Waiting For My Turn To Exhale - By Mahlatse Magau
Written By: Mahlatse Magau
Category: Poetry
Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026
Mahlatse Magau presents an evocative piece titled "Waiting For My Turn To Exhale" in the Poetry category for the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026. This profound work delves into the complexities of human emotions, capturing the essence of love, loss, and the quest for healing. Magau's poetry is a reflection of personal experiences and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
About the Work
"Waiting For My Turn To Exhale" is a deeply introspective poem that navigates themes of love, loss, and healing. Mahlatse Magau employs rich imagery and a poignant narrative style to convey the emotional turmoil and eventual acceptance that comes with life's challenges. The poem is a tapestry of raw emotion, offering readers a window into the author's soul and an invitation to reflect on their own journeys.
Waiting For My Turn To Exhale
Original Submission by Mahlatse Magau
Waiting for my turn to exhale
Mahlatse Magau
Waiting for my turn to exhale
Dear reader
This book is all that I believe my life to be
The loving
The hurting
The healing past the hurting
Growing older
Failing to heal at all
Waking up yearning for happiness knowing I’ll still go to sleep wishing I won’t wake up again.
The believing
The learning
The dying
Preparing my mind, body and spirit for what they have needed most since 1997
To Exhale
Chapter Index
The Romantic Tragedies
The Loving
The Hurting
The experiments and all the happy bits in-between
The Grow-Heal-Learning
The
Romantic
Tragedies
When love arrives pt. I (Poltergeist on vacation )
You may try to make yourself a home for them. Make space in your bookshelves for their favourite literature. Study at the altar of the stove, the soup recipes your mother learned from her mother for healing. Sweep the dust out regularly and burn incense to complement their fragrance. Crisply iron your clothes that provoke the famished greediness in their eyes. Despite the elements, the welcome mat at the door will always be swept back into place before the dust even settles, the steps to the door counted twice certain the exact number is what finally keeps someone
Only
The seeds they plant may be foreign to the soil of your patch garden. Your recipes may get colonised by salt. The rose water you both bathe in could very well be thinning out your hair. You might not ever taste like the last sip of whiskey lingering on their bottom lip. Cloth and polish in hand, no amount of elbow grease can clean their smudge Mark from the photo frames in the living room and the mirrors your reflection is bent in.
(Why did you bother to take so many photos?)
They might make a hotel room out of you. A pit stop. Lying awake at the witching hour, they are a poltergeist on vacation and you are left haunted with their luggage under your eyes. Sooner or later you’ll be the only one keeping the bed warm. Sleeping inside a morgue , you only wake up on the way to your own funeral
Love hasn’t arrived here.
A Buzzfeed questionnaire for old love
1. Why would you ever try to tear my faith apart like that?
2. Does your therapist know everything about me? ( I know mine knows about you intimately )
3. Do they think we’re a jigsaw puzzle better solved apart?
4. Are the hues of stardust still the same when you watch the sunrise in your new love’s eyes?
5. Is small talk just as much torture for you as it is for me? Knowing all the love that lies buried, decaying, in what we’re not saying.
6. Are you getting to embrace other pieces of art in your new city? Are they better than mine?
You are a phoenix flame.
Mesmerising
Terrifying
Ready to light your way into your own reincarnation.
And so that’s exactly what you did when you came back home from rehab. Drunk on your fresh set of life lessons and coping mechanisms it was time to treat me like the drugs…
So it is here that my life is at your mercy.
Bound by rope to a Salem’s Crucifix.
Intoxicated on my own feelings.
Ready to be burned by the fire that you have been your whole life.
Wondering…
7. Were you ever planning on calling me back?
Sleepwalker
This bed is a river that I do not get to sink or swim in.
Really I just float aimlessly right above the ripples.
Thirsting
The Moon is my only witness to how I will dry swallow these sedatives just to be weighed down into the currents.
Crossing my heart that I will drown.
Filling my lungs up with the hopes that they will return
Dear Neptune
I can no longer lucidly survive this nightmare.
Where I am awake as an isolated insomniac and asleep I am at the bottom of your ocean of memories.
But whisper the answer to this into my ear like the rainfall in the wind…
Do they get to have sweet dreams or are they praying to you on the shore sleepwalking? On the hollow altar that is their own empty side of the bed?
Eclipse
These flowers you have brought are here not as a gift but as memoriam at my tombstone
What is it that I should be begging for… mercy?
In order to give birth to your new life you had to deliver death to my door. Your beginning has met the end of all the ‘I love you’s ’ that remain unheard and unsaid.
And so in your final act in the lead in the play that has been Us… bury me on the dark side of the Moon on this day; the solar eclipse of your heart.
At either dusk or dawn you will find my ghost reflected in your rear-view mirror, marrying the old shadows of yourself you drowned once you were sober.
“What am I going to say at your funeral now that I have silenced you with my departure, my love ?”
Recite your voicemail at my graveside. It is truly the only eulogy that will keep me and our romance in the coffin
Withdrawal
You will probably turn off your phone this year for your birthday because even though it’s not my place too I’ll still buzz it like a tax collector.
Why can’t you stand to look at me anymore?
When it is those same eyes that once saw me as a blooming white lily while I felt at my most grotesque.
You are still submersed deep under my skin and I might need an exorcism in the Sistine Chapel to purge you out.
How much of my own blood do I need to offer your gods in exchange that you will still bow at their altar praying for me?
Where exactly did you misplace your faith in love and what is keeping you lost?
Like clockwork, I wage wars with myself at the witching hour over these poems about you. The only weapon involved here is my heart in your hand, loaded with overthinking for bullets and hopeful waiting as the trigger…
Years ago our addictive personalities collided into each other at ungodly speeds willingly; high on the idea that all needed was each other too feed the hunger our demons salivated for.
The Moon makes a puppet out of me every cloudy night, sleepwalking me on strings. She only gives me one question to act out in the play before curtain call…
Who told you to leave me with these withdrawal symptoms while you got sober?
Figures
Ain’t it funny,
how you were alone lonely.
Misunderstood to the point where could not be translated with a Rosetta Stone.
Hiding all the best parts of yourself away from the world until I discovered it as treasure.
I remembered it like it was only yesterday.
I took off your glasses and gazed into your ocean blue eyes and readjusted the lenses that you blindly looked at love with and it was a miracle… I saw you see me for the first time.
I fed you when you were starving,
Laid you down when insomnia held you hostage.
Made the rain pour to cure the drought in your chest.
How naked do you feel whenever you have to wash the red jersey I gifted you? When it’s the souvenirs of dead love that get stitched into our flesh.
Ain’t it funny,
How I’m the only one that still remembers your birthday is the 15th of February? Isn’t it hilarious how you don’t take photos anymore because you don’t recognise your face in the distortion of my absence.
Go figure that you’re not the perfect stranger in your own reflection. You ruined your own happy ending when you tried to replace me as your ghost writer.
Exile
I am a criminal on trial, pleading guilty of committing horrendous crimes.
I tried to illegally mine rose gold love in the arms that didn’t have the capacity nor the want to hold me.
The judge, jury and executioner shake hands in a blood pact on what is the only punishment befitting of my insidious law-breaking:
I am to be exiled into the vast darkness of space until death, thrown completely out of orbit where your heart is.
Soaring through the atmospheres at lightspeed towards my imprisonment can only be described as peaceful drowning in every shade of blue.
As I drift through this celestial vacuum, a lonely astronaut, I am afforded the opportunity to gaze upon the stars and ask myself…
Will you remember me in the constellations we claimed for ourselves when we promised the universe forever?
The drowning turned into a crash landing on the Moon. In the chaos of the debris from the ship – new craters formed that spell out your name.
This is a once in a lifetime kind of death. To be buried in a grave made of moondust… so whenever you might want to have a conversation with the night…
You are only rewatching the funeral.
Death at a wedding
In my dreams I wake up to you excitedly waiting for my eyes to flutter open as today promises to bring another adventure.
Only in reality I will probably die on your wedding day, and in turn you might deliver the final eulogy at that matrimonial funeral.
I wonder what you'll have to say for yourself.
Dearly beloved. We are gathered today too lay to rest the victim of a crime of my own doing. Here lies the body of one of the loves of my life, whose heart I held hostage, and at no point did I demand a ransom so they can be set free.
Here lies the man who generously gave birth too all the best parts of me, as both a soulmate and best friend. Rest in peace, my one true confidant , who I took for granted. My own crucified martyr who, because of me, his sweetest dreams became illusive as I warmed the bed of my newly betrothed.
His ancestors are listening, aiding his oh so devoted spirit too crossover to the other side. May his heaven be a love that will be reciprocated tenfold, in spite of my betrayal. Ashes to ashes, stardust to dust. May we all pray and be thankful for this coffin and the hearse that delivered it here to us, a selfless sacrifice so that this diamond ring may sit perfectly on my finger.
He will be survived by this beautiful, unrelenting marriage we have united here to celebrate. His life's greatest achievement.
Reflections on the delusions of grandeur we called a relationship, a dissertation
Defamation. Noun.
The act of damaging the good reputation of someone, slander or libel. The defendant claims that what they shared with the plaintiff was not romance, but rather obsession with an expiration date, disguised as good intentions stemming from their personality disorder.
The defendant claims in their own notepad poetry to not know what it means to have been in love. The plaintiff would like the record to show that this is a trauma response.
Intimacy. Noun.
A close, familiar, affectionate, loving personal relationship with a person or group. A close association with detailed knowledge or deep understanding. The act of recognising your darkness and becoming a lighthouse . Our bodies searching for the other in sheets. Ironing out your stutter when you confess the secrets that make you shake. Clinging onto you with my arms and legs as you spiral, a safety harness until things make more sense.
It's in the hopeful waiting. The weight inside my lungs. The enabling of overthinking. The kinship made from
scratch with your parents in the family home.
The wide awakening of our third eyes while we sleep.
This dissertation seeks to report the findings on the phenomenon of mourning potential. The never quite moving on, merely forward.
Why do you deny yourself heaven?
You think it's not possible for someone like you.
Given the time, I would have sewn together biblically accurate wings to dance with your demons.
You are a sweet melody unsung.
A glorious sunset never to be witnessed.
I have never been afraid of your mess.
My greatest fear, is your incapacity to readjust your lenses to see what I have seen.
You phrase it like you're doing me a favour,
Letting me go before you can grow to resent me.
Your father named you soldier of war, and that is exactly what you have been your whole life. Consumed and later addicted to the chaos.
The greatest wealth you have ever accumulated is in the economy of pain, and even at this very moment you're being taxed by phantom collectors.
The milk and honey in my voice was never going to drown out the ringing of gunfire,
But I would have whispered life into you until it faded regardless.
You never had to flee and abandon someone that was always going to choose too stay
Confessions of a photographer
I fell in love with a draft.
Not you.
The version of you I was writing
in my head while you were still figuring out your first chapter.
