Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Your Lost Shoe

I didn't think of much today, only about you.
I wondered if you ever were, going to find your missing shoe.
That shoe you might ask, had white stripes on both sides!
Although worn out, scruffy as it looked as if had taken a beating.

But in those scruffy shoes you held my hand,
walked me down the railway singing.
It wasn't a special song.
Or a pop on the radio
Just a random tune that popped into your head
You hummed it like it belonged
It belonged to that moment
When our fingers touched,
My spine went cold,
You turned towards me and asked.

"Hope you don't hate my scruffy shoes, babe but this is all I got."

I smiled, a soft smile, in response to you,
And before I could shy away
I was looking straight into you
Your brown eyes, melted my heart,
you kept on humming
And you took my hand and placed it on your heart.

Strangely enough I know that second,
That was eerie cold came back.
There was no smile,
There was no tune,
Just my sobbing face in my hands.

I looked up at behind me,
Leaves rustled with the cold wind and a faint murmur glid through air

I felt it rush up my spine and wrap me in an invisible sheet
Expecting what to here.

The yellow police tape and static responses on the radio feeds
That humming tune I once heard was actually the sound of speed.
Your stronger hand pushed me across the rail,
I yelled but you were gone.

That scruffy shoe, that darn shoe, no where to be seen with a terry eye
I need to find the other pair
And remember the hum as well

But truth be told, all I have now
Is how to say goodbye


Thursday, December 27, 2018


Those Lights








Sheer lights

burning stars, glistening stars, twinkle twinkle little stars

Nah, just damn bright lights, in my way, all the way.

Always?

What?

Get out of my way...now

I can’t see a damn thing!




Good Enough


If I were good enough for you, would you have been able to stay

If I were good enough for you, would you have smiled again

If I were good enough for you, would you have been able to say no to me

If I were good enough for you, would you have tortured me more sweetly

If I were good enough for you, would you have completely lost yourself to me

If I were good enough for you, would you have let me conquer you completely



But I was never good enough

Because I am still waiting for the rain to fall

Because I was not the one who could not hold on

To something this good enough

Not for me

Nor for you


Peeling Paint

She sat beside the wall
Her back facing the peeling paint
Mouldy coloured depiction of charred books and mould on damp ceilings
The smell was dry, tenure of a wet field of dried burnt grass
The air was filled with remorse and cold gritting teeth
Time did not stand still as much as she had would wish it would
She lived her day as if it the last
Her heart had done that dance as everyone would do
That rush
That euphoric feeling
The lights
But she had lived her day now as if it the pass
Because that dance her heart had done
Had been crushed against that very wall

Her back now peeled like paint.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

Confession



I confess that I am weak at heart
I confess my vision is slightly dismissed
I confess cheese is my priority
I confess life is a phenomenon
I confess I am my own obsession

But
Does it matter?

That the life of any person
Should be drowned in the shores of self defence

I praise myself

Putting all planets in line with my height
Everything that comes my way
I take
I yearn for more
I adore my lyrical ability
Despise my own brilliance even
I admit and
I adore it


Friday, March 25, 2016

Peppy

I will never forget
The day you came into this world,
You were so tiny
So tiny I was scared to hold

I had you for a short while,
But your thoughts still make me smile,
Your hair and your fair skin,
your eyes and little heart within

The memories I hold deep within my heart,
of the day when we were torn apart.
They surface when I am lonely, they make me cry,
And the pain how you were taken the of days gone by.

The memories are my past, I never let them go
They are also my future to help me grow.
Memories within the heart, always stay
But given time, the pain, will go away.
 
My son, for you I wish the stars
And each night before I sleep I pray
Of health, happiness and angels upon you
Of strong mind, white heart and smile each day

So dancing butterfly
Delicate and free
Carry this mother’s prayer to
The highest tree

For a day will come when you will return
To understand the truth and understand what went wrong
The reason why were taken away from me
The reasons I was left with no possibility

There is no doubt, and that is for sure
This mother’s love has kept me sane
I pray to the Angels everyday
When Peppy will return to me again.





