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Poetry is about belonging, coming home, feeling homesick for the ones you love.
In the element of light this is where you belong. You’re nothing but a dream safely put away within reach. The world of silence is now my home. It is a force to be reckoned with. Knife wounds heal but words don’t. The wind is so cool and sweet this evening. It’s getting to be that time of night again where I write a poem for my mother. Swiftly and comfortably the brightness of the ego of the words all come together in one blow. Terrifying, terrifying and then still, gentle like leaves against grass. No, autumn leaves against grass. I decided to write poetry because of Keats and not just because my father also had it within himself. Women have prying eyes. They see everything. They have a long memory. All my eyes see is a forest of rain. It glitters. And even their shadows glitter. I don’t feel driven, committed, devoted to anything, and passionate except of course to see my mother’s smile shine and my father to discover that in his hollow bones that he still loves her and that there is still a part of him that aches for her. Morality, it does not thrive here, it triumphs. I think it is because of the routine. Its madness really. The time you have to get up and the checklist you have to follow. You’re a child. You have the possessions of the child. You’re useless and empty and have to stand in lines. You have to be good. You have to be a ghost and you will never get used to the fluorescent lights that burn so bright.
All my life there has been a meeting, mending wall, turning point between the forest of rain and my mother and father who is always left drowning in what he does not say. My mother never said or asked rather were the natives victims? She never asked am I Inferior to you because I am Coloured? Her skin are the flowers of white stealing beauty. Her skin is powder on your portrait of flesh burnt by the sun. If you were mine I would never let you go. You belong to Eve, Evie, and the middle child the chosen one and the one you love the most. All I can do is wash away my sins, flip my legs like a seal. My middle name is ‘Pilgrimage’. You’ve left me with the questions of what if God were the moon and not a globetrotter? Ah, the wards smell like cleaning fluid, cake and tea. It smells like home, this fragile basketcase whose sensibilities seem to thrive here. How do we think violence into existence? My mother thought violence into existence. It is just an earthquake. But then I became a missing child. I was more missing, than present and more mute, than sound, more or less living but not officially on the same page than other children my age were and there I would be. Alone, the Outsider while life happened to others. Change took place in society. I was never a part of that change. Was I ever (and by that I mean made of substance, something substantial) a child? No, never. I never played like other children. I never spoke like they did. I was more attuned to an adult world with grown ups and their nerves of steel, their silent treatments, their undiagnosed behavior, their neuroses, and the spirit of their love. There was nothing pure and spiritual about their love. It just made me feel that I wanted to be taken away from it all. I wanted to be taken away from home. I wanted to runaway. In this ward there are lovers and there are fighters. Some of us are even still teenagers. We are all woman, man, daughter, son, missing children, runaways (that’s the impression that life has made on us). We are united. We are ‘You People’. We are also You people this and You people that. She has made flowers but they burn right through me. I’m homesick for the poverty that I’ve lived in all my life. The lack of the flame of love, that slapstick maternal instinct, to slap that frown and long face upside down, turn it the right way round (in a perfectly elegant solution). The flowers are arranged the way I have been arranged all my life, perfectly, in sync with the rest of her children. Knife wounds heal but and words don’t. All I see around me is Antelope People, women who are gazelles and men who are kind, introverted and gentle like my father. So what if we are half a dream and half a journey turning, always turning at the look, the inevitable fate of madness. I’ve stopped running, caught my breath, stretched my whole ego out until it meets tomorrow head on, and met, supped with all the invisible and visible signs of autumn. I can live with autumn. In summer, winter, spring my moods are unpredictable. So I’ve stolen autumn for myself, for my consciousness, to keep me sane and predictable, also cold and aloof. It has pinned me down. It has kept me indifferent to a lot of things, to love but not to passion because a person can have passion for a delicate and frail bird-like thing but you don’t have to love it. Love it in the sense of loving it deeply. You can have passion for something and call it ‘security’. You can give it an emotional kind of security, an emotional kick and for some people that can be enough and for others swimming in lust, perversion, greed, corruption is enough for them too and they think they have the right to call that ‘having a passion for something’. Having a passion for something tastes like snow. You want more of it. You want to spread it all around, share it with everyone in your proximity. It makes you smile, it makes you ache for laughter, and it makes your heart ache. It makes you want to reach out and touch someone, in some instances it is so strong that you want to love. And or to at least consider it, all of love’s madness and confusion that conspires to set your soul afire, your mind at perfectly at ease with the world around you. When passion turns to love it tastes like rain.