I painted you in colors you never wore.
Invented a plot you never agreed to follow. For six years I mistook your potential for a promise. Truly thought I knew you. Turns out I only knew the person I was trying to build.
Everyone else saw what I refused to:
you were showing me exactly who you were and I kept insisting they were misunderstood.
You asked me to photograph your engagement and in true martyr fashion of course I said yes.
Stood behind the camera
documenting the moment
you became someone else's future
using everything I helped you become.
I wanted you to grow and you did...
just not toward me.
And sometimes when you are about to stitch the final threads on your build-a-bear they've become someone else's happily ever after.
"I wouldn't have gotten married
if I hadn't met you first."
And somehow I'm supposed to find comfort in being the blueprint
for someone else's happiness.
I can't be angry.
I did this to myself.
Fell in love with my own edits
and blamed you for not matching them.
And years later I might find myself clearing out old photos asking:
Was any of it real?
The
Loving
When love arrives pt III
When love arrives it will envelope you in its arms and ask you why you ever disappeared. Hold you so tightly that all your fractures stop aching long enough to forget they were ever separate pieces to begin with, dulling into a distant memory. Lift you up to places you always felt you were too heavy to belong in.
When love arrives it will be road-worn and certain after taking the long way on purpose, afraid of what a shortcut might have cost you both. You will welcome it into the family home where your heart is with its luggage in your hands, Unpack their taste in music, clothes and all their insecurities into your wardrobes. And be damn sure to lock the doors twice at night.
When love arrives it will say to you that it loves hearing you laugh. And for each other you will grow into comedians. When love arrives it will tell you that it cannot resist gravitating towards you. And you’ll let your full weight rest against something without checking if cracks formed under the pressure. No longer will there be a need to count the reasons you had for not deserving this.
And for love you will return on a loop.
Endlessly. Not because forever is promised to anyone. But because love will choose you on the unremarkable days too.
.
Amazon Gift Card
My dear butterfly
I hope that remembering this comes as easy to you as breathing does.
The love that we have for each other transcends Omnipresent, unfaltering and unconditional. Forever and always.
From
…
Genesis
The creator.
You made the shore crash into the ocean. Banished Lucifer into heaven.
Unbrothed the family stew. Robbed the garden of photosynthesis. With only words you enchanted the hearse that is my heart and spoke life into it.
There is necromancy in your every breath.
You are my first holy communion.
The one really acidic heartburn episode my ribs confused for a stroke. A sultry ruby red rose, whose thorn will always be stuck in my finger.
I still remember how you taste. Forbidden. The mania before the waves of depression. Levitation in chains; you have anchored my spirit to your back pocket.
I still search for you in all the new lovers.
Seek out the same adventure you possessed in the dark browns of their eyes. Wander the expansive valleys of minds yet I only find hills. Craving the same lust in their bites.
Aimlessly journeying the ends of the Earth in-denial that you are the destination. I still yearn to be the revival to your relapse. Cursed by your mind games.
Stained by your stolen kisses.
Marked by your blood.
No poet ever forgets their first exorcism. The poltergeist that leaves them the wedding ring of insomnia and marries them to the Moon.
You'll live forever in these rhymes.
Immortalised in every proclamation of devotion.
Cemented at the core of this museum of tragedies. You are where the spilled ink first learned to paint pictures on paper.
The beginning to all my very different ends
My original sin.
An incomplete field guide on how to love a survivor of borderline personality disorder
1. They will call you in the middle of a panic attack on the drive home. In that moment, no one will have ever reliably brought them as much sanity as you have. They don’t even realise that they are safely parked in their driveway, given how tuned in they are to your voice.
2. The queue of people waiting to greet you on your arrival at the party will discombobulate them to the core. This will be a key lesson that love prohibits entitlement, shortcuts, or greediness. (Of course, a show will be made out of how much longer you embrace them though)
3. Any of their attempts to beat the love-bombing allegations are a dismal failure.
4. They will let you see the embarrassing version of them. The one who hates being seen crying. The one who apologises for crying while still crying. And is still secure enough to let you stay in the room while they figure out why.
5. They will want to know your history during the obsession phase. Not because they are collecting evidence against you. They are trying to understand the architecture of the person they have become inseparable from. ‘Who raised you? What makes your intuition doubt the relationship you feel safe? What is something nobody gave you when you needed it most? What broke your heart? This is when they’re at their most attentive.
6. Keep a few crisp insults for friendly fire ready. The teasing helps to humble their god complex. Results may vary.
7. Remove the halo off the top of your head and gently place it back in their hands. You are no angel, no matter how godsent they might convince you you are. You have never been, cannot and will not be the one to save them in every universe.
8. In order to gain their confidence, you may have to surgically cut yourself open. Undo the stitches on your deepest wounds with a needle driver, bleeding out the traumas that make you diagnosable. This is how you prove to them you aren’t fragile goods. Vulnerability and reassurance are often only recognised when communicated in scars.
9. Every quirky story of a moment from their childhood is a litmus test to gauge how much of their ugly you can tolerate.
10. They will love you loudly. And suddenly quietly…
They may not always know which volume their heart is supposed to be. So sometimes they will hand you the entire thing at once.Every imagined future. Every nightmare. This can be frightening. It is also an astonishing act of commitment.
11. They will send you songs instead, the lyrics are stand-ins for what they cannot get their mouth around. Every playlist is coded with confessions. Listen closely for the chaos behind the harmonies.
12. They will lie to you at times. Retelling the horrors they had to survive has made countless almost-lovers fear for their lives and run for the hills. So you are fed what is palatable. You are likely to hear more about their struggles with quitting the vape than the familial abuse, exorcisms, and near suicides.
13. They may ask questions whose real subject
is attachment. Underneath the ‘are you sure?’ may be a small prayer: let your yes still be true in the morning.
14. One day, in the least cinematic moment imaginable, fear may stop being the only narrator in their heads. Not every declaration of love knows how to call itself love. Admissions of their past mistakes and insecurities are all leaps of faith. They would rather risk being known than remain entirely hidden from you.
15. With their permission, the greatest act of service you might ever gift them is to catalog all their trains of thought and patterns in your phone’s notepad. Never to be seen again. These are for their therapists’ eyes only. (Refer back to tip no. 7)
16. Do not be tempted to forget your boundaries. Love is capable of surviving the occasional no. The need for reassurance is not permission to consume you whole.
17. My nervous system noticed your absence
before my mind could explain it. The text message will read that they miss you a little. Even though you saw them yesterday and you will see them tomorrow.
18. Play stupid games. Win stupid prizes. Bring up that one ex on your dinner date at your own risk.
19. Uncertainty may arrive disguised as anger at times. Or tears. Long-winded voice notes where they speak in parables. Anxiety is a terrible translator. Whatever the costume, the moral of the story is always what they are too proud to ask: are we OK?
20. Resist the urge to leave mid-argument. It’s not that the conflict must be solved tonight. But the sudden distance can feel like a door slamming on the whole relationship. Handy affirmations can be anything along the lines of : I am not abandoning you. ‘I just need a pause. I still care about you. Coming back to you is the plan.’
21. Don’t roll your eyes when they tell you ‘I’ve never felt this way before.’ Absolutes are natural when you feel everything in extremes. The feeling may be real even when the language is enormous. Love can arrive
with a megaphone with the volume button broken. You can still help build a language that leaves room for reality. Quietly remind them that ‘ you are important to me’ does not have to equate to ‘you are my entire world’. There is love in making room for two truths (Refer back to tip no.7 ) .
22. Believe when they tell you they are trying without surrendering your boundaries. Trying is not a synonym for healed nor is it a free pass. It is an acknowledgment of the work they are proactively putting in.
23. They will apologize with terrifying sincerity. A defendant who has already served the sentence. Read you their full list of crimes before you have finished being hurt. The apology will be so complete you will have nothing left to be vexed with. Somewhere in the middle you might find yourself running your fingers through their hair to comfort them. Begging them not to punish themselves too harshly. This is the part no one warns you about.
24. One day their obsession with you will end and so might the relationship. Neither of you is a wound the other must spend a lifetime trying to close. You will have followed every rule in this guide. None of it is a contract. They will be well. The love you have for them needs to be able to survive this part too. Your thumbs will keep wanting to go back to the notepad entries out of habit. But you have to keep your promise dear reader. Refer back to tip no.7
Till we meet again
These four lonely walls have changed the way I feel. My neck rolls in waves with every push and pull of tidal nostalgia of what we once were.
It is the witching hour. The spectacle of the show is how I levitate on the puppet strings of the ghosts that haunt me.
You should be here.
To cut the strings. Burn sage to purify the spirit. Surf new waves that crash on the shores of our possibilities. Hang pictures of us transcending the limits of compassion our physical forms contain on these four lonely walls.
My dear butterfly.
I wish I said that you are my circle of life. My ends and beginnings are looped in the corneas of your eyes. I dream of you in colours not known to exist. I wish I said that it's through the kaleidoscope in your hands that I witnessed the entire spectrum of love.
The Aurora Borealis in my blood.
The silence of what I'm not saying to you is deafening. Our atoms are splitting but no one else can see the eruptions laying devastation on the landscapes of our skin. It's only God's grace that kept us alive in the airport for the goodbye.
My dear butterfly. Till we meet again
Safety
A miracle for the devoted
Therapy for the troubled
A bowl of broth for the freezing
Aloe vera to the burned
A spell of merciful rest to the dying
Abundance for the impoverished.
The holy grail untouched by Armageddon .
Gravity for the stray astronaut who’d forgotten which way was down.
The first unlocked door after a lifetime of knocking.
A drowning man convinced that the shore itself was another trick and read rescue as an ambush. A nomad who kept both feet out the door and only peeped in, certain shelter had a landlord that would change their mind. Counted every kindness as evidence being gathered against him.
When I was lost in my own danger, you found me and gifted me with safety.
There isn’t even a currency or an economy that exists yet that allows me to repay this debt
In the dark
For our sake I pray that my mother never learns how to communicate with the Moon. Because if she could , she would invite the luminary over for tea, and lo and behold the secrets we whispered to each other in every kiss would be spelled out by syllable and letter.
See, you are exactly the kind of lover my mother warned me about, her finger pointing and wagging at my empty head. You're the type to say that they know a place, and by that they mean a derelict parking lot ; where no one but the Moon can bare witness to the intimacy laced into our conversations that happen in the backseat of mother's SUV. Obviously I've lied about my whereabouts to be here.
In all of our secret rendezvous you are an artist through and through. Our lips meet and you start painting me into your heart's picture; pinning my very essence down with every stroke. You'll be hanging this muse above your bedroom wall soon…
Even in the dark you’re still working, memorizing me by touch the way you would a canvas before the first stroke. We grow like daffodils, rare and out of season, blooming on our own clock, long before the Sun can get a seat and play audience to it.
