The Unfinished Rondavel

I am the red dust

that refuses to settle

on the polished floor of this parlor.

 

My mother spends her Sundays

scrubbing the thresholds,

trying to wash away

the scent of my questions

before the elders arrive.

She thinks if the brass is bright enough,

no one will notice

the cracks in the foundation

where we buried the truth

and called it “Respect.”

 

I am the only one at this feast

who knows that a wall

is just a fist made of mud and water.

 

They sit in a circle of ancestors,

pouring libations for men

who died holding secrets

tighter than they held their children.

I am the stutter in the praise poem.

The line that won't rhyme

with “Everything is fine.”

 

In this house,

“Family” is a heavy wool blanket

we use to smother the fire

whenever it starts to speak.

They tell me I am “lost”

because I have traded my silence

for a drum.

 

They want me to be a brick—

baked hard,

rectangular,

stackable.

They want me to disappear

into the masonry of their “Legacy.”

 

But I am the lightning

that remembers

the tree before it was a roof beam.

I am not the “shame” of the lineage.

I am the Exorcist.

 

I am the one

who realises that a “Good Name”

is often just a shroud

for a very loud ghost.

 

So let them keep their tea

and their ironed shirts.

I will stay out here

in the tall grass,

building a kraal

where the gates stay open,

and the only thing we worship

is the honesty

of the wind.

​

Anatomy of Devotion

I carry you like a blade beneath my ribs,

turning me inward, a quiet violence no one sees.

Every pulse is an echo of the cruelty and devotion I cannot name,

a heat that burns both body and soul.

 

I have loved in ways that crush me,

tenderness that feels like punishment,

and desire that sears with a dread I cannot escape.

It is a love that asks everything,

takes everything,

and leaves me raw in the hollow where I thought I stood.

 

I remember the sweetness that became a weapon,

the softest whisper cutting deeper than the loudest scream.

To love like this is to dwell in a storm

where the thunder is inside me,

and I am both the cloud and the lightning.

 

I ache for the intimacy that scorched me,

for the hands that held me only to wound,

for the mouth that promised life but delivered fire.

And still, I do not turn away,

for to turn away is to betray the godlike cruelty of loving,

to deny the unbearable grace of this anguish.

 

Love in its action is a harsh cathedral,

its altars lined with the bodies of our own hearts.

I kneel, I burn, I bleed into the memory of you,

and still, I rise again,

because even in the ruin, there is a devotion I cannot abandon,

a heat that neither time nor pain can extinguish.

 

I am the architect of my own haunting,

rebuilding the walls just to watch them fall again.

I do not seek a cure for this fever;

to be healed would be to forget the shape of your shadow,

and I would rather be broken and known by you

than whole and forgotten by the world.

 

So let the embers stay bright in the marrow.

Let the wound remain an open mouth,

singing the only hymn I have left to give.

For if love is a fire that consumes the house,

I will sit amidst the ash and call it home.

​