May 2012
72 posts
5 tags
trigger
it’s the second time
i’ve spilled your name on his shirt,
it stains his breast pocket purple,
it resembles a drying bullet wound.
he says so long as my lips make his swollen
he’ll pretend he isn’t bruised.
these days,
our bed is lonely enough for two.
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17: On Being Made for More
I had an epiphany. Today. May 29th 2012. I had an epiphany.
After spending 6 months working as an intern at a court in Blantyre last year, I realised I hated working in an office. It was boring. It was repetitive. It was the most uncreative environment I’ve ever been placed in. It was bleeding me dry.
At first I thought it was just the nature of the job I was doing and the industry in...
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I Wish by Natassja Namisengo
I wish you could read the one important page out of the book of my life
Then maybe you could understand my grief
I wish you could see beneath the scars
Then you would understand the rigidity of my emotional bars
If only you could see the dead veins on my heart
You would not know where to start
Dead weight from the hurt
A mind filled with scattered thoughtS
My heart a Vacant vessel
Bleak
...
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inherent
there are moments when
you will curl into a fetal position
in a bid to remember what her warmth felt like.
you wonder if your body still recalls
the brief time you carried his baby
in your adolescent womb. it feels empty.
______________
the moon is dangling like a washed-out coin in the sky,
it’s light spills into the backalley
and onto the sack cloth your mother had wrapped you in
...
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sshhhh...
less promises escape voodoo dolls.
stitched lips. just fragments.
just building block rubble.
just bone marrow pieces.
they are the only things
that keep the secrets breathing.
I'm gonna write you a happy poem [this is not a...
because i think you’re the happiest i’ve ever been.
i’ll paint it in my cartilage
and carve it into my spine. it’ll be the worst poem
i’ve ever written.
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alexander
i once managed to convince myself
that between the clouds in my teacup
and the salt in my coffee, it was possible
to spit you out and swirl you around
unshackled, in my lungs.
i once almost forgot how to breathe you in.
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for john
i love the smell of your spine
in a hurricane. it tastes like
the back door kisses we shared
when you held me in your seatbelt arms
ten feet from the fireplace.
i like to remember you that way.
before your fists taught me
promises weren’t the only things
that could be broken in your palms.
before the passion in my chest
became nothing more than just
a persistent case of...
A POET:
curiousseriousthoughts:
How they see a poet: A soul who withdrew himself/herself from reality and existed in his/her own world full of crypts and mysteries.
How a poet sees himself/herself: A desolated soul trapped in the confines of loneliness and pain whose only way of exhausting his/her heavy feelings brought by the unfair world is to write...
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confessions of a teenage arsonist
the gasoline left a trail
ablaze at the front of your house
and i watched it burn, unapologetic.
you stood frozen, hoping if you stared
hard enough the flames would regurgitate
the old bricks your forefathers used
to cement your family together when
the toll of slave ships left their spines
balancing on a tight rope.
and as the firetruck light danced
around the clench in your jaw,
i...
yousoothemysoul:
For once, because of you, my mouth overflows with pretty things.
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Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent
– Foundation, Isaac Asimov
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paperweight
on the days when gravity
holds onto my bones with the determined will
of a lost valentine,
give me a jagernaught heart,
a thirsty mind and arms built from redemption.
give me the body of conquerer and
the mercy of a conquest. let every breath
i release from the chambers of my lungs
form permafrost smiles around memories
i should never regret.
hold me in your argounaut arms,
let me...
Dear Lovelies,
Got a couple of things on queue. Travelling like the light, well not really but I just had to because I love VV Brown. Back to the matter at hand, I’m packing and clearing out because I’m going home to Malawi for the summer and things are super hectic. I hope you guys understand why I’m letting the blog grow cobwebs for the next week or so.
My flight is tomorrow night at...
Anonymous asked: What's your biggest fear?