When what if gets answered
To the greatest what if of my life
I want to tell you that you are a performer of miracles. I have beared witness to you unknowingly burn too a crisp the journals of what the stars had written for us. I am able to testify on the stand in front of the judge , jury and executioner that you really do love me, but your happily ever after is going to be with someone else.
And to that I say...
Thank you
For letting me practice.
You have been the many botched figurines of red mud clay that I needed so I could mould flower pots blindfolded for the lover I truly deserve.
You have been my greatest lesson and educator. In your chalk board teachings you spelled out the difference between what it is to desire and to be desired. It's almost embarrassing that I needed you to demonstrate through simple arithmetic what it meant to be a placeholder and how much greater it is to be held together when on the verge of collapse.
I kept solving for x alone. The answer needs two names on it. The equation only balances when both sides show their work.
When common sense leaves the body
You and I are the children of two natural disasters, floods and drought. And yet here we are, continuously surviving the horrors that made us to bring salvation to the other's world…
After our first kiss you put our foreheads
together and the common sense started leaving my body. And in this meeting of the souls our mutual demons shook hands and began plotting our downfall.
Your demons convince you that you are undeserving of the gifts I have to offer you in the same way mine harass me with the insecurities I can't shake off in the mirror.
And so we banish them with salt and rosemary
I have always seen my own brokenness as shackles on my hands. Little did I know that all I needed was a partner who would take my sharpest shards with their own and make new pottery out of us.
With every other kiss along with my common sense you also left me speechless. And so I will say this in all the other languages available to me.
Lerato waka
Ndiya'guthanda
Je vous aime
Ek is lief vir jou
I cannot wait to make love to you in more tongues
;
For you?
I would breathe life into you if I had to…
Even as I lie here with a punctured lung and an oxygen tank.
Cheer you across the finish line. Despite the fact that you didn’t even get out the starting position to start running.
When the wonders and mysteries of life become too overwhelming I can teach you magic.
I would rather drown in the thickest oil than have to wade myself through an ocean of the mourning singing dirge hymns at your grave.
You will love yourself. You will choose yourself. You will try again. Regardless of how heavy your bones are. No matter how far ahead your eyes won’t let you see all the things that were waiting for you. As sure as the light will burn to replace the darkest night…
Under all the agony that may tempt you to end it all; there is heartbeat persevering for you to carry on.
Believe in it.
Sweetest Confection
Preheat the heart to yearning for
75 kilograms of you,
measured not in mass,
but in memory.
Crack 3 eggs into a glass bowl:
for the Leo in you
sun-strong and golden,
a yolk that binds everything together.
You were always the center,
always the reason the whole thing held.
Sift flour slowly;
Virgo rising, precise to the gram.
You hold structure in your silence,
quiet hands folding corners of chaos
into something tender enough to rise.
You never let love arrive clumsily.
Everything with you is refined;
even longing. As well as the way you hold my chin when I won’t meet your eyes.
Add sugar by instinct and not by measurement. You taught me that sweetness is best served when unexpected. The way you leave the last bite, the way you soften when no one’s watching. This isn’t the granulated kind.
This is the sweetness that lives in restraint. The “I missed you” you never say out loud but tuck behind a warm plate and stolen glances.
Pour in milk, full cream,
like the way you once poured your childhood stories into the gap between us, spilling wounds like cream into batter; softening the ache, making everything richer.
You linger like spice. So we add a teaspoon of cinnamon. Not too much, just enough to smell you and the warmth you leave in a room after you’re gone.
That’s what you do; leave behind traces
like scent on skin, like a secret I haven’t finished unfolding.
Vanilla essence. A dash.
This is the part of you no one sees.
That back-of-the-neck softness. Your voice at 2 a.m. isn't loud, but it's unforgettable.
The you that writes with stillness,
that tastes like childhood and choices
you never got to make but carry anyway. a kind of comfort that doesn't ask to be noticed but changes everything when it's there. Melt butter into silk.
This is the heat I bring. Reciprocal to how you love, slow and sure, melting into the cracks of me without ever asking me to hold shape.
A pinch of baking powder
for the faith you have in things unseen, for rising, even when neither of us
knew if we could.
Whip fresh cream for the way
you hold softness without shame.
A topping, yes, but not decoration.
Just another texture of devotion.
Fold in ground almonds
like all the quiet ways you've taught me patience. Every small gesture, the unspoken acts of care. Love, with you,is textured. Never plain. There are things I taste in you I have no name for.
Cocoa powder, bitter because not every part of you is sweet. Your mouth when you’re telling the truth. Your past, still clinging in places you don’t show me.
I take it all in --
not to sweeten, but to understand
Add generous chunks of dark chocolate
For every time you asked,
“Are you sure?” and I answered with a kiss that meant “yes,”and “still,”
and “again.”
Spoon canned caramel into the center—
the heart of you. Sticky and golden,
a secret kept soft inside your spine.
It oozes when cut.
You said you didn’t know how to be vulnerable, but look what pours out when I get close.
Bake at 180 degrees of quiet devotion until fragrant. Check it when it smells like coming home.
Pour into a lined designer tin—
gourmet, like you.
Curated, careful.
Beautiful in ways most won’t understand.
Cool on a wire rack.
Not because you’re cold, but because even joy needs time to settle before it can be served.
Love that’s too hot too soon collapses. Because I want us to last.
Frost with laughter.
Decorate with Sunday mornings.
Slice carefully.
This cake weighs 75 kilograms.
It carries a full person’s worth of desire,
doubt, ritual, and return.
This is you,
my sweetest confection.
The cake I’ll never stop remaking
with flour-dusted hands and an open heart.
And me?
I am the lucky oven.
I got to hold all that heat,
and rise with you.
We begin, not with hunger nor a recipe
but with a craving only you can answer.
I serve it without apology.
Without permission.
Without trying to make it lighter.
I am the one who got to bake you into forever with these words.
Twilight Hospital
During an emergency Cosmic surgery,
God herself placed the Full Moon and the Sun in exact equilibrium to each other in the West and the East, where she cut me in half with precision along the horizon of the sunset.
The planets aligned on the operating table of this hospital room coloured by the Northern lights to give birth to a new shooting star , where a galaxy of other hopeless romantics will wish upon themselves for a love like this and label it with angel numbers from their clocks.
Stitched and sown back together again,
God will now commence her rest on this Seventh Day.
From the inevitable end to the blooming beginning of a blossoming flower at sunrise, I will stay rooted here by gravity at the centre of the universe. Where our hearts eclipse.
Lilith
If I didn’t know any better,
I would think that this Saint Celine wine
was to be consumed dripping off your lips.
That the vineyard aged it for the exact moment your mouth met mine.
The velvet finish, dark plum, the aromas and subtle notes of flavour behind the sweet red is lust.
Not love; no, not that diluted nectar they serve in public.But not just any lust. The kind that flickers behind closed curtains. That waits patiently in the throat until one gasp sets the whole room on fire.
Lust, aged in a woman’s hips,
bottled in the hollow of her throat,
uncorked only when the moon is thick with mischief and even the stars avert their gaze.
I sip slowly.
You, watching me over the rim of your glass, ask for nothing because lovers like you never beg.
You summon .Conjure.
You exist like a question that burns the tongue:
what if god was a woman with her legs open and her shame undone?
You, Leo Sun, heart-forward, spine straight, born to be seen. Your Cancer Moon gives you away in the quiet; the way you touch like you’re reading my fears aloud, the way you listen to my silence like its music.
Your Virgo Venus doesn’t rush. She studies. She crafts pleasure like it’s a ceremony, clean sheets and trembling hands, arousal dressed in precision. Every kiss from you is proof: intimacy is an art of noticing.
My Pisces Sun, all fog and ocean-floor knowing. A body made of memory and imagination. I feel you before you speak. My Libra Mars seduces in symmetry; a slow undress, a balanced inhale, a gaze that lingers just long enough to ask:
“Do you want me soft, or real?”
My Aquarius Venus wants you to want my mind, but tonight she wants to be touched until thought disappears.Virgo Rising meets Leo Rising in candlelight, and the air becomes stage and sanctuary. Your devotion in detail. My divinity in chaos.
You whisper my name like a prayer you don’t need answered. Your hands roam like you’ve mapped this terrain before, a cartographer of soft danger, charting where my pulse betrays me. You don’t ask for permission. You wait for surrender.
And I give it.
Every part of me that’s ever been told to sit still,be nice, keep clean, call back, they dissolve beneath the weight of your wanting. You pronounce my name like you’re tasting it for its power. I arch into your mouth and meet myself there…feral, fevered, free.
There is nothing soft about this love.
Lilith, you are a sacrament we do not deserve, but still, we kneel. Not in worship but in full-body confession. Each kiss between us is an absolution without penance. Each moan, a psalm unsanctioned by scripture. We part for you, not like an opening, but a return. There’s no shame in this altar. No guilt in this gospel.
Lilith, they warned me about you in hushed tones; called you a siren, cursed witch, a seductress. Said we’d ruin men, ruin order, ruin God’s design. But you? You meet me in ruin and find ritual. And when we’re spent, when your breath steadies against my back, when even the stars look away in reverence.
I realise…
This is not sin nor shame. This is soul. This is Saturn watching us rewrite the script. This is the past collapsing under the weight of our want. And me?
I do not apologize for being the desire they buried in fire. Because tonight, we are Lilith. We have no reason to fear each other. You drink what drips and bless what was banished.
The
Hurting
Miscarriage V1
The apple might not fall far from the tree but it may still decay neglected in plain sight at the roots.
The umbilical cord, was burned off with anxious avoidant attachment.Our belly buttons are lifelong scars to mark your undiagnosed postpartum depression. In your old age, you finally admit that you do not know where to begin to be a mother to us ,the abominations of your womb. May God and the ancestors share in abundance their blessings, wisdoms and graces with the daughter and son raised by the voices in their heads.
Your name translated means mother of herds in Sepedi.
Your cattle lay slaughtered, bloody, under the trap door at your feet. A consequence of your parenting.
Goddess of loneliness,
Our Lady of Emotional Absence,
patron saint of conditioned disappointment.
Origin of life, our cold distant sun.
Breastmilk of our apathy.
Tender muscles turn tense and rigid under your touch, we trauma respond at your attempts of affection.
This childhood home is now an orphanage
as I have had to mourn both of you, while you were watching your soapies and sports. Condolences are said for the versions of you that never existed. It's anyone's guess if either of you are still alive in your seperate living rooms.
Why she stayed
My mother is the furthest thing from a witch. She has never had to perform the dark magic of hiding black eyes with foundation and a well-blended shadow.
He doesn't rape her or decorate her limbs with bruises so he must be a good man.
So she stayed
His lips peak and trough with the same smoothness of barbed wire. Every word his baritone brings to life is an ominous roar. He could never be unheard when his only language is emotional abuse.