It (poetry) forces me to live and to lie (falsehood upon false behavior in fragments, fragmented). Poetry is where light and dark meets. It is where poetry lives with the best intentions those two people who team up together in love and decide that they want to raise a family. Poetry lives with autumn and mementos, nostalgia, the mute, the deaf, educating the attitudes of the first hurt, ignorant and perverted.
It is where we drown and all the ghosts that we have carried with us forever. Poetry is brightness. So acute, so sharp, their depths magical and unsettling at the same time, disturbing, unnatural and supernaturally godlike. My mother is a gazelle. She is the sun. I am her vision and seed. And I’ve discovered that I need her now. We both need each other to live. What does that ache feel like for her? I can only imagine. Imagination is a great part of poetry. It is a great part of my life. I’ve called the people in the ward the Antelope People. There’s a beauty in the construction and deconstruction of the structure of the routine they’re all involved in. I am also a part of that order. Once it was a prison (this hospital, this ward, and this stigma of illness, my entire being) but now my world is a dream world and I’m phenomenally grateful forever meeting all of them. Some names and faces forgotten. You don’t remember me my Achilles in heaven, Orpheus, Craig. My name you’ve probably forgotten. It has withered away. It has no edges and no skeleton. I’ve tried to escape from the hurt but it is just becomes an object. I am the bone woman remember. A super-athlete run ragged and defeated with her breath caught at the back of her throat. You stole the autumn, heightened summer and winter, every platelet’s red bleeding heart of mansions and letters. You’re still a child with the heart of a child and a child’s mind. Once you went missing (you’ve been missing for years). I am no Rilke’s mermaid and no treasured relic from the past. We both had an inheritance. We both were seed and a vision. My tears sound like a violin that has no link, strings, no web or catalyst to any path in society. I now know what it feels like to live in poverty and to acknowledge it. I know what it means to be lost and miserable in it, to be accompanied by solitude, to live in an intrinsic struggle between wrong and humanity. Once it was a cell but now
I champion rights and the church. I champion human rights and God. Prayers stand alone like a figurine. I think this is how angels became significant to citizens and so the Antelope People do their best to survive in a world that does not want to acknowledge them. So one thirty-something day Owen and Craig just became ‘my Owen’ and ‘my Craig’. These two brothers became very important and significant in my life. They impacted the goals I had for my life and my dreams although consciously I didn’t really ever think about it only in retrospect. I remember Owen’s tears in front of our house after something that was said was misconstrued, his father, his sisters and brothers, (I remember Craig, my childhood best friend) his grandmother and the cage they were locked up in when they did something wrong. They would be stripped of their clothes, naked with only their arms to shield them from the freezing cold spray of water from the hose. In America they put photographs of missing children in comic books or on milk cartons. In South Africa they simply disappear. In Johannesburg they end up on the streets addicts, sniffing glue, sleeping under apple cardboard boxes. So their disgruntled grandmother would leave them there standing wet and humiliated in the cage. This would be the boys’ punishment. They would stand there with their hands under their armpits. They would shiver and cover their private parts with old newspaper that lined the chicken coop. They were fenced in. And that’s why I watched Clint Eastwood’s ‘The Changeling’ because I needed to know why and what became of these lost boys. Maybe I needed to mourn something, the fact that people do not live forever and that life is sometimes lost in tragic, brutal circumstances including forces beyond our control). I needed to know. I needed to heal some part of my life that felt useless, empty, broken, bleeding, dissolved into thin air. I live with the souls, the images of missing children, those living in poverty, Owen, Craig, Robert, David, mummy spinning in my head. I think about them when I’m lonely, on some mission, or crusade to help the poor, save them in some old-fashioned way. By giving away food or clothes in a maddening way. I’ve always wanted to uplift communities. I’ve drifted and my heart has bled so much for other people. Sometimes I dream about them and even in my dream Robert has the same substance and charisma he had when I knew him for real in the flesh. Charisma is pretty. It’s as hard as a diamond. It’s as harsh as is struggling under the cover of true suffering.
