winter freeze and thaw

Im not leaving here till I produce something on this page-
till I do something with this strange pain.

I can no longer tell if the pain is the last warm part of me alive in the ice,
or the epicentre of the freeze.

Everything has gone quiet and life is too loud. The meaning has suddenly flown south for winter; there is no more food.

Waiting on the conveyer belt of capitalism and patriarchy feels like the worst kind of living: what would arriving even be for?

I come back and touch others through my senses but they cannot seem to reach me in here where feeling has become looking and looking has become doubt.

At this rest stop in a long journey, I look back at the memory of living homeless in my own skin but here I sit- skin, self and thought together and apart.

positional

consider who you are
and where you stand,
and how you came to be there.

consider who held your hands as you took your first steps,
who held theirs,
and where those feet walked.

consider what your place
has meant
to you,
for others,
and those yet to come.

self evident

two womxn make love;
straight minds obsess over how-
it's plain truth to us.

#decemberpoetrychallenge word: geography

A yellow word, from twenty-six year old memories
of wooden desks
and white walls
amid hundreds of strangers.

There were topographical maps,
drifting continents,
and ox bow rivers,
flattened images on paper,
while birds and winds and clouds danced beyond the windows.

I could see my best friend's new house
from inside the classroom. Just like that she moved on.
There was a rumour that the matric geography teacher flirted with the pretty girls. Ours was old and strict, and bored.

We measured. Made dots and drew lines.
We marked spaces, wrote words and traced symbols.

The deserts were inside us and we were drowning.

morning walk

a morning,
like midnight,
after a long day.
stillness
elusive in the light breeze,
a cacophany of sounds from streets away,
and my heart mourning loudly in my aching chest.
Trying to make my feelings into words
to lay them out before me like a path-
am I going away or returning home?

for jane doe, and her sisters

A bird's eye view of
people, living together,
american dream-

but close up- selfie
close- another girl's body
caught in the thresher

of a fecund rape
culture grown from birth to death:
each doing his part

to farm fresh bodies-
toddler, girl, young teen,
grist for the mill of

fragile, hungry men,
insatiable locusts, they
swarm the tender stalks

of fields of womxn-
watching, doing, excusing,
protecting- menselves

at the cost of half
the bright sky and blaming it
for storm clouds or drought

when they are violent
machines plowing through us all,
dead things in their wake.

Toxic man, again.

It's the urge to stand somewhere,
anywhere,
solid and sound,
as you squirt your toxic sludge,
self righteously,
spasmodically,
onto me,
that never stops.

The money shot.

Over, and over, you mark your territory,
on me,
and on all the clay earth,
walking yourself,
your flesh,
across any land you can size-up, survey and then subject.

You will run out of land and bodies to walk over; unless they bury you instead.