But he'll make good money, as every husband should. Move the family to a neat house in white suburbia that he will sometimes provide for care. She is a village girl from Manghegetha born in the peak of the Apartheid regime
What more could she ask for?
So she stayed
Even when he can't be bothered to have the sex talk with his son, look away from the football long enough to stop the profuse bleeding from an injured knee, shed some light on how he can learn to drive or give half a fuck to even remember his birth date… At the end of the day boys need their fathers ( to teach them first hand that familial love is a currency they'll only be wealthy in by loving no one else back)
So she stayed
The village suffers its own epidemic of men who do not belong to us. Men who pride themselves by
impregnating as many wombs by different women possible only to leave the children haunted by their absence. Men who will vow in sickness and in health only to be the plague on our sanity.
The village women hold me in prayer at the altar
Begging God that the genetics can be reversed.
So that when I blink my eyes do not pierce with the same cruelty
When I speak my tongue does not curl with the same malicious lies
And when I fight to deem myself worthy of love in this lifetime my fists do not clench with the same abusive patterns
So as a village, we live in homes and not stay in our own hearses...
Genogram
[FATHER'S FATHER]
Left his successors with more questions than answers. Did not even leave behind his surname. His true identity was buried with the woman he burdened with having to raise a son alone just two years after Apartheid had been legalized.
↓
[FATHER]
Eldest son. Product of his time.
Compulsive liar. Drafted excuses before apologies. Insists the fear in his presence is a sign of respect. Inherited entitlement from the regime oppressors he so desperately
wanted to mirror and acted like it was earned. Wore the burgundy blazer of the Men’s Guild in the Methodist church and later outsourced his hatred to black magic so God couldn’t trace it back.
Could not be bothered to let the household know whether he was coming or going for work and ultimately stayed gone.
↓
[SON]
Inherits the intergenerational absence.
Masks the gashing wound with humour and calls it character development.
________________
[MOTHER'S MOTHER]
Taught her youngest daughter everything she knew. Did not know that some lessons skip a generation and some traumas teach themselves. Passed down her scones recipe, home remedies, old wives’ tales and survival.
↓
[MOTHER]
Wore all the mistakes and unlearned lessons like a noose and never took it off. Held death in one arm , hope in the other and called that balance. Ignored all the sirens and warning signs thinking she knew better.
↓
[SON]
Watches her leave him now, in real time, with only scraps of herself still written in her own name. The one entry in the genogram not yet history. Inheritance still being handed down as he writes it. Inherits a spiritual war declared at the altar. Calls it composure and wisdom before it’s acknowledged as the signs of a child soldier.
________________
[FATHER]———————— [MOTHER]
╲ ╱
╲ ╱
[SON]
(unresolved)
Patriarchs Prayer
Our Father
Who does not belong to us
My fingers interlace in what we thought was your name.
Your kingdom came with counterfeit crowns and yet we call the wreckage a gift.
Your will be done, in your echoing absence.
As it is on Heaven and Earth.
Give us this day, and we will live it in dread.
Forgive us, we still don’t know where you ventured when you went quiet.
We will try to forgive those who have trespassed against us, though it is your hands that are the evil we pray against and need delivering from.
For kingdom,
for power and
for glory, for forever,
a debt the village pays for in blood
For my kneeling,
Amen.
Kinship
There is a violence beyond war in my blood.
A mourning echoed in graveyards.
A torment beyond haunting.
Our grandmothers count the alcoholics with their wrinkles, the abusers with each of their aching joints and the men who could not be begged to stay in each of their grey hairs.
Their daughters. And their daughters. Tried to build homes out of magicians able to exist in two places at once. In return they were rewarded with glass houses furnished by the stones of infidelity. The closest thing to love can only be found in the cracks of the soon to be shattered walls.
Some Sundays in desperate need for divine intervention they raise their arms in habitual worship to a heavenly father that will not honour their prayers. Their husbands are in the same pews hungover from the night before with their arms crossed.
The Dining Table Has 17 Chairs
— a multi-generational case study on abandonment, authored by a reluctant heir
Abstract:
This paper examines the architecture of absence as curated by a patriarch whose only consistent contribution to legacy was sperm and contradiction.
Fieldwork was conducted in kitchens, courtrooms, and hospitals.
The hypothesis:
What happens to a child raised at a table where every seat is temporary?
My father built a table for two,
then kept inviting ghosts.
All the meals would be séances.
Every chair, a confession booth that never opened.
Each plate a peace offering gone stale
before the prayer even reached the ceiling.
He said grace like a man who had never learned to stay.
He sat at the head like a king with no crown,
no kingdom, just a rotating throne of women taken for granted.
He built a table that collapsed under the weight of
honesty. A masterpiece of emotional instability, held together by name-dropping, myth, and tradition.
The seating chart includes:
* Wife 1, the martyr.
* Wife 2, the cash cow
* Mistresses A through D.
* The children he claimed.
* The children he denied.
* The children he forgot.
* The pastor who blessed what should’ve been buried.
* The sangomas he paid to make sure no woman could ever leave him whole.
* My grandmothers, eyes glassy from seeing too much and saying too little.
My grandfather, his real father, also dined in absence.
The pattern repeats. The men carry knives sharper than their tongues but use neither to feed their kin.
God was a rumour.
Faith was a woman cleaning plates she never dirtied.
The children. sat there with forkfuls of questions
and a hunger for something other than survival.
All I ever wanted was truth that didn’t taste plastic.
But every conversation at that table was a eulogy
to the family we pretended to be.
Dessert was rituals without repentance.
So I learned to chew betrayal with my mouth closed.
What does a son inherit when
all the good china is cracked,
and the cutlery is trauma?
A mouthful of scripture and hatred.
Silence spoken as a second language.
A surname heavier than sin.
A birthright of resentment.
The Ugly War
I only ever shave my beard clean off once a year at most. These curly centimetres of hair that cling to my face are the only distance I can get away from the trauma.
Trauma is a bored sadist that enjoys punching its sandbags twice in the same place it left the first black eye.
Over tens of dozens of Moon cycles later, my vessel still seeks understanding, of any sort really, as too why it's most sacred parts were ever defaced before they could even encounter love.
The mirror holds in itself a detailed retelling of the war that is my nude reflection.
Upon being vandalised, I had ugliness thrust through into my very core and colonise whatever lands it could discover. The contours of my limbs are makeshift continents. The mountain ranges in my spine flattened out by the steel bed frame I'm being forced against .
Where my wrists were repeatedly held down are the burning villages and forests reduced to nuclear ash from napalm grips. The muscles and nerves that make up my hips are refugee camps. Resisting and trying my best to keep my legs closed only put me under a more brutal siege with more territory to be claimed. My thighs and what can be found between them witnessed the worst of it all. Guns took what they wanted without permission and the barbed-wire borders of my thighs that connect at my knees were pried open as collateral damage.
Afterwards, it feels like people look at you as if the folds in your neck are upside down and you do not belong to yourself anymore. Before you ask...of course I tried to speak out to the authority figures responsible for me at school and at home, but much in the same way my cries of agony had been muffled by harmful hands over my quivering lips, I had been silenced with the phrase that boys will be boys.
I have spent thousands on dermatology and skin products since then. Urgently trying to negotiate with my flesh to wash out their unwarranted acts of domestic terrorism. Cleansing out the colonial ugliness. Applying and rinsing and applying and rinsing and applying and rinsing. I choke sometimes on my own desperation trying to scrub out their stains.
For some reason I am the one responsible for making sure that my face and teeth do not reek of loneliness or emptiness.
I can still feel the earthquakes. Every time a woman comes forward with a story of her rape on my Facebook timeline I still feel the earthquakes rumbling under the surface of the scratches and bruises that still haven't healed from my own assaults and molestation.
And so when women beg for their own lives to not be treated like expired canned food, I know that their tears smell like salt sea water and those tears drift down their faces like splintered wood in a wide river among the debris of bombed cities, volcanoes erupting in new explosions worse than the earthquakes under my own skin...
The smell...
It reminds them of the ugly war
Rope burn
The card of the quirky drinking game read:
Take a shot and say the first thing that pops into your mind when you think about rope burn?
Without a gun to my head, I ignored the heat from my flesh ripping apart, hands holding on for dear life to the back of a flannel shirt and a suitcase that did not want to stay in a house where two lovers would grow to be their unstable and abusive fathers
And after the tequila smoothed over my throat with the liquid humour one needs to be playing drinking games I answered:
Elsa from Frozen singing Let It Go
Notes on their marriage
1) My niece, from her point of view thinks I had a good upbringing growing up. I only need to reveal the truth to her through two questions. When was the last time you saw my father and what does he look like?
2) I was in the womb for the ritual. Not blessed, just bartered. Where a dowry should’ve been delivered,
there was only my mother’s silence.
He placed a ring on her finger like a noose.
The white dress made her the lamb.
The altar: an execution site.No witnesses.
Just ancestors holding their breath. The hexes were disguised as vows. I am a miscarriage walking
3) My mother wears her trauma like a wedding veil.
She never took it off.
4) I was born drowning. There was too much water in the womb. They cut me out before I sank.
Lungs too strong to quit, a scream too holy to ignore.
5). I was born early, not by mistake but summoned.
My mother named me Mahlatse — Lucky.
She whispered to the stars, “I am lucky to have you.”
My mother held death in one arm, hope in the other.
6) Keorapetse, he named me. "I prayed for you"
He, the one who summoned storms
and then abandoned the village.
He prayed for me, then left me to be raised in fire.
7) He was there, crying in the hospital room that he was receiving a miracle. I wonder if the scent of his lies still trail down sterile corridors. I carry the shame of his sincerity. Even my name has teeth.
8) I was kept in an incubator, a child between worlds,
held alive by science and chanted over by spirits.
9) Our house was meant to be a sanctuary.
Instead, it became an open mouth, a feast for demons.
Muthi under the floorboards, baloyi in the light switches
10) The trusted healer confirmed what our bones already knew— he had been casting since before my name was ever put to paper. There were spells woven into our doorknobs. Salt under our feet. Bad omens in our tea.
This was never a home. It was a trap disguised as a family .She had been dying long before the wedding.
.
11) She lit candles. He hid knives.
She sang hymns. He buried things in the soil.
We were never alone.
12) The ancestors watched in confusion
as she set the table for him every night.
Even after he’d dined elsewhere. My sister and I were fed on her back. She made miracles from nothing. Butter bread from prayer. She was always last to eat.
13)“A ngwana wa letsogo le le bogale,”
the old women chant.
“You were born of the sharp hand.”
Meaning: He doesn’t love with palms—only fists.
14) She thought she was wife. But she was witness. Warning. Withering.
15) Eventually she walked softly. Learned not to disturb the sleeping devil. The consequences of her silence would later begin to scream.
16) She would still pray for him. Not because she loves him. But because she doesn’t know what else to do with the rope she tied around her own neck with his surname
17) The ones who came before me—
my grandmothers, their mothers,
the queens and prophets of blood—
stood at the foot of her bed and wept.
