I come into my room to look for you again. I don't know how you could love me & I'm still afraid that you won't. I'm lost again. (Please find me!) I want to cry again. (Please love me!) Again. I look for your face & find you looking at me. I'm thinking: "What he must think of me..." & then you kiss me again. I'm lost again. (& you sit with me) I want to cry again. (& you speak to me) You hold me. You love me. Again. from 'Never-endings' in Goodbye Songs & Thank you Notes
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My mind is sinking down through my chest
and adding it's weight to my heart. Together, they're heavy and pull on the skin on my forehead and under my eyes. Their gravity combines and pulls my hair in. My head is smooth, I have no eyebrows and my nails are withdrawing. I grow inwards, shrinking and getting heavier. The weight of my heart joins, kneads my liver into my mind. "Too much salt is bad for the heart," they say. My intestines lengthen and then contract around it all. My heart would be digested if it could fit into them. My stomach sucks up, but weighs nothing and adds only emptiness. I still have my appendix. Is it safe to have so many poisons so close to my heart? My kidneys get separated in the mass and they're filtering Strangers Tears & Blood instead of cleaning me. The skeleton stays hard and stretched out with my skin still stuck on it. To look at me, you wouldn't say my vital organs had moved. From my eyes you might be able to tell. From their being dry and scratchy-looking and a little withdrawn. - There are days when all I remember is the feeling of your death - Not You or you dying - just the feeling of me after you stopped. I have wanted to be rid of the snakeskin of your fingertips from the inside of my doorknob ever since you left for Cape Town. You interrupted me with your sweaty poster-paint hands and pulled your sticky skin over my head like a thief's stocking, blurring me. I had no room to breath the stale air you left; hyperactive bacteria crawling over my blue lips. I was numb from being squeezed between your bitten fingernails. Later, I wanted to inject you into the skin you left me in to ooze out of, finding myself oily and shapeless: A sewer puddle without surface tension: spreading everywhere. From 'The End: ...good riddance to bad rubbish' in Goodbye Songs & Thank you Notes.
1. Voices sneak inside my chest, talking. (that's the thing about other people's voices: you can't make them...) They're talking too loudly, too many opinions. (that's the thing about other people's opinions: you can't make...) 2. (sometimes) crazy, rejoicing or mourning or (suddenly) a brave and strong adventurer, I LAUNCH out into thin air and slowly start to hear my own voice echoing loudly in the silence outside my chest. 3. The day leaks from my eye-sockets. All my soggy cornflake prep- talk dribbles away and leaves a hollow place for other (people's) voices to echo inside my chest. from 'Inside: singing for my heart' in Its Inside-Out & Orange
When I grow up, I want to be a pudding. Maybe chocolate... or ginger; still slightly warm and jiggly, syruping in the coffee shop vitrine. Or on my mother's kitchen table. Yes, I think a chocolate pudding... When I grow up, I want to be a frog: Bright green and yellow, with white spots in a line along the sides of my glistening white tummy, flying spread-legged through the watery air and landing always ready to jump! Yes, I think a bright green frog... When I grow up, I want to be a cat in my mother's house, with my choice of sunny warm spots to snooze in in the morning, and tickly patches of garden after lunch and any cosy corners of the bed at night. Yes, I think a cat in my mother's house... - My mother says I will be a pudding (or a frog, or a cat, if I like, but) a pudding suits me best, she says, 'cause I'm so sweet. Yes, I think a pudding. from 'Nostalgia' in I sleep, I dream
I really loved him. I never found myself hating the skin under his fingernails like I hated yours. I really loved him without judging right(ly) from his wrong, without believing his worst, while knowing it (I never knew yours: you liar!) I loved him: being dumb, mute, sightless, faithless in love: being nothing, not like I was nothing to you. I loved him: not missing what I gave, not hoping to learn anything, not hating what was left. I really loved him a long time, trying not to find him, trying not to show myself exposed by you. I loved him secretly without seeking my reward or taking my revenge as you took yours. I loved him sadly, wishing for his truth, carrying my bloodied heart, believing in his goodness & despairing of mine, enduring my memory ... - Between you & me, I want less than the estranged tip of a lizard's tail, twitching with remembered life. From 'The End: ...good riddance to bad rubbish' in Goodbye Songs & Thank-you Notes
Morning. Breathing fresh(ish) city air into which not too many cars and bakkies have yet exhaled; warm white mini-clouds from my mouth making reverse trails for me to follow; running forward to meet them, breathing them in again and thinking Hope! Thin and hardly there, like invisible pollution: hanging around as long as there's no wind and then coming back again soon after being blown away. You can only see it from a distance, but, if you breathe really deep and hard, like you must when you're running, you feel that it must be there 'cause it burns in your throat as if you've been screaming and makes the air taste different: Sweeter than it should. It's there in the air and it's not getting blown away as completely as I thought. It's there and I'm breathing it in every day. Written in the New South Africa in 2001. Reading it to myself again this year.
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