia Plath has written. I pretend to smile when she is funny in her book but I know better than that. I know I shouldn’t smile but I go ahead and do it anyway. I slide under the covers and pretend I am still asleep but she, my mother still checks up on me, switches off my light and I can hear her praying for all of us; the four of us. But I know better than that. I have not yet exorcised all my demons and all my preying monkeys on my back.

Pain is painful. Living through it, even breathing hurt and all you were left with were stern lessons in an arena that demanded everything of you. When one of my mother’s latest running commentaries on my life hurts me, this I know for sure is that it will linger long past midnight like the stories I marooned myself in. My parents spun an intricate web of lies and intrigue as my siblings and I grew up. To live like that, all day, everyday was alluring. When my mother was sad she shrieked at us. When my mother was happy she screamed at us. Same difference. When my mother was depressed she never showed it. She was made of sterner, stronger stuff than that and she showed it. It fit her like a glove.

My mother is a gem. Like any diamond in the rough she has rough edges that need to be smoothed over time and time again. She takes a lot of work to put up with. When I was younger, growing up I didn’t think it was worth it. I didn’t think she was worthy of it but as an adult I grew to appreciate her more and more. She was gifted, she was talented, she could cook a leg of lamb until the meat fell off the bone, her roast potatoes were always crispier than mine, the yellow, runny moons of fried eggs came out perfectly every time, she was pretty and good at a lot of things I was not.

This is another story about your mother my father says with that tone in his voice. A minute ago he was laughing as if we were in cahoots with one another; as if we were co-conspirators. Now he was serious, frowning and wearing a crease between his bushy, exclamation mark eyebrows.

I have this thing for Marilyn Monroe and her leading men. The prince and the showgirl, Gentlemen prefer blondes and Some like it hot. What it meant for me was that even if you had all the money in the world, fame, were idolised by millions of fans you could still be miserable, be inclined to throw pity parties, hang out flying solo with your most hated self, believe in your therapist/therapy/psychiatrist/psychologist/psychological terror/relief and that it would get your through this phase of your life that refused to let go of you and surrender your hurts to the greater beyond and the shared universe.

Around me people looked sad, concerned, wholly indifferent and vulnerable as I skated through what was becoming more and more my predictable life. I had a neat routine going on as I lost my mind and all self-control with it. I was surrounded with people who had money and beauty at school. I could feel or rather sense how strong, powerful and omnipotent these girls felt. They were afraid of nothing, while I feared everything in sight. They were beautiful even when they were tense, miserable, when they failed a test, wore braces, when they were blonde, brunette, had frizzy curls that would not behave. I wondered did these girls ever get depressed.

It’s the way men are, my friend Tash was schooling me one on one on that mind trick that grown men seemed to be born with; that and their swagger, when they snubbed you for a lovelier girl who seemed to float on air, what they really meant behind the words, you don’t mean that much to me, and what was meant by their true frame of mind when it came to their wife and their children and their disheveled house and dysfunctional livelihood. Tash was street smart, independent, classy and pretty. She always had a story. As a writer I was drawn like a moth to a 60 watt bulb to that. She wasn’t a bore and she always made me laugh out loud which gave me a slight belly ache. Her mother worked at the Portuguese consulate. She was in a top job and you could tell they lived comfortably. Tash could tell her mother anything.

When I wrote it felt as if all the loveliness in the world was within my reach. It felt as if I was connected to something greater than me. When I was depressed it felt as if it was like the inviting glaze on a heavenly mouthful of honey slipping, bittersweet, over the edge of the spoon when I didn’t want it to.

You do not know what I want, I screamed at my mother. You do not own me, I screeched. I knew somewhere in the burnt bridges of my heart that what I was saying made no eye to eye contact with her world, that she did own me in a way that was conditional and that what I was doing was unforgivable and that in no way would I ever make up for what I was saying.

You are a painting, I said to my reflection in the mirror. Everybody else in the world seemed to see pretty not young, sullen adolescent girls who scribbled fragments on pieces of paper manically as if they were possessed. Who had a collection of black notebooks, journals, diary entries of what they ate and when they slept and what they were thinking. Nobody would have even guessed what my life was like outside of school.

No simmering pots on the stove for supper, a sister who locked herself behind her closed bedroom door and soared academically winning a scholarship to America to go to NASA while she was still in high school, a brother who needed attention but lived like a ghost in our childhood house, shards of glinting glass on the floor, doors with gaping holes like open mouths were smashed, bashed, kicked in. There was cursing, sneering and strangled cries were heard, raised voices behind closed doors, muffled weeping.

All of it was my doing. I convinced myself of it.

Flawed circumstances always manifested themselves in my stories. I told myself that love would find me in spaces ultimately devoid of sacrifice, make me believe in make-believe and daydreaming. I put my faith in that. When night was over, I was older. When the school day was over, I was wiser. When I finished a book, I reflected on what people wanted to see and how they wanted to say it. How some had absolutely no control over what they spoke about?