Tuesday, March 22, 2016

THOUGHTS - MARCH 2016

I look into the mirror and what do I see, 
not only a reflection but the human side of me.
I am able to do whatever I can, only if I have a plan
Yet I get caught up with everyday things
Work, chores and continuous cell-phone rings

I look into the mirror and what do I see
not only a reflection but an exhausted me
That sinking feeling when, nothing seems done
I complain, I am tired and I am alone

I looked into the mirror and what did I see
A an empty soul
Staring back at me.


I Am

I am blue
I am lost
I am you
I am time
I am fear
I am simple
I am near
I am silence
I am defence
I am spirit
I am dance
I am sweet vanilla
I am youth
I am social trauma
I am new
I am voice
I am cold
I am rain
I am soul
I can never get enough
Therefore

I must be just cause

Self-Destruction

Lost…Stranded
Can’t find my own self
My own closest enemy
My own worst friend

On a mission
To a path of collision
I am my own cave
Because I am hollow

Shambolic ambition
I’m a single solitude
In this catastrophic mind
Perfected the science of the bovine


Therefore the moon must be made out of cheese

People People

It’s a bizarre world we live in
Compacted with greed and hostility
Where money buys love 
and
Love doesn’t exist
Where people become challenged and
Nothing is cheap

Destitution at its best
The barbaric acts of prostitution
Merrymaking of deluded men
Sin and glamourized sex
Means more than the death of a cat

Running from the refugees
Guns and booms
Blood and death
No rest for the wicked that’s true
Wars at hand with enemy and friend

Did I mention drugs?
Psychotic killers even
And the ironic twist of Confucianism
Where life is but a serene temperament
But life’s a real bitch
Suicide attempts and rape

Girl meets boy
Boy meets girl
Why bother at all?

We were made in perfection
To remain reverent
To be people

The turned pages of humanity can never be changed
Our accomplishments 
and
Mistakes are history for now
Our time will come and
Our bodies will disintegrate

Into the earth we once walked upon

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Granny


After being born
I was little and frail
My parents did time for murder in jail
I was left in the custody of my Gran
I despised that decision
As she looked like a man

At the age of seven
Gran made me work hard
I cleaned and I cooked
Fed her baked lard
For an old goose
She was tough and strong
She could do chin ups for eight hours long

Some nights 
She made me wax her legs
For breakfast we ate fried ostrich eggs
Life was tough 
I couldn’t complain
Gran used a superior force
To control my brain

Gran made me do
The most revolting chores
I scrubbed her undies
Cleaned her toilet floors
And when I told her it was no fun
She’d beat me senseless for being a lazy bum

By the age of twenty
I found job
Gran took all my pay
And bought a fat hog
She never aged a bit
Although she was eighty
Those pills she took
Made her young and mighty

It happened one night
Before her medication
I swapped those pills with no hesitation
She gasped for air
Then choked like a toad
And within a second
I watched Gran explode.

Why Write? Why Not?

Words are your thoughts that you literally hold in your hands

Your mind is an infinity of imagination. Take those thoughts and weave it in words. Then read what you have written. It's not so easy to put thoughts into paper as easy as we thinking of them. We know what we have to say but when it comes to writing it down, it is slightly twisted, perhaps tricky and those who read your thoughts may perceive something else.

So how do you start.

I close my eyes and picture my thoughts. Then those thoughts gather into words. Like a feather floating till it lands on the ground and stops completely.

 I may be thinking of writing about a rainy day. I know thick grey masses of clouds gather. I can see it. I know droplets follow because I can feel it. I know it will start to drizzle. I know the pitter patter sound of the rain drops because I can hear it.

I never thought I would be able to cook up words to write because so far nothing seemed to make sense in my life. But I took a step back and realized that the so called "not making sense" we're my thoughts. I just needed a subliminal moment to decide how I will impart those thoughts into words and into structured sentences. And as boring as it may sound, it began to make sense. 

I adore it.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

The Afterlife and the In-Between

June 2001

Give me a moment to tell you what has transpired. 