They struggled regularly stop the bleeding,
but they braided her spine with survival.
She patched her ribs shut every morning.
18). She danced in dreams with her lineage,
asking them to take him back, liberate her from the bondage . But he’d built a dungeon where she would have had freedom.
19) The church said she should endure.
She should pray harder. Forgive deeper. At times prayer was her only medicine, her only rebellion against a house thick with shadow. It made her bend further. And she broke.
20) I wish her prayers were poison. Fire
I wish they burned him from the inside.
I wish she were less godly. Or at least I wish her God was more vengeful.
21) I was born with a war inside me.
Not because I wanted it,
but because it was prophesied.
22)My mother cannot hold my gaze too long.
The features betray her. A forehead, a mouth, a brow that once told her love. Now just landmarks to a man
who undid her.
23) Sometimes I wonder if I had to shoot myself in the mirror, would I finally look less like him. Or would the bullet miss me entirely and find its way into his chest?
Would I finally see my face alone?
24) My half-siblings perhaps were born in bedrooms
where love might have been bought by the hour.
They wear his smile, but none of his burdens.
25) He fed other families with our sacrifice.
Children we didn’t know existed appeared on his bank statements like confessions. Love paid for in direct deposits.
26) We were his only, he said. But his only has postcodes, birthdays, surnames he’s never said out loud
27) My mother read those names like funeral programs.
Every syllable, a spade of dirt tossed over the marriage.
28) Five women. Maybe more. Children like scattered embers across provinces. Each name a secret. Each womb a wound he never stayed to clean.
29)The half-siblings will grow. They’ll wonder about the
man they call father. And I will have nothing to offer them except a mirror and a warning.
30) The ancestors cry in the pipes.
The house groans under the weight of hidden truths.
The soil grows nothing where he’s stepped.
Rain avoids our rooftop.
The trees lean away from the walls.
Even nature seems to have chosen a side
31) This is his second divorce.
My mother is leaving him with the scraps of herself left behind. The other women may have been swallowed whole.
32) He has lied to her therapist about how he fears for his life in their bed because she might kill him as he sleeps. There is no diagnosis accurate enough for his delusion. He calls her dangerous but it is his fingerprints found on our mouths stitched closed
33) He looked the therapist in the eyes
and cried like God owed him peace.
Not a single tear reached his soul.
34) He still calls himself a father. Demands respect for it. Even though he left his darkness longer than his
presence. His legacy is an empty chair. His portrait is a dent in the wall.
34) The village we came from suffers in famine .
He left our name in disrepair. It stumbles out of mouths.
It coughs when introduced. It has no home to return to.
Every child cries like they’ve seen something.
Even the goats refuse to bleat at night.
35) She was wife by contract, not by heart.
She was guardian, mule, confidant priestess.
All titles. No salary.
36) Every time I walk into love, I wonder if I’ve inherited his appetite. And each time it ends I fear I’ve inherited her wounds.
37) I will not be polite about survival. I will not make palatable poems about a father who buried us alive.
I walk with my ancestors in broad daylight.
They don’t whimper; they wail through me.
38) If this marriage is a curse
then I am the undoing of it.
Not a footnote but the revolution that ends the ritual.
I am my mother’s bloodline returning to her.
I am the ghost of his sins learning to speak.
abandonMENt
With a snap of their fingers, these magicians would disappear like thieves of the blackest night.
Leaving me so lonely that I prescribed myself back onto the pills doctor; to fill the abyssal emptiness they left me responsible for.
My therapist after a sip of water would then ask me:
Are you talking about a friend, a lover, or your father?
Confessions on Father’s Day
I am a burden on the backs of the men that I project my unworthiness onto.
It is through their hands that I beg for them to perform miracles out of the decrepit clay that is my body. I’ve been handed a wrench I don’t know how to hold and told this is what makes a man.
May the clump together a new lung where independence and self-love should be. Roll up firmer biceps with their palms so I can finally fix the leaks in the ceiling myself.
Sculpt me into a statue that can survive the erosion of gender roles and tradition, having to grow into a man being moulded without a father figure that my village needs me to be.
I keep building myself from a blueprint I never got to see, and I still don’t know if this silhouette is a man or a convincing guess.
This land has a habit of burying women beneath headlines and hashtags, turning their names into slogans before they’ve even lived full lives.
Grief here has a schedule: it trends on Mondays and fades by Friday. Their names rot in forgotten timelines, like unmarked graves behind gated communities. We are a nation of short attention spans
and long funeral processions. A republic of echoes, where mourning is rehearsed and justice postponed.
I have grown weary of the "not all men" tantrums lit like petrol bombs. How many times must we spell
Tshegofatso Pule in candlelight? Or repaint the story of Uyinene Mrwetyana in broken post office glass?
The country parades pity like a float but never arrives at action. The blood dries before the outrage
does in the comment sections.
Anene Booysen died screaming.
Karabo Mokoena still burns.
Nokuthula Mabena never made it home.
Kwasa Dlamini was buried beneath the news cycle.
Cwecwe Mtsweni was found in the river
like a secret the country hoped to forget.
Olerato Phalatse’s smile now lives in a coffin too small for how loud her laughter once was.
Namhla Mtwa's body wrote a diary
the justice system still refuses to read.
This is not poetry. This is a post-mortem report signed in blood and patriarchy. This is a eulogy for the living,
a hymn for every girl who has had to rehearse her escape route while walking to school, to work, to church. This is sacred rage.
Our dire statistics are a curriculum
they won’t teach at former Model C schools. Because they still teach little boys to speak first, to touch without consent, to ask forgiveness instead of permission.
I write this with my lungs full of fury as a survivor of the epidemic and my tongue heavy with shame.
Because even I, born heartbroken in a body deemed man, have been made to swallow silence like communion have watched sisters fall and wondered
if my breath could build a barricade.
I write from the mouth of my own guilt.
As I am hoping the men I affiliate with are teachable and actively studying how not to inherit violence.
I, once have stayed too quiet in rooms where jokes became grooming and men mistook discomfort and fear for flirting.
This is about accountability .
If your masculinity can cost them their lives, then your manhood is a debt we cannot afford to keep paying.
Dear Not All Men,
if your hands are not building safety,
they are a threat. If your voice doesn’t echo theirs, you are an accomplice. Masculinity cannot continue to be a licence for terror. Commit to showing up, not with speeches, but with shields ready to be used against other men. Even if they are your friend, brother or uncle.
Not with pity, but with protest.
Not with saviour complexes ,but with softness and service. Learn to be a mourner, a witness, a saboteur of your own privilege.
Break the chain. Torch the altar.
Unlearn your inheritance.
To all women, girls, femme presenting and queer persons: I do not write to speak for you but with you.
I write because the silence of men
has always made your deaths haunt louder. I write because your lives should be poems and not obituaries. You deserve to walk unaccompanied
and live unafraid. You deserve joy, return, breath.
And we, as a country,
owe you more than mourning.
Grim Reaper
The witching hour has come again ticking waiting for it's children to cast spells on the playground. The other kids don't pay me much attention because I've been putting on the same magic show for half my life now.
With a blank glossy eyed stare into the void , the final act of the performance begins. Water and Air are weighed harmoniously on the scales of this dark abyss. Heads or tails, do I or do I not exist?
Floating in the silence, the silence talks back to me using my breath. The quiet echoes in my voice that Heaven is no closer than it was yesterday.
Thobela Badimo tsaka
I am raising my arms to you, a toddler in need of comfort. Twist my tongue in the right direction so I can put into words how it felt to look up from the imagined blood on my wrists into my reflection where I found the Grim Reaper wearing my face as a mask in the mirror.
My ancestors parted my lips to respond:
Wana wa rōna, ho ne ho tšoana le ho shebella lefu le lenyenyane. e entse hore o lle ka puo ya heno
(Our child, it was like watching a small death. It made you cry in your home language)
My guardian angel and all their personal assistants must suffer from chronic anxiety and obessive compulsive personality disorders at this point in their contract with me.
To be suicidal for 13 years at 26 is to be in a situationship with your own will to live. The flirting between is a thrill ride. There are no measurements or blades involved in this slicing of half. You just sit there in foetal position waiting for your phone to ring. Wondering if you'll ever leave yourself on read
Miscarriage V2
The seed may have been sown but the soil it was buried in was salted -- nothing grew but grief.
You did not plant children; you scattered consequence. Your presence was a whispered rumour. Your discipline, a disappearing act.
The family tree grows crooked under your craft.
You cast black magic into our bloodlines
then named it tradition.
We carry curses we didn’t consent to.
Our trusted healers say your shadow still sleeps beside us, that even your footsteps leave hexes.
How many daughters does your guilt avoid?
How many sons rehearse your mistakes?
Prophet of abandonment,
High Priest of hollow intentions,
Deacon of Broken Homes,
Minister of missed birthdays
Pastor of unpaid maintenance.
I wonder how many times you vanished before the baptism.
You turned your loins into liturgy,
anointing wombs and disowning the altars.
We cannot say your name too often or too loudly in fear it might activate your muthi.
Your reputation is a sermon on betrayal.
Your gospel: orgasm and exile.
Your sacraments: abuse, adultery, absence.
I sometimes daydream about your jail sentence,
pressing my palm to the prison glass
during a conjugal visit I would never offer,
just to see if you would lie to me again;
or finally confess with your eyes
what your mouth was too proud to admit:
that your love is a fable too long-winded to believe in.
I carved myself out of the silence you left behind.
Your inheritance is a haunted house,
and I am the child locked in every room
trying to slay your demons with white sage and frankincense.
Depression, A Love Like No Other
You came to me quietly,
like a hand on the small of my back
guiding me out of rooms where laughter overstayed its welcome.
You did not knock.
Never did.
You knew my name before I learned how to say it without apologising.
You told me you loved me
by teaching me how to disappear
while still showing up.
Taught me how to sleep
with my eyes open.
You kiss me with heaviness,
said this is what devotion feels like.
Insisted real lovers would weigh me down so I never float away and forget you.
You learned my rituals.
How I rot politely.
How I make my sadness presentable.
How I tuck my grief into clean clothes
and call it discipline.
Made a home out of my chest
without bringing furniture, preferred the echo.
Said emptiness is more honest
when left unfurnished.
You fed me silence and called it intimacy.
Taught me how to hold my breath
until my body confused survival for love.
You told me everyone leaves eventually
so you stayed like mould on the ceiling,
a leak no one wants to admit exists.
You lay beside me at night counting my failures like rosary beads.
Each one a prayer unanswered, proof that God is not above leaving me on read.
You called me your favourite place.
Said I felt like nirvana,
because I'd never ask you to explain yourself.
Ruined me without asking why.
Your philosophy is that happiness is a phase, that joy is just a rumour
invented by people who had never loved deeply.
You said pain was commitment.