I liked Marilyn Monroe because she wrote poetry. She may have acted silly and dumbed down in her movies but she was intelligent and very, very sad. In my stories like in the films I loved and grew up on both seemed like far off magical realms where reality was suspended and possibilities and potential seemed endless.

When I was growing up my father and mother fought about everything. They fought mostly about money. I was hidden somewhere in there saying do not forget about me.
I became aware at an early age of how much everything cost and how everything that was beautiful was so expensive.

I sit on the leather sofa, chocolate brown and balance precariously a bowl of popcorn watching television. I watch anything, even the rubbish. I like watching John Edward’s Crossing Over, Party of five, Dawson’s Creek, Oprah, talk shows. The only things I give a miss are the soap operas but sometimes I catch myself out of the blue watching All my children. Television made the words ‘emotional abuse’ stop ringing out like a rumpus in my head. Talking heads soothed me.

I liked that word ‘memoir’. It released me from all the hateful things that I loathed.
Pillows of steam escape in gusts from under the shower curtain. I pinched the cigarette between my lips and blew out a whirl of smoke. I felt something move in my gut. Something awesome and frightening on the surface but below, underfoot it no longer made me feel as if I was a drowned girl, a neglected and abandoned thing by my own kin.

In Port Elizabeth my aunt dared to behave in a way that she did not on her home turf near my uncle and my other mother’s sister’s wavering eyes, our aunt Sheila. She drank until she behaved like a stammering fool, slurring her words together. She got away with her teenage behavior every time. As she came teetering on her tiptoes, three sheets to the wind up the stairs leading to our front door and slipped and my mother said the words, ‘Serves you right. You deserved that.’ as she landed with a smack on her bum. My father and I stood there lending each other moral support watching this spectacle unfold night after night wishing we had put her days ago on the bus back to Johannesburg. Auntie Sylvia is dead drunk again. She has lost her shoes; soft, white sandals; the cheap kind.

“Are you misbehaving again?” I asked my mother eager to start a fight, to blast her with words, my frenemy. A word I had made up combined with the words ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’. Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

As children after a school day we cruised through the gates of hell and turmoil not knowing whether to see the smiling faces of our parents or to be let down with sinking hearts.

Words left me euphoric. They came on a heady high like a rush, blistering under my fingertips, sticking like glue to the page, like glitter or sequins. The curls of paper on the floor that I scrunched up into tight balls reminded me of the grace that origami animals took on. They had a grace of their own; a perfection. Miracles came with reading and writing.

No, I thought with a sinking heart. She couldn’t possibly be thinking I would actually wear this out of the house, I thought to myself as my grandmother handed me two billowing shirts with huge orange flowers in patterns that hurt my eyes. One came complete with eighties shoulder pads. She in turn had got it from auntie Evie – her favourite child amongst three sons and another daughter.

I was skinny as a rope and flat- chested and no match for either but she insisted that I take them. Only know when I can look back without cringing at those painful days from high school do I recognise the love that came with that gift that I was too selfish and proud to admit to at first. Perhaps she had seen something of herself in me at that age and had wanted to reach out to me in my loneliness.

Perhaps she didn’t want me to starve away completely. Now there is nothing tangible I can remember about her except for her milky teas, split pea soup and gooey sandwiches rich and thick with knotted fig jam, chewy stews and bredies she used to make my father and me for lunch after school. I hated those sandwiches. I hated the way they felt in my mouth. I tried to nibble at it and make it go down but it was useless.

One day, naughtily, I pushed them into the soft, plush side of the chair and wiggled it in further with my fingers until it was out of reach. When I visited my grandmother again it was gone. She had found it and I never got fig jam sandwiches again. I must have disappointed her in so many ways.

One Christmas I got a book from my grandparents. I didn’t even know they knew I loved reading. Everything was alright in my world again with them. It was a hard book. The words were smaller and closer together. It had words in that were long and difficult to understand. It had excerpts from other books; exciting books for teenagers that I had yet to land my eyes on. How did they know? I never found out. When I was sick she smudged Vick’s vapour rub under my nose. I breathed in menthol.

Now I miss her. I miss trudging up the hill past the church for the Assembly of God that she went to on Sunday’s, a dishevelled looking soccer pitch with goal posts that had no nets, the Muslim butchery and the café when I finished writing an exam. I watched television, CNN breaking news with my grandparents in the afternoon on a school day. I would play with my cousins. Now they’re all grown and most of them have moved away, got married and had children. They’re busy with the machinations of their own humdrum lives and couldn’t care less about mine.