I am having a hard time. I am having flashbacks of some things that seem like a never ending dream or something you could describe when you stand on the edge of a cliff.

You know you could slip and fall and yet you take that step out into thin air. And you’re falling and falling until you hit the ground. You’re laying there, motionless, fragments of dust and dry air has filled your throat and you feel the bones of your spine shatter slowly. You can see pieces of rock and debris falling towards you. You lie there still. 

As a little girl I always thought of what it would be to grow up. To become a woman of perhaps power, a wife, a mother or even one of those women who sat in their cold brick like homes by the window sill waiting for their pocket filled husbands to come home with the bacon. 

Does it make sense at all? 

Doesn’t it make you wonder that sometimes growing up makes you tolerate all your worst fears as you take that step each way of your life?

I always thought that I would have a normal life, I would finish school, go to university, find a job and a nice husband and the rest follows. Well, most girls my age at some point in time thought of things like that. I would speak to mum a lot about that. The relationship we shared was a beautiful one. We were like best friends and did most girly things together. I suppose to some extent she spoilt me as well which was quite evident after her passing. I could not even make a cup of tea.

I lost my mum when I was 20. 

She was a short woman, with straight hair, fair skinned and petite. She was a beautiful woman who never seemed to complain of why it would rain on washing day after the sky had promised the sun, or what she was going to cook for dinner. She only raised her voice when my brother continuously pestered me or pretended that he was studying when all the time he would have the light switched on in his room but he would be asleep.

It all started after my trip to New Zealand. Even now, I ask myself several hundreds of times, would it have been so different if I had not gone away or if I had decided to stay back? One thing instantaneously led to the other and that’s where I think my in between life waited for me patiently.

She never told me she was getting ill. Perhaps she did not want to worry me but then again, which mother would want to worry their off-spring.

Being diagnosed with terminal colon cancer at the very late stage is a never ending saga apart from the changing colostomy bags. But she would lie there and still not complain and tell me things of how pretty my hair looked or ask me whether my brother had decided what he wanted to do with his life or whether my father was pleased with his dinner. She just lay there.

Her eyes, I vividly remember, her twinkling bright eyes, would close gently with a sense of serenity the minute the nurse injected her veins with a soothing shot of pethidine or maybe morphine if it ran out of stock.

I spent many nights at the hospital waiting and watching and contemplating. There were times when my tears would just dry up from the inside of my eye even before I could start to cry when I could only imagine how much pain a human body could tolerate. She described her pain as tingling, pricking and piercing of a thousand needles inside her stomach. It would stop and start again. She looked thin and frail, like a porcelain doll. Her youth was eaten alive and her skin described a barren wasteland. She looked as if she would shatter into millions of pieces if she fell.

She did fall, on the day prior to the night of her death. The night that I had been some what anticipating and contemplating for. The night I thought I would actually see a soul or energy being released and finally descend into thin air from the placebo we call our body. I missed it. I missed it by seconds that turned into minutes. It would have been the most beautiful moment of my life. I would have done anything to be there.  I know she would have said something or made some gesture to re-assure me that it was all OK. That she was OK. But she never did because I was not there.

There’s so much more to that moment I could describe but I would rather not. I don’t think a moment like that can be described. I remember as if it happened yesterday, the last night I spent with her at the hospital. It would have had to be the most miserable, yet memorable night of my entire life and I swear by all the powers under the sun that I would do anything to have that night again.

Tolerance is an amazing word and to some extent it becomes a passion. 

When you are able to tolerate the most difficult of circumstances, I believe you are able to conquer the world. 

My most precious memory of her is when finally fell asleep on my lap in the early hours of rainy Friday morning. That was after her last shot of pethidine. The side of her thigh was so thin, there was hardly any flesh at all and it seemed like a sheet of brown silk was dropped over her bones. The nurse seemed exhausted as well. She stuck the needle into whatever was left of my mother, nodded her head and walked away. All I saw was a tear running down her cheek as she held my hand while I ran my fingers through her straight black hair and hummed her some hymns. It was close to four o’clock.