1 tag
Anonymous asked: Love your blog! Your inspire me. Foul mouthed with class. Lol. How did you become so awesome?
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John
break your bones at the brink of sunrise to teach the night sky that its greed
will never surpass the beauty found in your cartilage when pressed
against the thousand shades of carnelian wands. sow your sunflower seeds into the pavilion, embed them in your eyes,
be the first to watch the carnage from the safety of your innocent tent.
you have sinned like the rest of us yet you are the...
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wenda
if you whipped out
your 5th grade spiderman marker
and connected the dots
in the distance between us,
would our fates still tangle
in our knot of desperation?
i suppose
if you hold me with your sun dried skin
i will love you with my front teeth.
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ancient
you walk with one fist in your mouth
like the cataclysms between the words on your tongue
exploded into your throat and you’re trying
to stop the bleeding.
your love is the colour of dinosaur bones
with the ribs poking out in all the wrong places.
where is the gravity that held you together?
in the thunderstorm that drenched
all you had ever known, were you alone?
did you feel...
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cross
he was the kind of boy who wore his heart on the back of his palm. she liked to break beautiful things and slot their jigsaw pieces into herself. she stapled his hands to the corners of the sky, crowned him with her bitterness and resurrected a man who forgot what he loved most about her.
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16: On Falling Into Your Own Traps
I learned pretty early on in life that laying traps for other people often means you, and only you, end up falling into them.
Let me tell you a little story.
I used to love raisins.
When I was I think 10 years old, I tried grossing my little sister out of eating her raisins so I could have them all to myself instead. At first I just asked her if I could have them. When she said no, I began...
Anonymous asked: Have you done tumblrdatinggame(.)com yet?
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Fall
Life begins in autumn.
When the ground harvests leaves
as though they are trinkets and each broken twig rests
at the dying hands of drying grass
and the wind starts to snake its way around the hems of our bodies
just to rattle rusting cottage windows.
It is the season of silence.
Between the lonely shudders
of a spinster and the screams of the last days
in a playground, there is a...
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fragrant
my mother’s perfume
smells like the broken dreams lying in her stomach,
dormant. without warning it can hatch pterodactly
wings against the lining of her skin;
sometimes it pierces through her arms
like voodoo dolls pins
and she lets the metal twist
in her muscles, punishing herself
for loving a man who was too busy loving everybody else.
she says it keeps her pores sore.
she says...
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15: On Bullying & Depression
NB. Most of my followers know that I had a pretty sucky time in primary school and some of high school. This is just an official post on that.
How do you tell your parents, or anybody for that matter, that you’re being bullied?
People think it’s easy to just open up and say that there are people out there who take pleasure in making your life hell. One thing I’m always asked is...
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kupenda
one day i want to hollow out my bones like a telescope,
look back into your memory
and say i loved you with the curves of my jaw
and the last breath in my lungs.
even in my old age,
when i’m no longer able to wrap you
around me like my favourite summer dress,
i’ll still keep you in the folds of my photographs,
pull you out when the lights are off
and snake my fingers around...
Anonymous asked: What things worry you?
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him.
i imagine you taste like honey molasses
when you thaw your spine long enough
to allow the earth to breathe you in.
i bet your body hangs on its hinges
ready to claw up the fastenings
of your boots, laced, wanting to run
into the empty space between your mother’s bosom
and the darkness in your shadow.
you are the type of man who will still hear music
when the world has been silenced.
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full circle
sometimes, when there are crickets in my skull, i pretend i’m watching sand turn into glass. i pretend each grain struck by lightning manifests in the corners of our bones until God wraps his basketball hands around our torsos and breaks the life out of our lungs. he says he loves the way the glass in the lightbulbs smashes into saw dust at his fingertips. ...
Anonymous asked: Where's a place you haven't gone, that you'd like to visit?
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B
She told me her father told her
that from the day of her conception,
time bombs were set to tick
on the surface of her eyelids,
detonating each time the lashes blinked,
she was born a head-on collision.