This is also a story about falling in love with people who have flaws, relationships that keep you grounded and realising that when you older, you are more forgiving and stronger with built in, stored up reserves of energy that you didn’t know where it came from, empathy for loved ones and compassion even for strangers. Angels come in different shapes and sizes, varying blueprints but they must always be defended.

“Daddy, don’t. You’ll only make her angry.” I knew my voice was whiney but I didn’t want there to be another altercation that I couldn’t put a stop to and so I lost my adolescence in books with racy titles about men who paid for hotel rooms with voluptuous women in slinky lingerie on the covers but their big bosoms were wasted on me. There was no intensity behind the words of the dialogue. I was not one of those kids who put up pictures of rock stars, actors, actresses and models against their bedroom walls.

I learnt how to repair a mother and daughter’s broken relationship time and time again and to convert the sin committed into something that was precious. I channelled all my energy into that as a child.

We – my mother and I – laugh together when things are ‘normal’ (when they aren’t fighting, screaming at me at the top of her lungs, yelling out curses), I write poetry, we love each other in ways that are simple and complicated, I cook elaborate meals and cry warm, salty tears sobbing into a bunched up pillow at night. I learnt to evaluate her moods. Sometimes I failed to see it coming.

The world is filled with so many people in search of and wanting love, approval and acceptance; words whose meanings feel like darts flying through the air aiming for a flailing target that you eyes could hopelessly not meet with and that was not always in reach.

There is a strange, combatant beauty in making lists of words that are full of meaning and purpose to you. It has become a numbing, pressing habit for me to fill little notebooks and diaries from cover to cover like this.

I wanted to have hair like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. There was nothing I could do with my limp hair except scrape the strands back together and tie it with an elastic band. I had skinny legs like a praying mantis. I was never completely comfortable with myself until I could string out words, pearls of wisdom from an aloof adolescent.

As children we had to spend so much energy on making a home life for ourselves that would make us productive citizens one day. We did it magically. We transcended the experience of having a father who suffered from bipolar and a mother who had terrifying moodswings. We survived and at the end of the day that was all to it. To the outside world we were the perfect family. There was a father who was a community leader, a mother who was lovely and a committed Christian and three bright, adorable children who were highly intelligent.

I loved being chained to the still air, the silent rooms I traversed in my mind that I found myself in when I was reading. I discovered and explored new futuristic worlds and environments; Judy Blume. While our lives could have been hellish at the worst of times, paradise bloomed for me between the secret pages; my own pain felt like poison as it weaved its way into my heart in intricate, beautiful patterns like a tattoo. I pushed these books and films on my brother and sister hoping they would find their own answers and they did.

They grew up while I still felt like a little girl, lost and bereft. I needed the comfort of my parents’ home even though it was haunting, the rules that I had to live by made no sense, gave me no comfort, stunned me into a disquieting silence.

Nobody talked about mental illness or emotional scarring or emotional baggage when we were growing up. It wasn’t spoken about in hushed tones or whispers. If our family was gossiped about we certainly didn’t know it. Living in our house, growing up as a child was living in one made of false interiors, without clarity or peace of mind, tinged with a surplus of emotions that were boxed in, locking us away from the prying eyes of relatives. Our shared history as siblings is intense. As grown ups we tend to shy away from it. ‘Emotional’, ‘too depressing’, ‘disconcerting, ‘intense’ are some of the words that other people have used to describe my work. I only felt welcomed and inspired when I was grappling by the overwhelming

It made me happy. It put a smile on my face when I was selflessly reaching out to hear other people’s voices of growing up with abuse or neglect or abandonment in books I found I could not put down like Running with scissors or A million little pieces. I held onto the kaleidoscope of problems they posed with care. My fear was no longer multiplied, schizophrenic, a self-portrait suggestive in anyway of not being cohesive, tidal or in a gestation period. This wasn’t just one girl’s, one woman’s journey. It has been the journey of three children into the painful growing pangs of being teenagers, of reaching adolescence anxiously always being in panic mode when needing comprehension when they had accomplishments, hit success minimally at first then afterwards success after success; into adulthood.

I would stiffen like glass in pleasure working on my doppelganger, my adult persona, showing off to the world at large while I wrote what became poetry and short stories. I was no longer a textbook case shown to a group of discerning medical students at a hospital for lunatics and crazies; a hospital where people went to rest because they were tired and wrecked consciously by life as they knew it. I was no longer a worry for my parents, a concern for my siblings and a case study of the history of mental illness in my family.

