Category: Performance Poetry

I’m not half a woman,
I’m mostly sea.
I’m not half a woman,
I don’t need legs to complete me.

I’m not an almost-whole Marilyn,
Underground rails billowing my dresses,
Haute couture of where I come from
Is mostly sea-shell bras, and floating tresses.

Come, live below sea-
Level with me,
Where there’s no doing the dishes
Or laundry,
We’ll pop oysters,
Smoke sea-weed,
And what we spark between us,
Is the only fire we’ll need.

Here,
There’s enough bubbles
For champagne the whole year round.
Here,
Gargling composes
Trumpet and saxophone sound.

Here,
There’s enough clay,
To be a water-work Michelangelo,
Here,
Where it makes sense to say,
Let’s take it easy, let’s go with the flow.

Our fingertips will forever be wrinkled,
Your money and maps, forever wet,
And should you ever get homesick,
We’ll visit the nearest shipwreck.

I’m not half a woman,
Sure, I’m almost always at sea.
I’m not half a woman,
I don’t need legs to complete me.

I’m sorry, I’m just not into flesh-trade,
Cutting in love’s name, is such a cheap charade.

I’m not parting with my second-half,
To be named your better-half.
I won’t burn hours at the treadmill,
To account for shapely calves.

So, Mister Prince Charming,
Mister Smile Disarming,
Take a deep breath,
Take the plunge,
Don’t open your mouth to say hello,
Just wave at the pants-wearing sponge.

Our meeting begins
At the valleys of your fingers.

I squint,
At the sunlight that squeezes
between them.

I look at the map,
And find no way around the lines
of your palms.

Of course,
I’m too proud to ask for directions.

I trudge on,
Dodging your fault lines,
Climbing,
Conquering,
Your mound of Venus.

The eddies of your fingerprints,
Are too many to unravel.

The air sings
of your musk.
My footprints
are your rash of tiny, pulsing gooseflesh.
The glade that I run along –
your rapt-to-attention follicles.

The sand of your skin,
Ripples in fractals.

So sharp the stalactites
of your upper lip
and tongue.

I snowball down the smooth
heights
of your arms,
And hang by the outcrops
of your blades.

Your throbbing rivers
pulse red.

I am caught in your rapids,
And rescued
by the mesmerising fissures
that crowd around your eyes,
Flirt at your cheek,
Cut your chin,
Chisel the dip of your back,
And punctuate
The neglect behind your knees.

What etched
the canyons between your toes?
How shall I escape
the quicksand
that knots your elbows?
What shall I read
in the braille of scars
on the walls of your shins?

I’m lost.
Wandering, wondering,
At the Geography
of touch.

The plateau of your chest.
The plains of your abdomen.
The pit of your navel.

And beneath –
a glistening pool
of a place I’ve been a hundred times,
And yet,
Never.
The mounting confusion
between a rise
and a fall.

A blackwater
of full moon tides.

Your breath
is the gale I brave.

My morning cereal
was all over the back of the van.

My throat burned
And my 6 year old eyes stung,
In pain, in shame,
And most of all – in pride.
I had promised Mumma I wouldn’t cry.
But all I wanted,
What I really wanted,
Was to let loose one sob,
Just one,
So that the knot in my tummy,
Or the knot in my throat,
Would melt.

My two long plaits were my only friends
standing outside with me,
And I would have called on them
to hug me,
If I didn’t feel my wet uniform
Sticking to my chest,
Or if I didn’t smell the smell that haunted me,
Hunted me,
From deep within me.

The pity in the van man’s eyes said,
“It’s all right, I won’t tell your Mumma”.
He gently lifted me back into the van,
To a dry seat by the window.
And with that,
Two drops weighing the earth, left me.

The school bell was long forgotten.
The other girls with the pretty pencils,
and obedient hair,
Had long gone in and called “absent”,
when I was summoned to show
my yellow
house, worth two gold stars.
The scabs on my palms missed
The bars of the jungle gym.

The engine roar was loud enough,
So no one but the black rexine seat heard,
Two more drops
plop.

My nose felt cool against the window,
And slowly,
So slowly,
I felt my attention wander
Even while the rest of me sat crying.
The scaly salt trails on my cheeks
Still felt like cake
When I saw that my buckled black shoes looked so pretty
Polished to a shine
By my grandfather’s able hands

This time, I wasn’t prepared
For the onslaught
Of plop, plop, plop.

I played with my tears,
Squashed them with my eyelids,
And by some strange alchemy, this
Made sunlight seven dotty colours.

Homecoming, today,
was magic.

God-light played between trees
That had finally woken
Stretching their arms up to the sky.
The wind did not have a flavour of hurry.
The air was not full
Of hot breath or bus exhaust
Or the giggles of gaggles of girls.

The scene was the same.
It’s just that the view had changed.

No wonder adults hid this from me.
Who knows how much trouble it would be
To get me interested in
Long division again.

My running nose had stopped,
My shoes were still black.
My tiffin box, intact.
And yet, I was received,
By the tough hands of my grandfather.
My scrawny arms cradled his neck,
And his hand found my head,
Even with the flecks
Of hurry-chewed cornflakes.

Inhaling the smell of his talcum and sweat,
I fell blissfully asleep.

Outside, the world had chugged on,
Unchanged by my vomit.