I had not slept and could feel my eyes burning. 

How could I have slept?

She had exhausted all means of medication by that time. Her pain threshold was so unimaginable that there was no more room for drugs in her system. Her disease had eaten her alive, the effect of the drugs died gradually and finally her will to survive surpassed by all means.

I think she was ready.

She crouched into a foetal position and fell asleep. She died on a rainy and dreary Friday night of 7 June 2001...and I missed that moment of her last breath perhaps by 5 minutes.

It was only when I began to remove her personal effects from her bedside and the pictures of me which she had stuck by her bed, when the nurse told me, “She was asking for you”.

Mum managed to lift whatever her energy allowed her to with her hand, pointed at my pictures on the wall and asked for me. My father confirmed this after the funeral and to this day, I keep contemplating on what she would have told me.  
  
Was it meant to be? 

Was I not supposed to experience something that I had mentally and emotionally prepared myself for the past 18 month?

Upon reaching the hospital, my father was already sitting by her bedside. I walked over to the bed and saw her in the most peaceful slumber. It was all over...


 I couldn’t cry. 

I wouldn’t cry. 

There was no need to. 

I needed a moment to myself at that particular point in time.

So did my dad and my brother.

It took us maybe three years to have that moment.








Taveuni - Throwback

NOTE: 

This update is 1 year 8 months old. I think I will call it my Throwback Thoughts...however it seems like only yesterday when we were basking in the sun and walking through an enchanted forest in the island of Taveuni, the third largest in Fiji. 

Apart from the septic arthritis and a fractured clavicle (my intention was not to masquerade being an Amazonian Warrior Princess - although the thought did run through my mind at the time); we relished every moment - the village kids, gravel roads, makeshift resting places, a swinging brigde, carpets of green moss, dense and prehistoric rainforests where geckos ran free. 







With the tickets off course, not forgetting the selfie before jumping into out little space ship.



    This image is one of the highlights from the plane.

Day One

One our first day, we met Sikeli, the custodian of the Bouma National Heritage Park, a knowledgeable gentlemen who knows all the in and out secretes that lie within the lands of Taveuni.

When he spoke, his words flowed with pride of his heritage as he pointed out historical sights where Abel Tasman first sighted Taveuni in 1643 and how tribal warfare broke out in the late 1860s. He spoke of how the very first British Methodist colonists began their outreach at respective villages.

We stayed at Tovutovu http://www.tovutovu.com/ , hosted by Mr Allan Peterson. The property is a family owned waterfront estate and the family has been residing in Taveuni since the early 1800s.

Sikeli drove us to the Bouma Falls, exquisite and the pictures below tell it all. My extremely silly crazy fiancée Allan was taken aback by not just the scenery but the fact he had his second love (lens) to capture those moments.

The walk is not an easy one, especially the 45 minute hike up to the second falls. There are three altogether. This in particular was unexpected creepy, dark, mysterious in a Middle-Earth kind of way. We did have a four legged guide called Simba but for some bizarre reason he responded to Dusty. He enjoyed those  Nature Valley Granola Bars. Love that Fleabag!


The Bouma Falls



Day Two

You need to give yourself one whole day to experience Lavena, apart from being consumed by the scenic coastline, breath taking waterfalls disappearing into the bottle green ocean, lush, and the rainforests, thick with vegetation and resplendent with tropical flowers, Lavena is one of the most picturesque villages on the southern coastline in the island of Taveuni.

What compliments Lavena, is her people. They are the essence of the true “ Fijian Bula” spirit, warm, homely and welcome you in experiencing their lifestyle. 

Lavena also features one of the most beautiful beaches of Taveuni. This beach, with its spectacular white sand and crystal clear water, was featured in the movie "Return of the Blue Lagoon".



Angels and New Beginings

Pay attention to your dreams -
God's angels often speak
directly to    
          our hearts when     
            we are
    asleep.



Quoted in The Angels' Little Instruction Book by Eileen Elias Freeman, 1994