Four poems

Captive

So our rift grows
Deeper, widens like the curves
Of the spine on my back

You fail to surrender
To the mercy of my magnificent
Words, their imaginary orbit

We have become like two
Strangers in the unknown dark wild
Captive by pictures

From the islands of our youth;
The small pit, gift of our childhood
Surreal, surreal then real

My tongue speaks of
Unholy suffering and I wish
Yours of frozen belonging

Sparse and then eternal
Flashed like swords in the air
We clash again and again

The word family deprived
Of us; useless like melancholy
You are not home

You do not keep me safe
Or mindful of images of the ego
Smooth out the rough edges

You think only of yourself
One goal in mind – you see me as
Weak; I see you as being selfish

A fragment, shell, filled with glory
Damn it all to hell this is not a fairytale
Story – there is part of me

That thinks this is indecent
Longs with agony for your love
Tell me that you need me too?

The end.

As light as feather

If we weren’t sisters
Would we be friends – a rare union?
Of inseparable instruments

Bend, bend, harvest
Closure with the country of your mind
I am left with crippled limbs

That does not work
That fails to embrace you, impress upon
You, you, you, your pale face

Fingers clenched into fists
I am human, lonely and sad, grounded –
Madly devoted to you

Perfume in your hair
On the paper-thin skin of your flesh –
Whisper, whisper, whisper,

I whisper myself to death
This is a belated hope – you’re in sight
But not in touch

Drowned woman –
Drowning woman on the offensive
With your string of pearls

My thalidomide –
Attendee at my tidal wake I imagine
The deep gravity of that

You’re only a half-formed
Weight in my emotional experience
Of life so far – a living, breathing

Goddess swathed in a golden
Light – the surface brittle and cold
Like a glass ceiling

Stiffening cracks shining
Through; there’s stillness in the
Air that reminds me of you

The end.

The ballad of being lost inside of you

I kiss your wrists
Before surrendering them
To the outside world

Hug them tight to my
Chest – wrote a poem
About peace; picked

At it and picked at it
Again as if it would heal quicker
The pangs of pain

That anchored me wisely
Ashore in a world filled with
Beauty, fields of darkness

I was a woman
On the verge of a nervous
Breakdown and you

Were oblivious to it
As the ghost of the sky
Its cosmic life force

Was running through
Your veins – your blood was
A vessel; I was empty

Wrecked left with
Words without borders I
Sought an encounter

With your womb-like
Serenity, the calm before
The storm, the life of

The fruit in your palm
As you bit into the red war of the
Seeds – you were no

Human stain on a pillow,
No proof that your canvas had been
Transitioned into a mosaic or

Guernica overnight –
Your words are a volcano
They cut off my air

Supply when I need
It the most – I trail behind
You leaving imprints

Made of salt – I know
They will dissolve; they’re lucid
Like my dreams

Delve, delve deep; what
Is poetry if it is not about soul mates?
The making up for destinations?

Anywhere, anywhere but here
I was left unconscious by the black fuss
In my head; the force of its reality

Staring out my window at night
Is like looking at a night on fire –
The air glows electric orange

Oh, these storms I’ve weathered
I can hardly count them all before
Their echoes start rising – flicker

And then before you know it
It is time to go – sleep to dream and
Only wish it will clear up soon

Drumming up, dumbing down
Like a manic street preacher thumping
His bible I pull out all the short cuts

Soup for the soul for every
Wintering place, flowers on the table
In spring, waiting for the faint

Pressure on the umbrella to be released
Caught in rain, crushing russet leaves in my hand
I still find you missing in everything

The end.

The triple goddess

I bear your moods like
Any mother would; I do –
You unrivalled beast

Still you can’t be
Touched; pirate – I hunt
You down in night air

You are the source
Of everything – welcome
Me home with your

Head of wet, dead leaves –
Your body the farm that will
No longer deprive

An insomniac – where is
Your spirit of giving like the
Bloodlines of the phoenix

What is this virgin ash
That remains behind and what
Can I make out of it

I am held captive
In your transparency –
Stay, stay and don’t fade

Turning in the air
There are two pairs of eyes
Here – how far is it still

To the next hour
Pushing by like a pulse –
The escape of blood

Where lions roared
We grew up – grounded
Where Kevin Carter

Stood up from hell
To eternity – perhaps as
A girl you meant

To love me – what do people
Do in the wilderness except use
Their voice to cry out

The journey of love
Perfected – is one that is half
Of tragedy speeded up

These words are like
The deceased – they can no
Longer breathe on their

Own; they’re hushed
Melting slow, sturdy – burning
Like sin against skin

He kissed my neck –
Swallowed me whole like old
Weathered prophetic ghosts

We drown our sorrows
In pots of tea – caught in the
Routed abyss of

Whatever is authentic
In the secret writings of every
Poet will be posed

As the words of a prophet
You don’t have to know the
Meaning of the word ‘Sufi’

To know it – only know
This; that it is based on faith
See your journey

As a ministry – a
Service to energies of light
And spaces bundled

Tight – surrounded
By frozen water, an
Illuminated lake

In the darkness
Remember the ordinary
Before doing the

Extraordinary
Assume the position of God –
Be willing to serve others.

The end.