Was it really all those books I read, my early childhood development, is this really a gift, was poetry really such a tremendous talent, did I get it from mummy’s brains or from daddy’s side of the family. We were taught about blessings at Sunday school. A house is built for a family and churches are built for ministries as much as they are built for families and innocents and children and thinkers. What is life if it is just made up of chronic illness and long recovery periods after hospitalisations? Is this the inevitable end of my journey, to always be stuck here in the middle, the in-between of the raw and blurred edge of the surreal meeting never-ending reality? Glaciers meeting water, hair touching wind song, salt meeting the air and light, missing children with missing faces, missing names, missing belongings, missing possessions alongside Jews trapped in a holocaust (limbs and everything disappearing before your eyes in museums). The middle of nowhere found in the pause of a ballad, an iceberg striking water, limbs in a hospital ward, arms with their curious fingers and hands, eyes wide open, shut when face is struck. What is hell? This middle part or the end part of this madness journey. So we brought the flowers for them, for the ward that I had never been to and my father had never been too but others had. So my mother decided to cast them into an office space. The floral arrangement into an abyss of darkness, while she waited in an empty and dim parking lot and my father and I were lost in darkness waiting for someone to come and open up the door for us with a key.
You will never heal if you do not forget. But how could those poor Antelope People ever forget, those who were lost in a striking surreal existence. I watched them, one or two come undone and it is an unearthly demise. You can never go back there into that dissimilar, unfamiliar dark hole but if you do you don’t really remember much of anything.
Funny how they forget me. They phoned the people in Johannesburg but not me. They actually forget that I exist (they remember people, important people but then again, aha am I not important or significant even) that I had life breathed into me as well, that I have traveled even further than they have. My existence means nothing to them, nothing and then what does that make me. It makes me just a thing. Not even something that is splendid, something that can be restored. I wear a dress and I think it changes something about me. As if suddenly I too can become something that can be soft and gentle, adored and something that can be regarded as being physically beautiful or even worshipped. Forget is a word made up of links and chains linked to boxes and keys, chained to Pandora. So I will bring my poems to you now. I will read them to you beside you holding onto your one hand while in the other I recite words to you. Words give me courage now the way you once did companion and protector, friend and father.
The phone rings and rings and rings but I do not answer it. They want details but what they really want to know is it time, is he dying. Is my father, my hero and protector going to pass away?
It, the unstoppable waterfall of the diagnosis doesn’t give me any sort of security. It just does not want to go away. It reminds me that all of life’s work is a struggle. When the spirit of depression hit it first was an unknown, then a wave, then it came in waves. All I kept to myself was the secret that now I had to live again. I would chant, ‘Daddy, daddy you’re not yet gone’. At night those words would make his illness less of a war going off inside my head. I would feel safe. If I could still be invincible so could he.
I wear them. I parade around in them. I put my hands in them, lace them up. It won’t bring him back here to life in this room, this large house that suddenly feels so empty and it makes me feel so empty, so lonely, so forlorn. But I do it so I can reconnect with him on a spirit level. I can feel his presence, his fierce intellect, and his ego that once stood tall, that once was so commanding, so smart, and so full of energy.
I can’t stand her. I said that once but now I stand up for her. Now I stand up for my mother. It is strange when you become estranged from a family member or immediate family and then the reunion that becomes is one that is bittersweet.
I think he can imagine what it was like to grow up in a house like this. It was magical. Everyday was magical. Everyday we got our vitamins. We had strawberry milkshakes for breakfasts and hot coffee with milk heated up on the stove. I always burned my nose. We pretended we were drinking cappuccinos, drunk on them. We went to the circus and laughed at the ‘magic’ the clowns did even though it wasn’t funny (they had red noses and larger than life navy veteran t shirt and strange accents or spoke in strange voices). We went to the zoo, we went to the theatre, we had rehearsals for plays and then dress rehearsals for plays, and what did he have growing up except a baffling childhood. I had a baffling everything. Every moment, movement, image, gala of illusion was vivid and came with a baffling sister, mother, father and brother (nothing invisible about them). There was a home and a family that he must have belonged to in some way. And a home and a family that I belonged to in some way too (a brutal home with an aggressive personality, a brutal family with everyone always being at blows with each other, blowing hot air at each other).
