Map


Lay my body down on a flat surface and read it like a map. Even if it's on top of the table at dinner time and disturb the peace of family members on Christmas eve.
Tell them how this body is made up of potholes, strange highways, rivers, mountains, hard rock surfaces, forests, valleys and meanders and how my tears never failed to form lakes and dams at the bottom of my belly where strangers thought it ok to swim and leave pollution here that killed the offspring of my ancestors.
Read it like a map because I was told that you never missed Geography classes.
Bachazele how my tattoos are not for flexing purposes, they were used as a cover up of deeper scars. Tell them how i got the sores on my legs, explain how I fell running even from you and almost broke my knees crawling on gravel surfaces.
Tell them I'm a walking exhibition of pain and clumsiness. Tell them my fake smile will always be the only clear sky about me. This is ok. I've accepted that my body was once like African Gold mines, it's constantly dug into so I decay everyday, my centre can not hold anymore, I'm a living earthquake, the natural disasters that they explain very well.
Read me.
When you done. Fold me and put me away. Who needs to read maps after all. The details in them are old fashioned anyway.

Map

Lay my body down on a flat surface and read it like a map. Even if it's on top of the table at dinner time and disturb the peace of family members on Christmas eve.
Tell them how this body is made up of potholes, strange highways, rivers, mountains, hard rock surfaces, forests, valleys and meanders and how my tears never failed to form lakes and dams at the bottom of my belly where strangers thought it ok to swim and leave pollution here that killed the offspring of my ancestors.
Read it like a map because I was told that you never missed Geography classes.
Bachazele how my tattoos are not for flexing purposes, they were used as a cover up of deeper scars. Tell them how i got the sores on my legs, explain how I fell running even from you and almost broke my knees crawling on gravel surfaces.
Tell them I'm a walking exhibition of pain and clumsiness. Tell them my fake smile will always be the only clear sky about me. This is ok. I've accepted that my body was once like African Gold mines, it's constantly dug into so I decay everyday, my centre can not hold anymore, I'm a living earthquake, the natural disasters that they explain very well.
Read me.
When you done. Fold me and put me away. Who needs to read maps after all. The details in them are old fashioned anyway.

Loving You 47ways

When they ask you about me. Tell them I fell inlove with you 47ways and more. Do not be afraid to tell them that for you I broke down all the walls and mountains around my heart, I stripped myself naked and I dug rivers here for your love to flow into oceans of my soul. Tell them I lost myself in you. Tell them I burn candles everyday asking ancestors for you to come home and worship at my alter. Tell them I've started doing crazy things like praying because I've never experienced anything as effortless as loving you. Tell them, I once almost drove 700km's across the country at midnight just to hold you close. How I've broken down so many times in Tears and drowning myself in dry red wine just so I numb the pain. Tell them it's all worth it because I'll marry you 47ways one day and raise kids with you. You are the match to my soul candle that had never been lit before. You are just the right puzzle. I never believed in love before. I still lie to myself about loving you but every time my heart sings a different melody at the thought of you. This poem doesn't have an ending, ill finish it at the alter as vows of my eternal commitment to you. I'll finish it in front of the whole community and there, ill only cry tears of true love.

Rodent

i loved you whole heartedly.
my skin would shiver every time
we touch. your touch felt like the first
hieroglyphic writing on Ancient
Egyptian walls and papyrus plants.
it was magic from higher spirits inhaled
from those that lived before us.
i lost myself in you.
collapsing in your arms was exorcism i'd
choose over and over again because this
was older than any religion i've ever known.
i built my alter at your knees. making love
to you was like burning impepho;
it was a cleansing ceremony.

but

another woman found resurrection
and scriptural pages underneath your
tounge. like a rodent she sneaked in
and you allowed her the cheesiest section
of our love affair. for a second, you opened
doors and Lucifer became an angel of
your heart, not even prayer can be a pesticide
here. let rodents turn our home into a black hole
where everything is sucked in and dies.
let rodents inhabit our home,
for my womb can never bare kings and
Goddesses for you anymore,
let these rodents into our home,
it was never our to protect.

#CulturedButterfly