Keeping Abreast of the Competition

For better or for worse...

 I need to put something straight. LZK alluded that when I meet a guy, I’m looking for a husband. Men out there, be assured, that is not the case. When I met my husband, I was neither looking for a boyfriend nor a husband. I live in a university town and was just looking for a friend. Someone my age. I didn’t work at the university so…

My husband was definitely not looking for a girlfriend either; never mind a wife… I guess we both just wanted to find a good friend… The rest is as they say HISTORY!

Marriage can be sooo taboo with young fellows. So let’s just demystify this subject for a while. My friend sent me an email this morning about how men choose their wives. Read below:

“A man wanted to get married. He was having trouble choosing among three likely candidates. He gives each woman a present of ZAR 5,000 and watches to see what they do with the money.

The first does a total make over. She goes to a fancy beauty salon gets her hair done, new make up and buys several new outfits and dresses up very nicely for the man. She tells him that she has done this to be more attractive for him because she loves him so much. The man was impressed.

The second goes shopping to buy the man gifts. She gets him a new set of golf clubs, some new gizmos for his computer, and some expensive clothes. As she presents these gifts, she tells him that she has spent all the money on him because she loves him so much. Again, the man is impressed.

The third invests the money in the stock market. She earns several times the ZAR 5,000. She gives him back his ZAR 5,000 and reinvests the remainder in a joint account. She tells him that she wants to save for their future because she loves him so much. Obviously, the man was impressed.

The man thought for a long time about what each woman had done with the money he'd given her. Then, he married the one with the biggest bums (or breasts – some are boob guys). Men are like that, you know. You can never tell what they base their judgment on.”

So… I was just curious, what kind of things do women consider when looking for a husband? Also, what do you women think men want from you?

Word of the Month: Breast

Get familiar with your breasts.

 

In South Africa October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. In light of that, the word of the month is BREAST. Our writers will all include the word breast in one form or another in their posts. It is entirely up to them how they choose to include this word in their entry. Please support our effort to raise awareness on this issue. We salute all the brave women who have been affected with this condition. Cancer Can Be Beaten!

Five poems

Broadside

My words find themselves
In a coffin – in mud they flower
Like a lotus without an ego

I educe furtive patience
Through tolerable effigies
Put elbow grease into it

Like a furrier or impala
These concessions are donors
Of instrumental organs

Like a locked junction box
Impervious, doomed empires
Room here – in the jugular

I touch your maxillae – your
Golden skull cap with my tools
Spy this mattock in hand

As I fiercely nail this tooth
To my father’s namesake for
The keys to the nascent idea

Recant this rule – engage
The physique of narcissism,
Piccaninnies, jonquils on

A slope, the sky rufous
Narcosis takes a rum flight –
The galloping sea breeze

Salt in caves of mouths
Feels like a webbed pellicle
Doing a slap-bang runner

In rush hour – here is
Slashed phyla on my plate
Pert sleepers no more

Letters loved and lost
There is only this wood left
To pounce on – revenge.

The end.

Evening

Winged sleet is only
Sufficient in memory
Hinted at in atlas –

On maps; geography
Down came the rain –
Housed with you in

Its grasped picture
You came dying – shut
Out undone in streams

In wet rivers of dreams
You glide, flocked, awed
Pressed unaccompanied

Once flung into flight
Your arrival immortal
I envy you – the

Stars in your eyes
Like dew – your tears
Are the tears of a

Hero exhausted
From blows – a barren
Silence in which

Nothing fertile grows –
Weeping pours out of your
Heart as if you were

Soulless; moulded you
Effortlessly – gave your
Self worth although

It aged you – you
Brought me to a home
Cradled me as if

I were nothing just
Waiting to be rescued
Waiting to be saved.

The end.

You

You –
With the dark sorrel
Hair save me?

I’ve lost you –
And I only have
Myself to blame

Bookish now –
I’m alone and sad
This boomerang

Has kept me going
For the ladders of these
Past ten or so years

It’s been a waked boon – oh
It’s been a wild ride to get my
Ego from A to Zero

Monsters have come and
Gone – grown inside of me
With legs as strong as elk

Lazarus or a Pharisee
Gems, mother-of-pearl –
I’ve roused too late

I’ve come to the thawed
End of my bloody, damned fluke –
I wish, I wish, I wish

I could take it all back brick
By brick – but every time I hit
A wall, a monsoon, a mistake

What warrant of
Success is there that you will
Break – that you will speak

This waif wails –
But can you hear her?
The gift of her voice.

The end.