I can tell when women don’t like me. Well, I don’t like them back. They remind me of my mother, my aunts, and my sister. They’re material girls, what I call ‘the materials’. I live with a very different set of goals in mind in that I write very simply about what I know. When the all the tests they ran on my father came back negative I did not sigh. I did not breath sighs of relieve with the muscles in my faces tensing, relaxing and then tensing again. All I could think about was how long the recovery period was going to be this time around. My father was a brilliant and formidable man, skin like ochre, always dedicated to human rights, defending the rights of the most vulnerable, women, children, the handicapped, the disabled. People who did not have the luxury of money, power, status, the emotionally damaged, emotionally disturbed, women perpetrated by domestic violence. He fought for me too.
That was the most significant. Who would tell me I needed friends (my father)? Who would tell me I was playing it too safe (my father)? Who would tell me not to hate, despise other people, lie, and display the opposite of the Ten Commandments (my father)? Who would tell me he would always be there (my father)? Who would tell me I would always have a home and a family to come to, who taught me about courage, motivating others to have goals, certain standards, that you had to be as tenacious, as good-looking as a Jean Rhys’s tiger because expectations do not last forever. Sometimes you fail even when you put your best foot forward towards the brink of educating yourself. And when you feel completely drained, as if you can go from nowhere, to zero it is your father’s voice ultimately that will pick you up by your heartstrings, that will pump your heart, your voice, give you the power of speech.
Who would tell me I could live my dreams effortlessly (my father)? My father showed me the world, taught me that love didn’t die. He told me when to turn back in the face of the high signs, the designs of danger, and the sadness that comes with wanton cruelty. He found me when I was lost (like the time I felt lost in an occupational therapy group feeling as if I was going scarlet-crazy solo). His voice steadied me while I was dead to rest of the autumn-world, while I was just simply waiting for any spirit to wake me up. He taught me it was impossible to love two men at the same time. He taught me that writing was more than just a profession, it meant hard work, devotion to your craft. It meant being committed to memorizing every half-pull and half-fall (that the world was your stage), that I was capable of independent action, grabbing hold onto the new decade upon me.
I had a unique past. A past that inspired the body of my creativity and both my illness and recovery. He made me sad but he also made me laugh. He taught me the purpose of living with your instinct on full volume. If my mother was my sun who burned me with her love, a love that I always had an elegant hunger for and her intimate gestures. My father was my Hollywood idol. I would settle into a paradise around him, under the spell of its geography and the ripples of its swimming pool. I would let that blues spell soak into me. I soared into the rhythm and rhyming-sonnet of my beating heart. I would steal away into the night and day with it. I couldn’t get enough of it like the ‘tunes’ (news bulletins) of Sarajevo, Vietnam, Rwanda, Angola, Germany coming over the air. Words like ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘genocide’, ‘mass graves’, ‘snipers’, ‘mines’, ‘refugees’, ‘refugee camps’, ‘aid’, ‘the Gift of the Givers’, ‘bleeding’.
‘Blood’, ‘stains’. The word ‘blood’ carried with it so much brutality, a beauty and a terror but also innocence. The innocence of a deflowered girl (doesn’t every virgin have a pale skin before she is touched) or one who has her monthly. I carried them like burdens, a boxer’s bruises (a face blue and black), and weights in a very fragile, yet a very determined thought-box. My father was the Wiseman, shaman, and navigator who would direct me. My journey was ‘everywhere’ and to exceed his expectations but he always expected excellence, nothing less. Where sometimes the filter to my mind’s eye would pop up and be brittle, his, my father’s was nothing more and nothing less than a lucky strike at a picture of power that had a spiritual property. I only wish we could transfer that to Wolf. I only wished all of wild, undone Wolf’s exit wounds could be healed. Wolf was my only childhood treasure.
I did not want to let him go. It’s become a loving tradition. Being heavenly functioning and productive on the go all the time and the construction of the earth-me (so promising and a fierce siren going off at all hours of the day and night). I produce (doesn’t matter what I do), falling down dead, standing up chin up, the feeling of the vivid expression of myself made me feel free somehow, high, electric, on fire like the debate of family values or about Jesus Christ. So what if I wasn’t in love forever. I had that life experience and maybe at the time I gave the performance of my life. I owned that symphony of emotion, physicality. There are shadows that I seek. The magnificence of madness is expert, and the maps are filled with mansions that have little rooms filled with something to devote yourself to cherish for. For the rest of your lifetime, dark charisma is waiting in the wings, alongside masculine charm.
