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.