Something about the life of a writer

Words flock
Onto the page –
I am left numb

Like a wadi
Any cold, wet thing
It dissolves

Subtly – unseen
Into a host of wounds,
Depression

Invalids,
Deaf mutes – the gut
Of a wind

Like tiny hands
It reaches out for me
It coos straight

From the shell
Of a heart – a
Fragmented

Wakened state
Of dreaming –
Like an infant

It is gone, gone, done
Grown up in years –
Matured, ripened

Like the brick walls
Of a house by the sun’s
Summer heat or fruit

Even the very small ones
Their welfare is pure – and
Carry a gravid weight

Wedlocked to words –
This is something of the
Life of a writer.

The end.

The poet

Loosed – this gesture comes with
Maternal pride; ceremony across
The page, they are not strangers –

Instead they comfort: even the
Savage, alien beasts – their deaths
Breasts are magical, a temple of delight.

Five poems

The blood orange sky

My brother and I believed in ghosts from an early age.
When we were little we thought they would haunt us to an early grave.
They drowned in the air like swastikas; armies in flight.

When they went missing we would try to find them
Again picking on the words black, shelved, barren, lit them up in the
Orange sky as if it was a furnace burning at Auschwitz.

I wanted to be the woman who gave you everything.
Instead I came with darkness, a wreck that was visible, cats,
So I hunted my brother down; swore him to secrecy.

I could see the boy in him still; even in the fog – with
Flecks of blue marbled sky dissolved in his eyes I kept him safe,
Warm; beguiled in my arms before I let him go.

The end.

In the natural backyard of poets

Here you will find golden pauses between acts;
Ends of affairs, pangs of love and where an ache will not subside

Here, the clinging, useful comfort of strangers
Tucked away in the wells of loneliness in the thick of things;
Butterflies whose paper-thin wings melt in the air

Here, patches of beads are worked intricately at a snail’s pace,
As white horses in playing fields, prayers in temples, a home for words
God’s little selves; others

For those of us who like poetry and their mirror images –
There is strength here underneath this web of smoke

The strength of an army, a swarm, an exit, human bodies
Only later you will realise that there are limits and boundaries
Bars at the windows to keep the ghosts out

Webs carry lisps of substance, wounds that are slow to heal –
Where broken links surface like Yoruba girls dancing barefoot in the
Rain; it feels like the Gestapo

There is a light and warmth that beckons with words like
Memoir and futurist – they feed the poet’s soul

As if I have drawn a zero – a mouth opening and shutting
Slicing through the air where it should not be – interpret is as you will;
This abacus, this alphabet

How do children grow when they do not play is like asking
How do poets fill themselves up cognitively when their minds
Are a black, alluring habitat

Until glory is all yours

A small, loosed hunger giving you grief inside your belly
That not even a mad man can cure

Mine for the taking

She appeared before me as if she came on the wings of an angel

Nursing me back to health; she never let go – mother kind.

The end.

Stars that begin to fill the night sky

While we sleep, while we eat, while we dream in tides
Every night they make their tribal mark on civilisation
The yellow sunlight of the white sun has now dissolved
The din that suffocated us like a forest of trees is now

Thinned, walled in by rooms that are deathly quiet like
A mannequin’s paradise escape – the flurry of a tongue
On a belly; I can feel the heat of the wind floating on air
It’s not mournful at all; not like stories of the holocaust

Understanding the measure of loss of love is not easy
It simply takes possession over everything in your life
Left with a gold watch that could no longer tell time –
A staged, petrified memory in which there was no longer

Recognition of stealing touch and comfort out of routine
Silence has come and gone; suffered with the dark hours
I don’t know why I felt like nothing in your life – I cast
Words like stars into the night sky’s shadow; thrust them

Into predatory familiarity, the material of velocity, pieces
Of fecundity; imagery that we shared as sisters growing up
Speak, speak, speak now voyager, saboteur, even if your
Words come as an abortion of small nothings; with a splash of red

In slow motion; don’t hold anything back as you have done
For years: in war humanity behaves at its worst and you have
Done the same, I would only like to garner access to you –
To your private, imaginative world – I have loved you from

Afar for my whole life, alas, these cancer years sought a
Substitute, under stars laid attractions to spools, negatives
I trace your eyes, your wild hair; your teeth of pearls all in
One place with my fingertips self-consciously – they all say

‘Do not come too close’; up close you’re delicate, a flower
Whose blooms are not yet set in place – ripened by the sun?
Yet I feel you against my skin, after all aren’t we mirror
Images of each other born on the same day; years apart?

Here they come, here they come: salutary never haggard
These stellar posers; one by one not stentorian reminding
Me of your rounded figure built for comfort and not size
Tell me what you want to hear; a moveable feast of words?

The end.