The doctor said she was breaking,
her wires crossed into red
and blue—
our fingers formed scissors.
The psychic said
something sinister lies there—
I swear I have seen it.
It is the kind of...
Anonymous asked: If you could have one Noun in the world right now what would it be?
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For Phoebe
When your father spat your birth out of his mouth like you were rat poison, I carried your body out into the snow and called you an angel. Twenty-three years later you sit at the third floor window of the hospital writing broken poems to people who pretend they don’t understand the crooked flicks of your tongue, you wonder if their blood clots a different shade of blue or if the sway of your...
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when exorcisms aren't necessary
in the liquid silk of your doubt,
when your elbows have wedged
their corners wide, openly unholy;
in the crab apple moments
when you lay yourself down to sleep
only to have the world
grab it’s evil and smother you,
remember that shadows dance where
light is exalted and heaven,
even heaven, has it’s own demons.
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presently
there is a fine line between loving you then and loving you still. i have loved every crevice in your being, every imperfection in the curve of your spine, each hollowed space in your skull was mine two lifetimes ago. somewhere in space there is a pebble that says “almost” beside our names, smoothed down by the sands of time, with my nostalgia for a looking glass i sometimes used to...
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M
he was nearly a silhouette.
in the shadows of his ego i could still trace the curve of his brow like it was home to me. his body is a language my tongue speaks fluently. my lungs once tried to breathe without him and they collapsed into themselves, caved inside my chest with what was left of my sanity. i’ve learned that being a struck match in the gasoline of a man’s pride is suicide. i no...
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to the scientist
i think we need each other. i think we’ve always needed each other. that’s why we keep walking back to the wreckage trying to salvage any tangible thing we find beneath the rubble. we like to wear our excuses like armour, so we can shield ourselves when locked in battles with common sense. we are two magnets pulled apart by timezones and isn’t it funny how after all this time,...
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Broken Down
I. The preacher swears my blood is blue. He says in the spaces between my fingers I hold something sinister. He wonders I can look myself in the eye and think I am beautiful. II. I tell him I can’t. III. Do not pity me. Do not judge my inability to love these bones innocent, I am as guilty as the day of apocalypse. My scars are the horsemen and I have ridden their path to damnation, I have...
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Mender
I have always liked to fix things— the cracks in my mothers jaw when she stopped trying to say sorry, the bent ego that made my father’s love grow crooked and unholy as though God had cursed it’s spine with the inability to care for anything but itself— I’ve always liked to cradle broken anthems in my palms, duck tape over them with the underbelly of swollen...
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spilledandinked asked: Don't take this the wrong way or anything but why are you so open about the things you've been through eg bullying and depression. It's just that a lot of people I know who've been through similar things don't like to talk about it.
Anonymous asked: Dear N, I am depressed. I don't know who else to talk to about this but your blog is one of the few that gives me hope. I hate myself. My body is disgusting. I don't know what to do, I have never felt so stuck.
I know there are times
when you will lay your head to rest
and have a moment...
– “The Information Man” by Buddy Wakefield (via unlearn-me)
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Predictions
If you stare at the sky in wonder
you notice the rainbow cracks in its corners,
the smiles of its midday stars,
the seagull sway of its belly—
it will look this way ten seconds before apocalypse.
Before the clouds suck blackholes into themselves
before the ground splits open in the manner of a failed marriage.
Before a lover forgets to draw infinity into the sun
with the trace of his...
Be brave. Be good to yourself. Always.
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14: On Things Unrequited
One of my biggest flaws is that I am drawn, like moth to flame, to things I cannot own and people who will never reciprocate my feelings. I suppose now I’m so used to it I’ve just written it down as a vicious cycle I am doomed and destined to repeat.
I wrote Unrequited whilst living in the disgusting trenches of the land known as the “Friendzone”. There was a guy I really...