Speak to me in a dream, speak to me as a mother, speak to me as an
Oracle in a rum voice, anchor me prince of tides, she says to her lover
In rumours of rain, gather chains and link them to my heart so that
This belly ache will subside and flow like jelly to the skull...

Poets are seers. Poets are always performance driven. They live to see their words impinge on others who do not see the world as they do. The gift of words they are bestowed with, although temporary, like a crest of a wave, makes its indelible mark, shapes the intellect psychically without permission being granted by any one living thing...

In this sweltering, settled country
of self-awareness and neuroses
of unsettling homesickness
as if stitched under the water
of a river, ocean and the sea
we shrink back from the mouths of fire starters...

Remember me for the girl I once was, she tried saying to herself in the empty room. Her depression was like a big, terrible shadow over her that threatened to overwhelm her with its strength. It shut out the light but kept the darkness within - the enemy within...

The nursery of any writer is school, literacy and education from a young age. Yet schools are still divided. There are schools for the rich and schools for the poor. There are writers and poets for the rich and writers and poets for the poor. There are writers for God’s children knocking on every conceivable door in this day and age. Orphans, children growing up in poverty; weak, innocent, malnourished, abandoned and neglected...

I am beautifully grown now; I will miss you: haunting,
lonely, focused, always near; I am no longer afraid
Of this life vanishing in front of my eyes –
I am still standing but you’re not here...

The promise of a career in television taught me to consider the shape of a girl as a metaphor. Beautiful girls become depressive women – they are the most unfortunate because they never grow up. Mean girls become miserable women. Silly girls become affected, hysterical and emotional women and sometimes intelligent women cause more harm than good...

Behind these eyes full of sky are new
Melodies – listen. Are you listening?
I stick out like a blister – the surface like fire.
Darkness was trapped inside my mouth
Lost in the meantime in a world full of reaching...

All her life she had been afraid of life, of love, settling down, making a home and being a wife. When she first met her future husband she thought she was staring it in the face – her inescapable future. How could she deny what she felt, that stirring deep inside of her that recognised everything that she had locked so far away inside herself? She had locked her youth, her innocence, her jaded insecurities, her childhood and her mother so far away that it no longer distressed at night, when the weather turned. The familiar was like paper – disposable yet at the same time fresh in her memory, easily picked at...

You have made me so happy, she said, but he could not bring himself to say the same words, even though he felt the same. Slowly as he realised before her that day by day they were no longer in sync. They were moving out of reach. He was the first, he realised, in a line, a succession...

And the rains came again
Monday mourning
Moth brown petals scribbling randomly
On sidewalks, down alleyways and streets.
Held ransom in gutters and drains
Like a fleet of dirty paper ships...

Her face is animated, a source of pleasure, of victory amidst the engagement with other people in the room as she hurts me. I pretend not to see any meaning and purpose behind her words. Yet I was still hypnotized as the three of them sat in the room like satellites spinning around each other. They each give the impression of a pure state of being....