The wounded pilgrim

When I was a child I was afraid
To speak to strangers; even then
I felt estranged from the human
Race, sought solace, a rare comfort

In books and in between the neutral
Spaces of the black letters of the
Alphabet that spread itself across
The pages I sought transition from

Childhood to puberty; a word I am
Still not very fond of; it meant growing
Up behind closed doors, shutting out
Dark voices; sensing there were no

Clouds with silver linings only
Cries of thunderstorms and lightning
Streaking across the sky in the night air
I was a good girl done badly by

Not as bad as some yet still locked
Inside a box with doll parts and the
Garden of a blank canvas perfumed
With the bright, still air of reality

Children can only be fragile warriors
But the canvas was uplifting and the words
Could all fit, musings, brick by brick?
The sun on its belly ripening even more

Poetry with keys, something absurdly
Supernatural in effect like the holier ark
Trailing behind the titan machine of my
Consciousness; sometimes the story

Begins at the end with no middle or
Beginning; sometimes not at all but it has
Educated me on so many things that blood
Is thicker than water and that families

Are not pulled out of the air for nothing
They exist to terrorise you, to bully you,
To grow you up into a worthy citizen or not
For the reasons that you think.

The end.

In response to Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days by Ted Hughes

Ritual

Michael’s ghost comes to me with the weight of water – I drink
In the lines of his face, blur the edges; bottle them up in memory for a
Keepsake of a perfect solidarity, stitch the laughter, the inner battle studies,
The bittersweet imprint of two bodies, star-crossed lovers, self-portraits that
Flower at the commitment of first time lover’s closeted togetherness

He has given me something; new eyes; shameless jewels, diamonds,
He scrounged about on the ground for his own in the rough;
Waited patiently until their gestation period came to an end,
He takes my own hand in his, I watch him like a spectator; his
Body is made of glass so I touch him tenderly as if he might break

You are the painted groom in the forest of the moonlight – you
Cover the mouths of dunes with your skin; there are no fences
Where you come from, there are no children here; there are
Golden rings on our fingers, wedding bands to mark the state of
Our unions to mend this focus purely – I needed you for awhile

This path, this door left ajar to remind myself of my swallowed up,
Rehearsed fear of being alone, a flock gave me hope, this furnace
Gave me the fear of being placed by an anchor, oh, joy, what is
This gift – I am choking on white, I let the angled beast in too soon
Black dogs as black as a river bark madly at the presence of wounded

Ghosts but they don’t keep me awake for long – I thought I wouldn’t
Know what do to with these stages of infancy that I have given birth to;
Baited with trailing, unnamed hooks; I pick at his birthmark, scratch it
With a nail as if it’s a tattoo, the plum of a bruise; I hit a wall, there are
Woods here – unburdened, finally loosed the weight I’ve carried

His clean, pale, bitten fingers are as remote from me as the light on sea glass
Or a wet, streaming tadpole; we are done with the night, I try not to dream
I can smell the scent of your ruffled, yellow hair like feathers on your pillow
I am in the minority now, I surfaced like winter, as wet as snow, as heavy
As the storm on the other side of the world, as weather; as if you didn’t know
My heart says love is intense; the heavenly shine of lust on the mind is brief

I watch you sleep – if I could slay your dragons, I would, I have numbers
For company, silence, a golden roost of mounting words sinking without
Feeling too much self-conscious, they burn, harvested on the bare, mute page
Those islands in neutral territory, if lust was not temporary then where
Would we all be; physically, humanity without alchemy – anonymous; I’ve arrived.

The end.

FolksNet: Welcome to FolksNet. Its a chatroom for Folks only.

FolksNet: Welcome to FolksNet. Its a chatroom for Folks only.

Getting there: the gut symmetry of writing

Getting there: the gut symmetry of writing

What motivates me to write? It’s harder to explain to non-writers and easier in some ways to explain to writers who write for the sheer thrill of it, the madness clicking away inside your brain and the hell of it; to sweep away all the cobwebs out from underneath your psychic mind. In some cases writers sometimes miss the interior spaces that come in the neutral, empty nothingness between the words. Writing has created miracles in my life; it has created within me a deep sensitivity for the human condition, mushroomed insightfulness in the blackness of my depressions that is and will be forever linked to my imaginative, artistic and creative expressions. Without my depression I cannot write. I am left blinded; exiled from the distortions and the truthful meanings of words, a weakened, grasping and gasping fool, a terrifying puppet with a weathered resolved.

Piled up features with nowhere else to go

Writing ages me as I arrange the words on the page, mellows me like a fine wine as I slowly take cognisance of the fact of what I am committing to the page , it smells of the scent of freshly washed, limp hair, something novel and benign, linen airing in a cupboard lined with peeling old-fashioned wallpaper left over from an odd job of doing a wall years or months before. Writing reminds me of my mother’s rose garden in full crimson bloom (the one that she meditates on early in the morning), her perfumed wrists, her perfumed lobes behind her ears, it pulls and pushes words gently and then forcefully against my mind like oars in water, makes me crawl like a vulnerable baby, makes my words walk stooped like an elderly man leaning on a cane who has frail and delicate bones. It spooks me sometimes; jerks me into tidal daydreaming, when pain or hurt moves within me leaving me to lick my wounds so does inspiration in small doses or a heavy weight. Inspiration for me has always been the definition of a miracle.

