Rebel Queens

Milky waters crawl down my fingers As I discover layer after layer Of flesh Of tightness Of beauty My garden wets as I gaze at her delicately sculptured folds Her fruit bursts with juices and flavor I snake lower charmed by her feminine aroma Lips plant kisses on petals Beautiful black petals, pink on the…

A Beating for Love

Your fist pounded my face In shock I stood there Not moving, not screaming The first time it happened You said you beat me because you loved me You put the blame on me I don’t remember doing wrong Your gambling and drinking Your womanising and flirting Your problems and woes Were all my fault…

L.I.F.E.

Life’s like living just at the edge of a knife Incredible, yet sometimes one’s choice is not counted Fear, one’s likely to succumb to courage’s rarely remembered Evidently, life’s not how long you live but how well you thrive Life sometimes wants to be a dictator It can twirl and whirl without one on hold…

She Seas

She will carry me away If I stare long And hard enough A wise old woman once whispered in my ear If I danced long and hard enough for the Sea She would dance into her waves laugh me into her warm endless depths that big, roaring laughter that shook the earth to its very…

The sun e sons of Africa

They come here with empty faces Looking for the sun The equatorial sun rays hit their eyes, They blink and find the son, Poised, smiling at their wallets With a hot, hard, black, cocked gun. There is no argument to be had with such a gun between your legs. Between sips of badly brewed, black,…

If there had been an owl

My son          died the death I should have died                   quietly         – he went – in his sleep. On that morning the sun shimmered like it had showered in gold – I would have understood if there had been an owl – two hoots (one for each year he breathed). and no sun…

The Broken Mirror: to teach people to hate themselves…

Who are you? I am Angel. No, really, who are you? I am George Stop playing around! I am Hanson, Ferguson, Manson, Johnson, Ellison I am… Zombie Lost in the ways of my people, my identity, my heritage I am the soulless black-white being that haunts the screens of materialism in the face of my…

I Lost My Teeth in a Fight

I. My father tries to kill me twice before the age of twelve. both times I’m a tiny thing on a floor. He breaks the branch of a jacaranda tree on my skin and I lose my voice. In both scenarios he screams: I will kill you. In both scenarios, my mother stands by and…

Take me to the river

We say “take me to the river”but what the river wants is the body of a stonethe kind of stillness that can be worn.It runs from its destructive natureand we run to its healing waters. What the mouth wants is wetnessa torrent of forgivenessto baptise flesh with abandon. We sing of the rivers of Babylonand…

The Searching Cheats

Whirl of the wind Sing decades of familiar tunes Encroaching voices of old whispering stories untold Cold the breeze our bodies Freeze The Misplaced Birds they say they wail “We have lost our way” We are to show them their way We? We point They screech “Where?!” We point again And again Then we tell…