#poemsandstuff

I am content with the luster that adjectives lack,

to describe such a mood.

You are a heartbeat, hastened,

fastened to young bones,

holding on to red heat like old coals.

There is a jazz prelude on a warm night,

the city is bright, and humming your name.

I see you in it all.

I hear you when only phantoms call.

There, laid in your eyes were the stars,

the orbits of heavenly bodies, 

encased in your vibe.

You retain my being,

boasting, benevolent, reign,

my soul your domain.

Exhaling projections on my eyelids,

enlightened, I repose,

finding comfort in the thought that you do exist.

And you DO exist,

accommodating the whole of reality,

propagating the relevance, of immortality.

I found sense, hidden, in entropy,

and you were the one walking there with me.

You resuscitated emotion and, employed,

returned my heart, which belongs to you,

They tell me that Sundays are for forgiving, Rice, and best dress.

for buckled seat belts in the squashed backseat,

Rides with the windows rolled half down,

And Stereos, that spit out broken cassette Tapes.

Remember when we drove past the water,

and you told me that rain comes in bursts , then not at all.

That we all need a little place, that's just our own,

so houses could never be homes,

and neither can people.

I heard you fought your own body,

to clean out the stench of lovers that did not bother to stay,

you tried to , didn't you?

Your mother gave you this skin that was your grandfathers soil,

it remembers it all,

the tormenting sun,

she will curse the day you forget to wear it like, some precious metal she passed down to you.

I heard you can smell lost lovers in the air sometimes,

like their scent forgot to leave the fibers of your clothing,

i heard the memories come flooding back ,

like the rain our people prayed for,

see when the Gods opened the skies it poured for three days straight,

 and on the fourth i found your sister crying outside,

she says we shall surely perish, we shall perish! 

See, when she awoke yesterday, half your house had washed away.

  Lover, i regret to be the bird that brings you this bad news.

Lover! Everyday this body is a battlefield i wake up in, and i don't know which side i've been fighting for.

Love was a thing we did while our house still had doors.

Yours Thabo

Your Aunt Bella has been waiting for the rain for far too long,

her mother slipped away,

soon after she gave birth to her,

her father stood on the other side of the screen,

and he wept,

rivers,

then seas,

then oceans,

and when he was done,

he lay in expensive things,

in scotch,

in liqueur,

in women (the oceans)

See My heart is a river running through the mountains,

my body finds forget streams and it calls her its own,

love is a sea i am yet to meet.

Love is the ocean,

i am a small sailboat fishing in its waters,

the wrong man's daughter is the storm playing above me,

see my body needs things to call its own,

so it calls her home,

my heart will not find the sea.

My people were a kind and caring people,

but they did not care for these things,

so when the right man's daughter comes to ask for my affection,

i will tell her,

"I am not the type you fall for"

"my people did not prepare me for these things"

My body goes and calls the wrong man's daughter home,

yet she was the one who burnt this house down.

Your grandfather met your grandmother on their wedding night,

he showed his naked soul to a stranger,

they made love at first sight,

that month she loved him twice,

the first when he said she could name the child,

the second when he held her sick body in his arms

So when the right man's daughter comes to ask for my affection i will tell her,

"I am not the type you wait for"

i will tell her,

"My people taught me to love strangers."

Your Uncle smells of gunpowder,

he smells like the other men who stayed out late last night while their families waited at home,

he had to come here early in the morning so he only had time to change his shirt,

his jeans smell of cheap cigarettes,

they smell of the beer his friend spilt on him when he got up to talk to that young girl at the bar,

it's been two years since your aunt lowered her standards,

see she used to pray he stayed faithful ,

but after her late night calls went unanswered she started praying he'd come home at all,

so she lays there in silence and listens to the clock tick like some sinister metronome,

a malicious blade driving him to his fate,

and when that fire subsides,

he walks in smelling of the moans of a 19 year old girl trying to pay her way through college,

and blood,

this time there's blood,