Stan

 So nawe ungathatheki, ungashayashayeki, ungabaliswa iMillion ngamasheleni

- Kwesta

This man gains social height at the expense of my depth

Trading my trust for a Jesus piece that turns neck green

With both feet on my stomach, the bile rises further still

With each misstep and falter, my disgust reflex on overtime

The respect that you pulled out of the mouths of other men

Is riddled with ulcers and stomach acids leaving it unleavened

Uneven, unsteady, and not to be relied on, can't be leaned on

When striving to see your image in the eyes of others has staled

And the inauthenticity of it has made its way to your marrow

Deep seated, unignorable, flattening like a 'stat' without an 'us'

Could you stop digging your bronze heels into my ribcage?

You've kicked the locks; the doors are asunder; a violation

The stone walls have gone up, and you are on the wrong side

Of the best love you've ever known, a medieval loneliness

I've cut my hair short, and I've cut ties and ties of souls

There is no longer a way for you to climb up, over and into

You are besieged by all these lowly men who now prop your esteem up 

Who have also contaminated you with their picayune pedestrian ways

The cancer has spread, and you are no longer lofty, celestial and singular,

Your malignancy is a house divided from the outside in, a curtain torn

It's not like they even care about your well-being at a primordial level

Or care to know of how your life has been orchestrated by debilitating shame  

A shame that you left at the foot of a bed in Linden and are now beyond

The method remains prosaic, to try destroying what you have accreted 

And to drive a wedge between you and the object of their concupiscence 

And the great Esau fell into step relinquishing a birthright for a meal

A birthright to be wanted and loved for who one unadulteratedly is

For a meal that gives rise to hunger pangs just a few hours later 

I went to bed one day and you were a man, woke up the following morning to a Stan

Cinder by Lethokuhle Msimang

Now I stand at the end of one life and on the 

threshold of another. Contemplating. Weighing.

Above me lie the ruins of life. Instead of blind faith, 

directness, unbound energy; and instead of clearness, 

I have knowledge that comes with experience;

work that is limitless in its scope and significance.

Is it not enough to weigh against love? 

- Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth

This is the point from which you heal. Your room emptied of the things you don't wear, you won't miss them, even the things that were rare. Slim your items down to your bare necessities. Pray in the morning, make tea for your mother. Speak to yourself in consideration, be kind. Remember you are young, but you are no longer a child. Picture yourself left with a bag full of clothes, climbing a mountain, being on your own. 

You are simple. The life you want is simple. Learn to wash your shoes, try to rise before the sun. Do not fear a broken man, do not close your eyes to devastation. Do not go about life as if it were weightless, least not before you've embraced that you are black. 

Black as a mamba, black as burnt bark, black as the men you fear in the dark. Do not fear what you are, there is still warmth in a body with scars. Be gentle, daughter of God, as you would with the residual spark from cinder. 

In the distance, there is a mother nursing the wounds of her child. She is the image of what you must become to yourself. 

Spirit 2.0 by Sampha

 Who needs to sit in a palace when he already sits contently in God's good grace? 

Luke Kemp (paraphrased) 

Waves will catch you 

Light will catch you 

Love will catch you 

Spirit gon' catch you, 

Flashes capture us

Lyin’ in reflections

Moonlight hits your skin

Safe in conversation

You question where I've been

Two bodies on this mattress 

Save me as it sinks 

Automatic self-protection

Like airbags in my limbs

Next thing I'm drifting into open sky

And I don’t feel so scared

Dreamin' with these open eyes

I'm grabbin' at the air

Time will catch you, flash will capture us

Travelling for hеaling

I been speaking, I had to speak to myself

How far will I go?

Spirit, spirit, yeah

Still wear that chain you gave me

That eagle made of gold

And now I'm driftin' into open skies (Yeah)

I ain’t scared as before, ain’t as scared as before

Like, is anybody out there?

Like signals, messages, everything

(Spirit gon' catch you)

Just like Jonathan Livingston Seagull 

Try catch the clouds as I free fall 

I was caught by the wings of my people 

Then you pick me up in your two-door 

Hit the country roads, peaceful 

Can you fill me in with the info 

Stock was risin' like tenfold 

But you're more concerned for my mental 

Shutting down is your default 

Circling for a cheat code 

Sun is out and it feels cold 

Camera zoom on the eagle 

Find a bench and we recall 

Memories through a peephole 

Reconnect with the real goal 

Camera zoom on my people 

Coming Down by The Hollow Men

 I guess this is over now. I guess it's called the falling out

- Yellowcard

Coming down

Feel the ground

It's always been unpleasant somehow

Pass the crown

While bleeding out

The end has come, the war is to begin

And all the things that could be mine

They're drowning in reverie

How can I go alone in this now?

And everyone around, they speak too loud

Why would you carry me?

Why don't you go now?

I wish I could go back now

Running at speed of sound

Careless of what the future holds

It always ends just like this

Why is the fall so high?

From feelings above the clouds

Collecting the pieces caused by all my past mistakes

Can't remember why

Burning up

Like stars will fade

The light is gone, the colour's not the same

Cleaning up

Always the same

Another season is coming to an end

Oh, my mind

I can't remember how it feels to run

Remember who you are

Oh, don't cry

I can't remember how it feels at all

Remember who you are

Waiting for by rum.gold feat. Jamila Woods

 When a man loses his identity, he collapses back into his purpose.

- Sven Axelrad

Would we lose it all in the morning?

Suddenly the sun makes it all feel alarming

Breaking up our routine

This new thing it's daunting

Rest my head on you it's a border I'm crossing

Just another drop, fill me up, till I'm holy

Heaven only knows

What we'd do when we're lonely

Break the bread and watch as the seas come calling

All in my head, should I play it safe?