That suffering meant loyalty.
And if I left you I would be betraying everything we had built out of sleepless nights.
You asked me to choose you
over sunlight.
Over food.
Over the future.
You asked so softly
it sounded like mercy.
And I almost said yes.
At some point, I have to stop confusing endurance with devotion.
And I almost said yes.
You asked so softly it sounded like mercy.
You asked me to choose you over sunlight. Over food.
Over the future.
You said pain was commitment.
That suffering meant loyalty.
And if I left you I would be betraying everything we had built out of sleepless nights.
Your philosophy is that happiness is a phase, that joy is just a rumour
invented by people who had never loved deeply.
You called me your favourite place.
Said I felt like nirvana because I'd never ask you to explain yourself.
Ruined me without asking why.
You lay beside me at night
counting my failures like rosary beads.
Each one a prayer unanswered, proof that God is not above leaving me on read.
You told me everyone leaves eventually
so you stayed like mould on the ceiling,
a leak no one wants to admit exists.
You fed me silence and called it intimacy.
Taught me how to hold my breath
until my body confused survival for love.
Made a home out of my chest without bringing furniture, preferred the echo.
Said emptiness is more honest when left unfurnished.
You learned my rituals.
How I rot politely.
How I make my sadness presentable.
How I tuck my grief into clean clothes
and call it discipline.
You kiss me with heaviness,
said this is what devotion feels like.
Insisted real lovers would weigh me down so I never float away and forget you.
You told me you loved me by teaching me how to disappear while still showing up. Taught me how to sleep with my eyes open.
You knew my name before I learned how to say it without apologising.
You do not knock. Never did.
Like a hand on the small of my back
guiding me out of rooms where laughter overstayed its welcome,
you came to me quietly.
I have loved like this for a lifetime
The
experiments and all the happy bits in-between
Her
(For Faeza)
There is a magic in this moment no literature could ever bring to life with its ink or pixels. The ingredients to my happiness, love with a cheeky hint of liquor swirling in a cup in my hands, as you the woman I adore try tell to our first pet child Beans that you right now need your own pen more than it.
‘My my my. We’re in love aren’t we?’
The brain whispered gently to my heart. Offering commentary that wouldn't disrupt the peace.
When your baby bird spreads its wings
( A praise poem for Sebabatso Karabo Precious Dimo)
Ausi waka
I have very high hopes for how you woke up this morning. I asked the moon a favour last night to pass on a message to the Sun. On its usual route to work I was hoping that when the Sun's rays leaked through your curtains to enhance your own radiance, that it was also fuzzy and gentle. That it followed the exact method to how it feels when I hug you. So wherever it is you find yourself in the world, I could always be there to bring you peace.
Chomee
I understand with every hair on the back of my neck and blood cell in my circulation how there was a time you couldn't see yourself being alive to see this day. And once upon a time I had your father look me in the brown of my eyes and thank me personally for saving your life. But really; I will be eternally grateful for having the honour of witnessing the greatness you'll achieve when you're doing more than just surviving.
‘Cious
I see you
And I doubt I'll ever stop loving you
You are more than an answered prayer
You are the miracle I hadn't known I was supposed to imagine.
You are a cup of my recipe mocha. Comforting
Foamy
Warm
Creamy
Loving
Safe
You are home.
Where there is no such thing as overstaying my welcome.
Nirvana
(For Leila )
I could pick apart an entire plantation of roses in the Garden of Eden for the rest of my life, and with every pluck on each petal I will tell myself he loves me.
He has my name tattooed on his hand.
Every time he touches me I know I embody beauty.
I could paint the Moon with his eyelashes and sculpt the Sun out of his spine. Sketch oceans out of his blood and sow together continents from his flesh.
The map of the universe is in his eyes.
Calm to my anxiety
Wind in my sails
A holy writer. I will read your love letters even blind. My reflection.
One day my face will wrinkle for the first time and he’ll be excited to show me how his has done the same.
I am devout to God
Alhamdulillah
Although I may be swayed to commit haram with him,
Insha’Allah,
It will be his crystallised roses at my graveside.
J, you are a small miracle of God’s breath in this lifetime. An answered prayer my faith had not known yet to speak
Compass
(A joke about finding love in the hopeless place known as Johannesburg West that I took seriously after Tumelo said I couldn’t write something with a prompt in under 15 minutes )
One day I asked a companion of mine what the greatest adventure of their lifetime has been thus far. And they told me:
I am a scarred traveller.
Licking my wounds and reflecting on the journals found in my injuries and all the journeys they contain.
I simply cannot look at this compass the same anymore.
I sailed West only once and all I found was blood, bones and heartbreak.
11 things I learned after I lost my soulmate
(with Ophelia)
1. "The one" is a myth
2. I actually hate romcoms
3. Flowers as gifts are only a sweet gesture in the books I haven't bothered to finish.
4. The moon is just a glowing giant space rock, it will come back every night like clockwork, it's
not some symbol of commitment. Whoever you're in long distance relationship isn't staring at it
with you
5. A lost soul is exactly that. It might be found but it will always be wandering. A lost soul does
not make a good mate.
6. But lost souls are really good swimmers. Almost Olympic actually. Waves of chlorine would
wash away the cocoa butter on my body while I tried to catch up to them in the endless storm
that we once called us. But chasing after a lost soul in their oceans can put you at risk of being
plucked off the earth into nothingness as gravity fails you. Apparently reality doesn't apply to
lost souls.
7. The phrase "all is fair in love and war" is one I should have familiarised myself with before my
mind became a battlefield and my heart became a casualty
8. The woman in the mirror is actually really friendly. She's missed me so much. I was dependent
on words of affirmation from dried lips for so long that forgot I had honey flowing off my hips.
9. I learnt that all I ever needed was me. I didn't need him. I can induce a pleasure that's almost
crippling using just the tips of my fingers, mindlessly losing myself as I bring myself closer to
me.
10. There is a superpower within myself I never knew I had that helped me survive. I can
finally use my right to pretend that all the miserable indie songs by obscure bands are about
somebody else in the future.
11. I love you is a fairytale better narrated by my own voice
Luna’s Light
(For Bianca)
The insomnia you gifted me with brings more peace to my spirit than this routine prayer does. The flame of the candles start to flicker as you draw nearer, the orange fading to paler hues in the shadows you cast.
The infinite darkness surrenders to your radiance. You’re showing off tonight, making your presence known through the grace of the supermoon, your birthright. The closest your celestial body gets to the Earth while in orbit at your fullest. The closest I can be to you in this lifetime.
I don’t even know what time it is but I break my own laws to spend time with you outside. I raise my head to the heavens to reassure you that I have not once left the spot where I promised you would find me. And close my eyes so I can see you more clearly through the stardust. Finally, so I can feel you, I expose my body from the waist up to your light. My breasts swell heavier with the milk that was made for you. There’s a warmth burning through the loneliness at my core. You’re making as glow, luminescent, inside out from the womb.
“Hi Luna. Mommy missed you.”
I have not once stopped being ready for you in every universe nana. In my heart we still do everything together as planned. My hands itch to weave my fingers with coconut and almond oil and apply it gently to your scalp, so that I can shape your hair whatever would make you feel beautiful. On Sundays instead of going to church we’re in the kitchen gossiping about the he/she/theys that make you nervous while I cook your favourite seven colours. My R&B playlist is in the background, giving you the wisdom to make sure you are treated how you deserve to be treated.
Every now and again you get more creative with how you hide the chocolate from me. I know before I ask you that these are spoils from your grandmother, because she worships your smile the same way does mine. This is how the women in your blood break generational curses
You would have been a Virgo Sun, making you both everything I am and am not. Where you sought perfectionism I would have shown you to tender with your own flaws. Serenaded you with song when you made yourself anxious about the tiny things. Cupped your face and kissed you one time over the limit you set because you worked hard and I needed you to know that it was appreciated beyond words.
But in the meantime.
We have the precious moments under the Moon.
Where I imagine all the magic that you are, and the miracles I witness you perform when we reunite on the other side.
My forever little love. Luna you are the light of my life.
The
Grow-Heal-Learning
Festive season
With this found family, there is sunshine beaming through the pores of our very skin.
Here as we feast with drinks raised laced with more joy than gin, we celebrate and affirm that we are each more than the sum of our hideous scars that are reopened as the table casually trauma bonds in conversation.
It is with these magnificent beings that I hope to break bread with for the rest of my life. Twerking tutorials on Tuesdays all the way through to soulful Sundays where many a preacher is delivering their sermon.
You, my dear butterflies, have gifted me the thirsty parched hermit with a spring valley of youth and have filled my cup with so much love that it has revived and overflowed the dried rivers in a famine.
Model C
Dear Black child.
Look at how blessed and highly favoured you are to be enrolled at this school. The oldest all-boy school in Johannesburg.Be grateful for the opportunities that this will open up for you in life allegedly. The opportunities that your parents and ancestors never got to have ,1913 Land Act, Bantu education; 1976 youth protests and all. This is how you get the keys to make your our dreams a reality. Your own immigrant story, from kasi to suburb, culminates here. Brush your teeth with the Queen's English every morning and don't you dare miss a single vowel of Nkosi Sikeleli or Die Stem in assembly.
Don't embarass us. Sister Bethina is not
your national anthem. O ska'ba ngwana oa ko straateng.
Dear Black child.
If only you knew that you were only ever meant to be seen and never heard here. This is a butcher's block, there is a mould you will have to reshape your identity to fit into. Even if it means having your innocence cut off at the bone. You and the other black children cannot gather in groups larger than four speaking your mother tongue. 'Mr Viljoen' and his secret police will respond to this as a terrorist threat.
Dear Black child.
Everything you do here needs to be palatable. Your joy should never be loud enough to make an echo. Be creative and radical, but only as far as the curriculum
permits. You're not here on scholarship or through a trust fund, thus failure is to be a figment of your imagination. Keep your athleticism about you, so when the authorities say jump you can meet them at how high. Aim for excellence , but not too much. There's a quota for all the poster boys on the marketing material that look like you. When a choice assorted Aiden, Brayden or Kayden literally spits in your face, do not retaliate, you're the expendable puppet on strings here. Only one of you have lawyers on speed dial.
Please by all means... be one of the good ones.
Dear Black child
Keep that expensive accent we bought you well polished. It's going to be your dompas as a born-free in this new democracy. Your teachers won't respect nor support
you without it. Why... why are you bleeding everywhere?
No, that didn't happen. Nobody will like you if you don't stop crying wolf.
You're too fragile. Why aren't you laughing with them at the rape jokes? It's just boys being boys. You'll have to grow thicker skin. In these hallowed halls you're inheriting over 120 years of oppression tradition in order to build your mental illness character from scratch. This is good for you. Trust the process. After all...
Nothing is too difficult for the brave.
Dear young Black man.