Madness comes with the borderlines of frozen stars of Mascara, masked Adrenaline, and alarming clingy highs not made of flesh but breathless fun and its then when I ask myself, ‘Why didn’t you come to see me afterwards?’ You stole autumn. That is something I will never forget. December has come and gone but you never came to visit, you never came back. Why shy, stranger? Illness is not perfect but people still expect a perfect recovery. When they glimpse its mismatched angles laced with addiction, feeding the wounded beast inside of you, the monkey gripping your neck, they want to know who is this person? What happened, what has gone wrong, and suddenly you were here and now you’re not. The impossible has happened, the imagined has become illuminated, and conspiracy is hinted at, wounds are licked, there is no longer cozy joy in the world, and no longer peace in a galaxy.
There is only praise for autumn. The Marakana Inquiry is still all over the news. I never speak to Eve. She never phones me but life can do that do people, separate them, separate childhood allies. But she’s a chatterbox on the phone with my mother. I have watched people robbed, looted, humiliated, the orphans, touching lives on television but where are the real humanitarians who did it all with grace. Who are never asked for anything in return but aid? I wanted a dream house with children and a husband. A study where I could write to my heart’s content. Good books, proper books, and sometimes outlandish books but there is a community out there seeking a revival. Sister Wren has experienced a poverty of the mind in Johannesburg. She has found a script for better life-habits. Brother Wolf a revolution. Eve, dearest travels across South Africa armed with sense, rituals, and pilgrimages in mind. She wants to go to Peru.
And so I come to the lady in the water, the sinner (but in the end aren’t we all sinners) Virginia Woolf in the flesh, that death of the drowning visitor. Her brain cells turned into moths. Absolutely nothing escaped her. Her passionate seeing eyes, liberty, mitochondria and bilateral symmetry no more. Only the grit, the brick walls, the mysterious interiors of the mansions of her work remained. Left behind. Granite. Diaries left behind for apprentices. Her intuition, breath and vitality has left this damned for an eternity to hell corpse. What does she have to do with the parenting skills of my distant manic depressive father and my elegant and cold mother, my cool mental illness that needed a room of its own to coexist with my brother’s cigarette smoke, his fatherhood, his triumph where I had failed and then I voyaged inwards. River Ouse captivated me. I am a woman who writes. Virginia Woolf was a woman who was a wife, a lover and woman who wrote. My ordinary madness became a thing of beauty to me. Me an empty vessel who found bright stars in women, in their husbands and children, in flowers in a vase, in the fabric of the universe at night. I am Orlando. I am Lady Lazarus. I have lived vicariously through Hiroshima, Jean Rhys the demimonde and artist’s model and the feminist Sylvia Plath’s cutting-edged authentic words signalling warning, communicating threads of wisdom, and protest poetry. I needed to understand the London scene, Ted Hughes, Assia Wevill, and the child from that union, Shura. I’m afraid of modernism because it’s not modernism that is taking over the world. It’s writing. The interpretations of an inner life, marriage creativity and madness.
Before I discovered the Russian writers (Nabokov and Dostoyevsky), there were the English novelists, feminists before their time with their pride and prejudice, sense and sensibilities, the spell of Mister Rochester in ‘Jane Eyre’ and the ghosts in the wilderness of ‘Wuthering Heights’. I could not escape from their shroud, their magical, otherworldly and ethereal quality that covered me with the fairy dust of the sun, moon, North, evening stars and a feast of seasons. It was before I felt compelled to write with every breath. As a child I knew nothing about Africa. Words like ‘Cameroon’, ‘Botswana’ tasted like magic. All I knew was that the world I lived in held a sun in the sky during the day and a moon in the evening. North was up in the air somewhere.
Inside I still feel twenty-two. In his arms I felt cold, numb as if grief was pulsating through my veins. I looked at his face. I was smiling. He was not smiling. And my first instinct was that I had done something wrong. What were the details of the flaw? I decided then and there I would never make anyone happy or love me. Julian tasted like the different elements of Africa, the wilderness, grasses, winter. Hard to explain everything here. But I am sure you get the direction I’m getting into. Color is very important to me. All the textures, shapes, crafts, the black and white medium of the world seemed to collaborate somehow when I was with him. Julian’s eyes were bright. His skin was beautiful. It still is frozen in a time machine only his eyes are less sharp. His los angeles dodgers sweatshirt is still warm. His hands feel cool. I touch his palm with my fingertips. I can hear thunder, lightning crackling in the air, blue light, the field turning into sticky, squelching mud. He taught me what beauty is.
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write by Jethro