Hide away feelings and play the game

How can I tell if you feel the same?

I hear a change, when you say my name

Yeah

Searching for the words to tell you...

You. I cannot pretend no more

You. Tell me what's behind that door

You. I would risk it all and more

You. Could be who I've waited for

You. I can't get you out my head

You. Were the ghost to haunt my bed

You. I can't risk it all no more

You. Can't be who I'm waiting for

I just need some space

Please hear me out

I can't hear myself think

In this house

I am not your hearts first casualty

Maybe you should set me free

Take one step closer and you're done

Heaven only knows what I've become

Oh, you gave me love

I want it but I had to give you up

Umfudumalo (The Warmth)

 What does this guy have that we don't?

- He asked

Well... 

This fisher of my dreams taps dawn on its broad shoulders 

To cast first light on the waters and draw out my somnolence

From the fathoms in nets that nest hungry altricial dreams

Bringing them into the open air to be fed life and feed life

I am infinity pool meet horizon in his emergent glassy visions

A granny smith, ripe and heavy, in his perpetually dilating eye

Unblinking, this threshold place holds the edges of my becoming

Blinking, the marble eye gives way to Michelangelo's David 

To be near him, is to have joy boomerang between my vital organs 

Oh my heart, quickening with every tentative dexterous touch

Oh my breath, straining to catch the catch in my throat, his name

Oh my soul, to purify with a flame-hot visceral blinding ecstasy

Oh my regeneration, a liver enlivening a lover with viscous liquids

Oh my mind, trains trained on him as destination and journey.... 

This reader of my thumbed biography titled Yahya, the one who lives 

Reaches out to my pages five times in the night like nocturnal salat

Harasses my skin and reality for spoilers, I moan Allahu Akbar

Summons copses of olive trees so this page-turner has a strong spine

He bends me in lordosis, I don't break, iSleepover sa ka Sjava

And in turning a page, turns to face my solstice like a marigold

My heart, a catherine wheel, turning to his untainted goodness

The needle of the compass, points true and north, what height

Prick my finger on a spindle of your lips, this beauty could sleep 

When love bites kisses, to awake, to induce, to awake, to induce

These electromagnetic forces that have dogs going in circles

Has this innocent puppy love growing in intimate cycles, a-turning  

This courageous man who has crawled out of charnel houses

Wearing gleaming hope like a diamond on his burnt sleeves

Inscribing words of encouragement for the hearts of others

With the soot covering the bulk of his lithe scarred body 

This ardent everyman believer who has been flayed alive 

By the incendiary demons has an 800 thread count touch

Softening my core to luxurious moving molten magma

Splutter and sputter ecstatically into something Vesuvian

Something that can never be forgotten, quieting cities

A koranic divine wrath has made a mountain of you

This simple love is both archaeological and anachronic

Beyond the understanding of modern stone-hearted men

Kairos

 

Kairos, the god of fortunate moments, is supposed to have a lock of hair on his forehead, which is the only way of grasping hold of him. Because once the god has slipped past on his winged feet, the back of his head is sleek and hairless, nowhere to grab hold of. 

- Jenny Erpenbeck

Empty, upturned hands stretching out towards the lofty neck of God

Feeling for a pulse, the blood of Him, the beat of me, a covenant recalled

Face scrubbed clean of all the makeup of pretences and pretensions

Life, head, heart lines in need of a re-engraving: authentic, clear, full

Only a murmuration of the photosynthetic, a plosive of sibilant change

To brood my belly's sense of begetting my only concatenating ask

This coruscating love beneath cannot break the slippery surface 

The rust of immaturity cannot incubate emaciation to sustenance

It won't be long before love, the colour of that good, sweet wine,

Bleeds out on the blistering tarmac, braille bringing up the unprepared

Wrapping my arms around the Lord's neck, lifted and carried

A babe once more, the thrumming of adulthood in diapause

For a beat or two, to catch my breath and for gratitude to reach me

And for his architecture of confidence to become a cathedral

In the meantime, I hang this light heaviness around God's throat

Swing from it, launching myself into the great emptiness

Which smothers nihilistic desperations and exasperations 

Reducing patience to the name of an anesthetized woman

These atoms cannot bind me, I am unattached to tidy geometries

Nor direct my desires whose coterminosity has dangerously loosened 

It's swinging on its last hinge, mutatis mutandis, vestiges dissolving

God's ineluctable will, plasma and amniotic, surrounding and sustains

Keeping me in orbit as I catapult through the nothingness of space

And though I have made a great hames of my meaning making

He has made a name of me in his gentle heart levelling his frame

But love, the colour of my braids, is bleeding out on these streets

And it is Malawi day, the walkways are teeming with people and pigeons

A pleading, a kneading, a knelling, a kneeling in the plane of comeback

An inoculation against neglect, rust and blading beliefs that cut in two

The unity of begetting under threat of perpetual haemorrhage

A warm womb surreptitiously stolen from an anesthetized woman  

Schrodinger's womb, only once she opens her eyes, this patient,

And looks inside herself can she know of her womb's withering

The rooms in God's house are many, is there hope of domestication

For this improbable union, can it abode and abide in Him?

Or will this love, the colour of desire, stain the rug in the living room

As I rest its head on my lap? It can't die in abandonment like a stray.

Will he, holder of my name, ghost me and haunt my grave regrets 

sealing Faustian pacts with tender delicious kisses of barrenness?

Watching my now unrecognizable desires promenade further away

I raise a rock to the head on my lap needing not to prolong its suffering

It's just not your time to be born, the beautiful ones are not yet born