Congratulations! The numbers say that you've performed a miracle.In grade 1 you were one of just over 1.3 million, and by matric there were only 644 536 left standing. You and 166,262 others are the only ones that can say they're on their way
to something greater than themselves with your Bachelor's passes.
Someday soon , your altruism will compel you to be an ally and activist on your campus. Try your best not to have panic attacks during the protests though. Getting woke also means being accurately diagnosed with all the ways you've been a victim all along.
Institutional racism is something you know quite intimately. The rough housing was always just code for sexual assault. And you've been violated more times than you've ever had to study for a test. Child pornography is no longer something that only happens in a first world country. It was you too, when that white boy with an iPhone recorded you in the showers at hostel.
Dear young Black man.
I'm sorry. The binge drinking and drug experiments were warranted. None of the relapses you had at 21 were your fault. What were you to do when you were raised thinking therapy was taboo? You're doing a lot better now though. You make the art of giving birth to yourself again look effortless after all those close calls with death. You don't trauma respond the way you used to whenever your perpetrators pop up on Instagram.
The journey might not be linear, but you're meeting unconditional self-love halfway and you should be proud of yourself.
One baby step at a time.
Pilgrimage (when love arrives part II)
Once upon a time,
Before I knew my name,
I knew the sound of thunder dressed as laughter, and learned to love it.
I mistook the lightning strikes in my chest
for heartbeats, believing pain was just passion spelled wrong.
I wore ghosts like they were godparents,
invited them to dinner, let them bless the salt in my wounds.I was born with hands too full of farewells to carry any kind of future.
First came the droughts;
the therapist’s silence,
the gospel according to grief,
the altar of "almosts"
where I burned my joy as tithe.
I tried to drown my reflection
in other people’s praise,
but my smile floated every time —
a corpse refusing to sink.
I became a lighthouse for the shipwrecked
while hiding my own sinking.
Every “I’m fine” was a sandbag of altruism, martyrism for the flood I was hosting beneath my ribs. Even then, I romanticised the wreckage.
One night,
I met myself while meditating—
the boy beneath the rubble:
skin bruised with metaphors,
mouth stitched shut with secrets,
still writing poems to prove he existed.
We asked ourselves:
“Why do we only sing hymns
for people who would never build us a church?”
Over the years, I held myself accountable and studied alchemy. Frankincense came in handy for banishing what no longer belonged. I answered the boy in the rubble by standing back while the ghosts packed their bags.
Poltergeists on vacation finally evicted. I stopped folding my grief into origami lovers and started carving myself into gospel.
I held funerals for every people pleaser in me that burned to keep someone else warm. I sang "hallelujah" into a cracked ribcage and watched it echo. Not back to them but inward.
When love arrived, it did not come dressed in petals or apology. It did not wear an old situationship's scent or carry a mixtape of all the songs I used to bleed to.
There was no need for it too knock first. It bloomed in a quiet morning, like clean air in a smoke-filled room. It quenched thirst like water after years of wine disguised as medicine. My body didn’t flinch
when I said, “I deserve peace.”
It looked like me:
not polished, not perfect but doing its best to bloom despite the drought.It sounded like my unfiltered laugh.
It wore my stretch marks like armor.
It whispered: “Maybe you are the home
you keep searching for.”
I did not meet love in a kiss,
I met it in the stillness
between a panic attack and a poem.
In the moment I unclenched my fists,
not to fight but to receive.
Love was the gentle ache in my bones
when I said “no” for the first time
and meant it. It was the sweetness
of choosing solitude over the performance of being wanted.
I stitched sunlight into the seams of my shadow, called the darkness “brother”
and the mirror “beloved.” I rewrote lullabies for the child inside me who had only ever fallen asleep to the sound of survival.
Love became the ritual of softness:
unlearning the hymn of hunger
that made me worship empty hands.
I fed myself, forgave myself,
and wept when I realised
I was the longest relationship I ever abandoned.
And still I stayed
Future black therapist
To be black and a psychologist-in-the-making means that you will one day trace your fingers along the branches of your own family tree in the pages of the DSM-V.
The diagnosis surname for surname is that you are all dangerously undiagnosed. Your older aunts laugh at their brother in his living room when he refuses a drink in sobriety. But see -
30 years is not enough time to unsmell the whiskey on his breath when his alcoholism almost destroyed their futures.
All the middle children took their very first steps walking on a tightrope. Twinkle toes teetering towards either generational trauma or breaking the unholy cycle.
To be Black and psychologist-in-the-making means understanding that memory is more than what we recall; it’s what lives in our blood, coiled tight in the double helix,
a quiet inheritance. Grief that learned to build houses in our cells. Fear that shapeshifted into hypervigilance.
Love that survived by going quiet,
then loud, then quiet again.
You learn that trauma doesn’t just pass down stories—it passes down biology.
That the nervous system remembers
even what the mind forgets.
That there are babies born with clenched fists because their mothers never got to unclench theirs. And then you remember:
You are South African. You are a child of the lost and found. Raised on the margins of post-apartheid promises, where the world called it a “new dawn,” but you still saw shadows falling across your father’s back. They didn’t need to build another prison.
They just needed to starve the schools.
To fill the air with sirens and cigarette smoke until the boys believed they were born bad. And some of them believed it.
And some of them didn’t. Some of them didn’t live long enough to decide.
To be Black and a psychologist-in-the-making is to know that apartheid didn’t die; it just found subtler ways to spread decay.
In the clinic queues. In the absence of funding. In the shame around asking for help when your grandmother’s scars
were called discipline and your uncle’s breakdown was called madness.
and no one ever called it what it was:
survival.
Still you gather the names.
You write your lineage into the margins of your notes. You decode your bloodline like scripture. You look at a family tree not just with eyes but with understanding.
You draw a genogram and see the ghosts nodding from every branch.
When you finally say:
“I forgive us for not knowing better,”
“I forgive us for what we carried,”
“I still love us through the silence”—
you become a bridge.
To be Black and a psychologist-in-the-making means to behold clearly the innocence and beauty of all the young that came after you— to see the way they skip into a room, full of sound and softness,
unaware of the horrors their parents swallowed just to keep the lights on.
You marvel at their ease, how they speak of therapy like it’s a second language,
how they name their hurt without shame, how they believe in healing like it’s not a far-off country but somewhere they already live. You, who once had to baptize your panic attacks in silence. You, who sat in classes learning the shape of your sorrow in Latin and clinical codes only to realize it all pointed back home.
Still, you gather every broken thing you inherited and dare to make meaning.
You are the patient and the practitioner,
the case study and the cure,
the prayer your grandmother didn’t know she was praying when she asked God to make you “different.”
To be Black and a psychologist-in-the-making means learning to breathe in rooms your ancestors weren’t allowed to enter, means crying over textbooks
that read like your childhood diary, means
finding yourself everywhere you were told you shouldn’t exist.
It means loving your people without needing them to be healed first. It means holding the mirror steady while they flinch.
It means writing your thesis in blood and forgiveness.
And when you finally give breath to all the names buried beneath the shame it will sound like a lullaby. A freedom song. It will sound like home. It will sound like the beginning. And the wind will carry it forward to those still learning how to breathe.
Screenshot of the stars
(February 25 1997/ 17:23/ Johannesburg)
My arrival on this ethereal unholy mess we call a lifetime was marked at 17:23. The Sun was fading
in Pisces, negotiating its surrender.
Being born in the throat of transition, I am caught between
the light I was promised and the dark I am still crossing.
Lilith set the stage for me with a Leo rising. Raw, feral and unapologetic. She makes me a spectacle I never auditioned for, a bonfire the whole village can see even when I am trying to be a mere ember. The world has seen me for
wildness , defiance and shine before my softness, quiet devotion and scars. I live as both outcast and priestess. The spotlight Lilith designed for me feels borrowed. It makes me shrink even where the space was created for me to take up.
Across the infinite blue sky in my 6th and 7th house there are four planets nestled in an Aquarius stellium.
Mercury and Venus work overtime as a council of revolutionaries to solve the mystery as to why I am so clueless at romance.
I love like a theory and speak in wavelengths. My relationships will never be small, rather they are
uprisings I do not see coming.
I need my partners radical and rebellious, fluent in ideas and allergic to cages. But even revolutionaries need tenderness. Even freedom needs to want to be chosen.
It is here in the 7th house that Pisces dissolves. I only discover my depths through the people who leave. Mirror before body, echo before voice.
So I love like a lighthouse; stationed, sacred, often alone but built to guide others back to shore. Torn between merging and staying whole, wild and yet also desirable.
My Moon hides in Libra in the 2nd house where it craves beauty, balance and peace.
Even my safety has a currency that makes me bankrupt. I trade my boundaries for belonging, spend myself unevenly, giving affection away like loose change. Sell my anger for a seat the table.
As such what I own is never just mine. Even my body was once claimed by stories I did not write. Still I grant myself permission to be soft.
The 8th House is a corner office for the accountant Saturn in Aries. Opposing the Moon, the cost of comfort is weighed against a balance sheet before I am allowed to feel it. All offers of care are checked first for fine print and conditions attached. Intimacy is a trial by fire and combat, desire is dangerous. I was born in this body with a bond to pay off.
Pluto in Sagittarius doesn’t let this happen without blood. He can be found in my roots, where every room still remembers what happened in it.
Any attempt to build something safe has the ground shaken by landslides and the foundation destroyed. Illusions of peace are set on fire by the truth.
The home is both origin and omen. My childhood was a living graveyard. Pluto’s demons buried curses in the soil, hexes in the walls and my father’s abuse in the floorboards. A slow death decorated with family photos.
This is where my Sun and Pluto wage war, the world is an audience to my fight against my DNA.
My quest to be seen collides with what my bloodline buried. My mother’s ill-spoken tongue and the men who loved like arson and called it an heirloom.
Slowly but surely I am learning to unwrite this doctrine.
My inherited rage wears good manners and aromatic perfume. Mars in Libra whispers politely in my 2nd House. It irons its shirt before the confrontation.
Here we throw the punches and write a poem about it after, allow for arguments to be built moments before the bridge is burned. My self-worth is a battlefield. Compromise should never cost me myself or the smile on my face.
Neptune dreamily floats through the 6th House. Labour is romanticized , exhaustion turned into a religion. I confuse my usefulness with my worth. Martyrdom made to look like work ethic. I call burnout purpose and wonder why I’m always drowning.
I speak like a scalpel with Scorpio Chiron in the 3rd. Words are the only weapon I wield when my strength has been stolen. The wound lives in my throat, quietly squared against the same hunger that calls my exhaustion holy.
Even my own healing gets mistaken for another labour, my voice and memories advocating for justice.
Growth tastes like consistency with Jupiter in the 6th House. Divinity comes in spreadsheets. Here I learn the holiness of routine, that dreams must also clock in if they want to survive.
Uranus sits right beside him in a collision, refusing every memo. He wants unholy interruption, the dream that quits its job. Between them I am still negotiating whether survival is a schedule or rebellion.