The education of the mind

Writing is my calling. It has taken me over twenty years to discover that. For years I considered it a secret. Words would rush out like blisters out of my pen. I won prizes for it at school. I had imagination. I was imaginative and sensitive. I was going to be an investigative journalist or a documentary filmmaker. But God infinitely takes those decisions out of your hands, chooses your pathways; your final destination. It carried me through tumultuous times; changing schools, built character, boxed my creativity within me until such a time came when I could put it to good use and colour invisible boundaries around me to protect my mad heroines and protagonists, my adolescent moodiness. I alternated unnervingly emotional maturity, alchemy, humanity and purity. For this I have to seek inspiration everywhere. For all the parts, egos, identity crisis’s, cogs and wheels of the machine to work I have to rely not only on pen and paper but also on hope, education, beauty and then setting everything to self-destruct so that only a blot of that remains that I can knit at, peep at, peek at, address, disguise and dismantle. I knit all these blots together and make them into features that heal, features that magnify the audacity, the intensity of the circle of life that has to be, most of all, endured. Something changes when we grow older as writers. We overcome storms. We learn breathing lessons.

The fate of the writer

The denial of suffering for your craft comes easily to some writers; not to all. There are times when I feel like every word I write is the last one that will come to mind. It scares the hell out of me. First, where do all of them, these words, come from (this always amazes me), some kind of wish factory from heaven? Will they eventually die out, become extinct; aside from behaving like gorillas in the mist at first to capture your attention even in a dark, hellish mood? Or will they vanish without a trace into a shimmering haze from where I first beckoned them from like a heat wave. Sometimes the world is a blur. There is no filter from your head to your mouth and the messages that your brain is sending to your memory box is so frequent and excessive that you forget jewels of thought and pearls, gems of wisdom. Words when they’re estranged from you (this is called writer’s block) always set up a challenge for the writer. Have I lost it now completely? You grow older in years but the words that spring from you are always in their infancy stages. You always have great expectations for them.

There are pieces of writing that pierce hearts, pieces that charge the air with electricity, pieces that leave readers in tears, wanting more, having their cake and eating it too. Pieces of writing that pierce the heart, leaving the writer breathless, leave the reader breathless too. If you’re moody, that usually rubs off on the characters as well and the reader can sense that. Never hesitate to write when you’re depressed. Some of your best work although it can be suggestive of what you were feeling at the time should well just be left alone to stand on its own ground and speak for itself. Don’t explain too much or you’ll give it all away and then where is the sense in that. Writers’ birth words, give words life, give them air to breathe, mouthfuls of it and give them a splash of colour to rejuvenate them in a sense of a wonderland. They’re not written on the body in tattoos for nothing. We are all hungry for words and for knowledge and for the gifts that come from them.

Eyes of gods

In words, in language, in meaning and their purpose we can see the eyes of gods. Some are Buddha-like, sturdy, built like brick walls. There are others like me out there who see words as meat, living out their dreams writing haiku and poetry until it completely sates their thirst like moths attracted to light bulbs, getting into the spirit of it all of being a little known writer, while having a normal day job that pays the bills. The empty shell of a writer is one that attracts eternal insomnia, fighting off sleep, madness, depression, mental illness, psychologists, chaos, disorder across a desk and leaves room for little else some might say but the shell also retains the order of families, progeny, small children growing up with vocabularies of children much older than they are; writing and words come with a love even of just hearing the wonderful words of herbal teas like chamomile that your psychiatrist drinks during her breaks from seeing her patients, chai tea from India that your sister brought home from her vacation there or an infusion of green tea or a flask of coffee. It leaves you with a hunger, no, a craving for seeing your name out there as if it was a completely different entity than you and what you created out of nothing; simply words.

This personal essay on writing was published on Ovi: Finland's English Online Magazine on the 7 of October 2010. Professor Emanuel Paparella commented on it and said as follows at 11:29:42.
Indeed, "in the beginning was the Word..." and the Word came into the world and the world knew it not... Some philosophers (one thinks of Aristotle and Aquinas and Spinoza) have reasoned to God and made Her into their own image: a thinking being who thinks his own thoughts eternally...I think that is only half the truth. God more than a philosopher is a poet. The whole universe is a poem. Not to recognize that (as Mario the illiterare is able to do in that gem of a movie "Il Postino') is to become an idolater and a narcisist who worships the thoughts of one's mind and thinks that behind words there is thought, when the contrary applies: behind thought there are images adn words. The living God is beyond reason and logic. She is not a logician and a chess player; is a dancing poet and most writers who need to write to survive intuite that much even when they cannot explain it philosophically.