When You Were Full Of Dreams

There were days when you dreamt

Beautiful dreams

Of a thousand suns

A vast blue sea

Of stars hanging so close

So close that you would grasp them

Pluck them and hang them like chandeliers

…but those were those days

Now, without concrete dreams

And if you dream it involves dying

The days are cloudy, the stars hide

In cracks in the sky

The moon is mourning

The sun is shy,

It creeps across the sky

Sometimes stealthily, other times it creeps

Behind the shrubs of clouds

Hold My Hand One Last Time

Walk beside me one last time

Be absorbed in my sheepish tales

Smile and laugh, I want to get lost in your radiance

Hold my hand one last time

The sky and the birds witnessed us

Loving without conditions

Sometimes even without dreams

Living and breathing for each other

But then ends sometimes beckon

With vengeance unseen, demanding

For us to cross oceans, climb mountains

But without each other’s comfort

Hold my hand one last time

Feel my grip, feel it loosing

Feel it feels to let go forever

Feel how to feel without love

Promise to gaze at my pictures

Think about us during those good times

Don’t dream or long

That we shouldn’t have met

Don’t Bother When I am Gone

The destiny of man is the grave

Bitterness may be all I gave

Laughter and love may be what I hoarded

Don’t bother, the ship of oblivion I’ve boarded

Don’t bother when I am gone

To pray for my soul either dusk or dawn

For I will bargain for my fate hereafter

Don’t bring men who earn from the altar

Don’t bother when I am gone

Tears and pain in this world a conclusion forgone

And a world, a blameless world awaits

Without bills and fear of being among misfits

Don’t bother about me

Don’t regret the things you’d have done

I tried to drown me

And live the life you projected

Poetry Reading

You clapped the loudest in that poetry reading 

People throw weird looks at you every time I am on that stage 

Yet all you notice is my brilliance, or lack thereof, 

Your belief is steady, strong 

And when the two us are reduced to a mere bubble 

In a city where lights become a boon for thieves and whores 

You look into my eyes and say ‘let’s have pizza, 

Junky though, but mursik will cleanse us, 

And we’ll live straight to the edge of life,’

That’s how we plan – to accept life with the calmness of a dog 

Munching that Italian culinary invention, 

We get brilliant ideas such as: isn’t good to grab a whiskey? 

And we grab a whiskey and board that noisy manyanga to my ‘sheet hole’

Intoxicated by love, we look drunken in love 

I am even amazed by how my ‘introvertness’ wears out 

Suddenly I am superman feeling like I can’t pay the fare, and they will do nothing 

The Scientist

Clutching the phone close to my chest

I walked by the railway,

Dwarfed by thoughts

Numbed by the memories

I saw us relaxing under the eucalyptus shade

Talking,

Willing the time to stand still

I saw us by the verandah, smoking

I saw me waiting for you at Flax,

Anxious that you may have changed your mind

I saw us eating roast maize,

I saw us listening to Justin Beiber

Having nothing but our love for each other

Then I saw that I had lost it all

All because I couldn’t give you what you wanted

Because all I offered was love

 

I was a walking dead, without feelings

Lost in the cool November breeze

I lost your love and lost meaning

Coldplay’s Scientist spoke to my heart

It was a such as shame for us to part, the lyrics went by

I walked diminished

Wondering

Dying slowly when the thought

Of you doing the things we did with another man

And I clutched my phone every night

And listened to the songs that made us fall in love

Because all I had was a memory

A memory that wouldn’t keep me warm

Neither would it make go to sleep

The Chaos

Listen to that oppressive stench

Smell the noise of the beeping electricity meters

Sense the chaos in your house

Look at your feelings, study them

They resemble a poor man’s

That’s not the clothe you are made of

Aftertaste

The idea of love, for once

Adopted the metallic aftertaste

The taste of the mouth after vomiting

-repugnant

Repulsive

Stirred revulsion

And the thought of ever being love, ever truly,

Became an irrevocable impossibility