Cape of No-Hope

Two hours
’till the silence of midnight falls.
And our sun hasn’t set.

Come outside and smell
the desolate red dusk of blazing eternity.
The endless humidity of clammy liquid air
filling the vessel known only as sky.

And when, from beneath the burning heat of the twilight’s waxing gibbous your face wanes for want of communion,

you find only the grating,
Grazing roar of the earth’s orbit
For a lullaby; its
Not obnoxious enough to split the ear drum of the fortunate
and not soothing enough to relieve the hearts of the omnipresent nobody’s.

So we bask in the red stained moonlight of a crimson twilight.
We burn in the heat of innumerable stars.
We shade our face from the blistering midnight,

until

Eskom turns off the street lights and we are human once more.
Wrapped in the blanket of our desolation beneath the unyielding gaze of fortunate passers in their
Civic.

Until

tomorrow’s soliloquy of sympathy conveys our misfortunes and illuminates our nothingness once more.
No food.
No bread.
Family to feed.
Please help.

Soledad

In the four walled cavity of my mind,
I make for myself an artificial night. And abound in the darkness
is the resonance of walls
which speak only silence.
I breathe memories
that dampen my spirit
and had it not been
for the warmth of my own solitude,
the very air that I remember would have frozen as crystals in my lungs.
I run my hands along reveries
and watch sepia brown emotions
which are as stagnant and unmoving
as the mud it has set in.
I, too,
sing a fearful trill
of things unknown
over distant hills.

In The Night Garden…

…I walk you down there,
Through the dark dank soil,
That grabs your souls and
Makes it hard to free your walk.

We see only by the twilight’s waning gleams,
Reflected off slivers of silver streams,
That echo our presence to the purple night,
Where darkness engulfs our only light.

But when we reach the gate ajar,
That makes our travel of near so far,
I see you no longer, we need not discover,
Instead of seeing, we may feel each other.

I lift your soul as you lift mine,
We plod no more, we stride divine.
And between our gardens gleaming streams,
Our lack of sight enshrines our dreams.

Free To Be

It may at first seem like only perception
But upon reflections on reflections
I surmise perhaps it is not me you despise
but the idea that, to you,
a simple notion is a subterfuge.

Too terrified to rely
on testimonies testified
by the lived reality of being confident enough to live openly
is a shame.

I, Too, sing a fearful trill
Of things unknown
Over distant hills.

The only out is cessation
that I pray for in emancipation.
When you smile out loud you are
reborn into recreation away from
an eternal damnation of the mind.
So become free.

As I play with words,
all doctrines deferred,
I dip my wings in the tempests
and mock the fervent roars
that seek to mute my humbled intellect.

I claim no wisdom
more than I AM able to live through and I give you no mandate
to doubt what I have been through. But the failure to connect
is a human defect that we are both afflicted by.

The only difference I see
between you and me
is that I am free to be and let be…
thus…
still I rise.