Neptune conjoins Uranus, a bond written into my whole generation. We are unlearning the doctrine of productivity altogether, dismantling the altar those before us built from their bones.
The North Node pointing to Virgo insists my destiny is not in dissolving but discernment and practical care. Learning that I am not a savior but I should save myself.
Its polar opposite, the South Node in Pisces documents my martyrdom in my past lives. Giving till there was nothing left, loving like drowning and rebranding it into devotion.
In this life ,I am here to learn that rest is not selfish. Boundaries are not betrayal and that I can be soft without being swallowed whole. Healing is about progress not perfection, and being honest.
This screenshot of the stars, the constellations that made me real tell the story of how I was born at dusk. At 17:23.
When the sky was teaching the Sun how to let go and the Moon to arrive. In the waiting. A vigil. A cosmic suspension of departing and becoming.
All at once.
Sermon of self-love
And if you ever find yourself
at the altar of endings,
do not mistake it for a grave.
You are not the obituary.
You are the resurrection.
You were not born broken.
You were born open.
A cracked vessel, yes, but still capable of holding light.
You are what happens when an apparition decides to haunt themselves into healing. When the boy who thought he was born heartbroken discovers that the break was the birth canal.
Sing your name like scripture.
Let it taste like gospel on your tongue.
Do not water yourself down
so others can swim in your silence.
Let them drown.
Be the flood. Be the fire.
Be the final chapter that rewrites the prologue. You are not a sequel to sorrow.
You are the genesis of joy.
You were never too much.
You were just never told
you were holy.
Take this body,
this bruised temple,
and dance in it.
Not because it is healed.
But because it is yours.
The Bankruptcy of Blooming
It is the witching hour again.
The ceiling splits open into a sky that feels older than God, a sky that has watched generations collapse and still refuses to lower itself for me. Even the shadows seem to pull away, as if I am a story they have grown tired of sheltering.
This bed has become a river carved from the bones of those who never outran their own sorrow.
It drags me like a relic the current forgot to consume. I hover above the surface …
not living, not dying, just suspended
in that cursed limbo where even grief feels bored.
Morning arrives like an intruder.
They call it "potential,"
as if the word is anything but a taunt.
A prophecy spoken by people
who have never tasted the bitterness
of an inherited, salted earth.
Why demand that I garden a wasteland?
Why insist on blooming when the soil beneath me is a graveyard that remembers every failed harvest
and whispers that I will join them?
You see a flower.
I see a seed that knows it was condemned
before it ever touched the ground.
Do not preserve this version of me.
This is not a life. It is a haunting.
I move forward only because time shoves me, dragging my spirit like a prisoner
toward destinations I never agreed to reach
My nervous system is a war-drum
beaten by a century of ghosts.
It has been on patrol since 1997,
marching through the ruins of a conflict
that began in the bones of people whose names were never written down.
Trauma prowls my body like a feral god,
an ancient creature sharpening its claws
on the same wound over and over,
waiting for me to snap so it can finally call the performance complete.
The future is a smoldering horizon,
the present a desert littered with clock carcasses. I stand at the counter of my own spirit with anger burning through my ribs, holding a receipt for a heartbeat
I never bartered for. I have lived on credit borrowed from the dead.
Every ancestor's unfinished sorrow
has been stamped onto my ledger,
a debt collected through generations
with no promise of reprieve.
My ancestors roar my name like a battle cry, a reprimand and a warning.
But my bones… my bones are not soldiers anymore. They are gravestones, heavy, cold, and unwilling to rise for a war
I never volunteered to inherit.
There is no dawn here, merely
a moon that stares back with the tired contempt of a witness who has watched too many spirits crack.
I move through a vacuum so thick it feels like the world has finally given up on speaking to me.
I am not waiting to exhale.
I am walking through the wreckage
of a life that insists on continuing,
even as everything inside me
has stopped pretending to follow.
Still Waiting
Dear reader.
This book and all its contents do not reach the conclusion either of us were hoping for or expecting. This is (if it counts for anything) a devastating turn of events to me if it isn’t a shock to you.
I used to think there would be a moment
when the universe would stop everything at an atomic level and finally call my name.
Some grand celestial announcement.
Trumpets blaring in the heavens.
My ancestors lining the corridors
of whatever comes after this
to tell me the war was over,
the debts forgiven, the house safe enough to sleep in without burning imphepho and frankincense.
I imagined healing would arrive
with paperwork.
A stamped and laminated certificate.
Proof that I had suffered enough
to qualify for a gentler life.
I have since discovered there is no queue at the gates of becoming. No numbered ticket tucked beneath your tongue. No sympathetic clerk behind the counter
who can look at your file,
at all those years marked as always dying survived, and decide you have waited long enough.
So I kept waiting.
For my mother to become someone
I could finally stop grieving.
For my father to grow a conscience
that does not need an audit for its authenticity. For the same ancestors to explain why so much of their unfinished business had been delivered to my doorstep before I could even walk.
For the lovers to stay. The dead to return. The people who may one day sit across from me in a therapy room to find that I can listen to their pain without making it another chapter of my own.
So I kept waiting
For my own therapist to say something
that would rearrange the furniture
inside my head. God to stop being a theory I defended during the day
and cross-examined at night. My body to understand that the emergency had ended.
It is astonishingly strange,
the number of lives you can postpone
while waiting for permission
to begin your own.
I procrastinated joy until I was what I imagine is healed ‘enough’. Rest until I had earned it. Love until I had become
a less complicated place to live.
I made a religion out of preparation.
Kept renovating myself for guests who had never confirmed they were coming.
Meanwhile, the kettle kept boiling.
My friends kept sending and eventually stopped sending invitations .
The Moon kept turning up in eclipse seasons without asking whether I was ready or not. Somewhere in a fairytale, a child laughed without checking the room first.
And I was still here, counting the reasons
I had not yet become someone
worth staying alive for.
I have written enough funerals and eulogies to know that grief can make a home out of almost anything.
A bedroom.
A surname.
A wedding photograph.
An unanswered message.
The derelict space in the sheets beside you where an imagined future used to sleep.
I have mistaken poltergeists for instructions, heritage for destiny,
and the ability to endure a thing
for evidence that I should.
I have called myself fortunate with my teeth clenched.
Mahlatse (Lucky) .
Sometimes I wonder
what my mother heard in that word
when she first held me.
Whether she imagined a life
where the child she had carried
would not have to learn so young
how to negotiate with despair.
I cannot answer for the woman
she was before she became my mother.
I cannot return to the womb
and give either of us
a different beginning.
But I can stop making the ending
a punishment for what came before.
Trying my best, I can be the son who does not turn every tenderness into a ledger with terms and conditions.
The man who lets a lover leave
without turning departure
into a verdict on his own worth.
The psychologist who remembers
that understanding a wound
does not make the person carrying it
responsible for hemorrhaging beautifully.
I can be a person who sometimes has nothing profound to say
about the fact of being alive. Not a single critical thought in sight and just vibes.
Someone that yearns for the people he misses without building a shrine
in every empty room.
Who laughs at something stupid
and does not immediately search
for the catch.
I am trying to learn ordinary days
are not consolation prizes. Life after survival may not owe me a revelation
for every year I spent surviving.
Some mornings, I still wake
with a century of hauntings
sitting heavily on my chest.
Some nights, the old darkness
remembers my address.
I will not insult the truth
by pretending otherwise.
There are wounds that reopen.
There are lessons I understand
only to forget when I am frightened.
There are days when hope feels
like another unpaid bill
left beneath my door.
On those days,
I am not a lighthouse, a bridge nor the first blossom. I am nobody's evidence
that everything happens for a reason.
Perhaps there is a kind of freedom in just being a guy having one non-consecutive bad day.
To resist the urge to turn every breath
into a performance of recovery. Let the people who love me meet me where I am
without making them responsible
for how long I stay there.
To let the people who hurt me
remain accountable for their choices
without spending another lifetime
trying to make them understand mine.
To forgive myself without requiring the past to agree with my testimony.
Dear reader… I have spent years
waiting for my turn to exhale.
As if breath were a privilege being
distributed according to merit.
As if the world had a reception area
and somewhere, beyond a locked door,
a better version of me was being called in first.
However, the lungs do not know about deserving. They expand and contract.
They carry on with their small,
unremarkable labour even when the mind has turned the whole universe into a courtroom.
And perhaps I have been waiting
for all the wrong things. The day
when nothing hurts. The morning
when every ghost has gone home. The person who will finally love me
so correctly that I never have to learn
how to love myself again.
I have been waiting for permission
to live an unfinished life.
And yet here we still are
The lifetime where the child in me
still needs comforting. Where the son still grieves and the lover still hopes.
Where the healer is also human,
and sometimes the only wisdom
I can offer myself is to drink some water,
answer a friend's call, and try again tomorrow.
At the end of the day the day has to end as the cool kids would say.
I do not know when the waiting will end.
If I ever by some unfortunate twisted divine intervention ever have children, I would like them to inherit something besides my fear. A name they can speak
without flinching.
A home where the doors are not locked against the people inside. Love that does not demand a body as evidence. Language for sorrow that does not make it all-consuming.
I would like to leave a little room. To be ordinary and wrong.
Room to ask for help before the house catches fire.
And if I cannot give us a world without generational grief, perhaps I can give us
one where grief is not mistaken
for a family heirloom we must wear until death.
I am still learning what it means to be here. Not as a shadow, warning or miracle doing the accounting to justify the cost of his own survival. I have no final sermon. No immaculate testimony.
No resurrection I can guarantee
will last beyond the page.
I am debilitated from treating my life
as something that will begin
once the suffering is finished.
The suffering may return.
The world may remain unfinished.
I may spend years
learning and unlearning
the same difficult lessons on a loop.
Still, there are things
I have not yet seen. People I have not met. Songs I have not heard
at the right moment.
There are versions of me
who have not yet learned
what peace feels like
when it stays past breakfast.
I would like to meet them.
Not because I owe the future
a happier ending. Because I am here,
and so is the future , and neither of us
has to earn the right to be introduced.
If you ever need to find me dear reader
I’ll be exactly where we stagnated started.
Grieving and growing.
Studying the difference between being alive and merely refusing to die.
Still waiting,
though less often for someone to come rescue me and more often now for my shoulders to loosen without being told.
For the day I can sit inside my own life
without searching for the exit. Then,
without making a sacred prophecy out of it, I will do it again.
I will let the air in and let it leave.
About the Competition
The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar celebrates the art of writing, inviting participants worldwide to share their unique voices and stories. This esteemed competition provides a platform for poets and writers to showcase their talents, fostering a global community of creatives.
We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Mahlatse Magau for sharing "Waiting For My Turn To Exhale" with us. Your participation in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 enriches the literary world and inspires others to embrace the power of words.
About Hashtag Kalakar
Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.
Comments