without myself
i swim to the horizon
in search of misty, grey-blue safety,
to listen to gut-voices.
Questions arise.
How to handle softly –
still handle smoothly?
Endure my body’s noise?
Withstand the self-shouting-ragin’,
dis-together
un-integrated,
non-collective of bone-muscle, energy and emotion?
In the many of life’s aftermaths,
i encounter, internalised ponds of splitting from oneself
dealing-leaning (amidst a site uninhabitable)
as it prickles into stretching backspace and
a hip opener
where the danger, the past,
gushes through openings forced in the dark.
i fear the dive into the dark.
Over seasons,
the violence of before
becomes violence of my inside(s)
with my uninhabitable body containing too many stale voices;
contaminating heart-blood
– they made my body a host.
Outsider anger streams and mingles with my own.
Fractured into many knots, now surfacing unshakable.
More knots when i want unfazed waters,
non-threatening and non-radical;
just the same collective story of inherited trauma tides.
i refuse to commodify the autobiographic but
i want to move;
to both carry and pass through.
To not reject tales but scribble-deepen
the hot-blooded gut-voices,
that usually rip-flash into a knot
pulling inwards, downwards,
searing-shouting outwards…
Gut away.
Get away!
In 1987, i screamed out into the world.
One lung collapsed, skin yellowed by organ failure,
fitting in one palm of a paternal hand.
Instantaneously, i.
i grow, i quieten,
i begin collecting.
Much later, there is a grip onto bedsheets.
Gritting teeth, clenched jaw,
a loss of time and order.
Memory as flashes.
i begin living with a permanently interrupted thread,
with markings of trespassers.
Alien entry leaving shame in its wake.
There has never been a mantra for this.
For recovery from this.
Only eternal attempts to ground through pain
– buoyant elation is too risky.
i choose to itch-etch my words as they grate
down pavements and silence social gatherings.
My body; an elastic, fantastic, fantasist, takes the long way round to munch numbness.
//
Dig the pen in.
Let ink run.
Let it un-parch feelings so that one day,
i still cannot tell you how it feels.
Within and without is all
horror-calm
but (with sci-fi premonition)
i radiate my pieces outwards.
They have healed,
warmed under acceptance of each fragment.
Mountains at midnight;
spines forgotten in the mist,
goddesses on their backs.
All is thick.
Ancient and renewed.
A sigh
“pele”’*
(* ‘pele’ a sympathetic ‘I’m sorry’ in yoruba. My uncle uses it in rare moments of empathy.)