And there it was. The strange machine of talking to myself.

Within the black and white photograph, I appeared as any stranger would. Dazed, worldly, beautiful and dazzling. The silence was magnificent as any silence was at the moment of yr in South Africa. I repeat myself. Forget if those words were a part of an essay, prose, haiku or poetry. Rain. It’s purity lit up. An emblem. The veil lifted up. Humanity lit up, lifted up in a way. As cold as ice. Plums stored within the refrigerator. Whatever was stolen is that this. Birdsong, foot stomping on the steps by children scribbling within the air, the celebrities’ survival, the change in climate but you see I don’t care two hoots. I don’t think that anybody reads my work anyway.

Perhaps they think there’s something heroic about me. Perhaps I feel that there’s something heroic about them. Real people on the planet on the market. What the universe on the market doesn’t seem to grasp is that no one takes me seriously enough. I slept the entire day until darkness fell outside over the world. Winter has revisited me, I told herself. I must have been a mother. I must have been a wife. I must have been a lover. Here I’m at home with the origins of the Khoi, with research on the origins of the Khoi. Slowly I’m educating myself. Throughout me persons are productive. Either doing the identical thing I’m doing. Research has turn into second nature to me.

The word ‘Khoi’ and ‘origin of’ just isn’t strange to me anymore. As an alternative, I see all these beautiful strangers within the pages in front of me as my kin, my sort of folk. I belong to their tribe. These lessons from their patchwork world are my lessons. I’m going to the photocopying machine and make photocopies of past lives to take home with me. Cancelling ghost lives, mapping them out, and mapping them out of the system. They have gotten greater than book knowledge to me. They were human too. Their bodies damned, yet beautiful in their very own strange way. Now they were accessible. They were surreal to me. Dadaist surreal. Their physical body, which had the feel of the sun. Songs have been written about them not directly.

Documentaries have been made about them directly. I wanted to recollect them perpetually. I desired to nurture them as any mother would. Faces with their blurred lines. Blurred like mountains. Did they ever find their manna within the valleys wherein they lived, I wondered to herself. I live in a city of bridges with my elderly mama and papa in a house large enough for familial supporters. I’m a grown up child with doll features. Secure from drowning but not from sparks, not from animal skin collections, from otherworldly, tender poetry, picket fences.

The extraordinary machine of talking about yourself in the primary person.

The night angels got here to my window. I knew they got here for a reason. There was a time I walked down different streets in Johannesburg. I surveyed alleyways. I needed to imagine in something. Risk. Change of heart. Change of mind. I actually needed to imagine in suburbia again. Out of sight. Out of mind. I needed it badly just like the wife who needs intimacy within the early hours of the morning. Just like the wife who needs to speak to her husband that she needs her bones to be shielded from sadness, the glaring way forward for incompatibility.

Society wants you to work for a living. Society wants you to work yourself right into a depression, into stress, into having that sunny road. Into having those kids, going to the dog park on weekends together with your husband, having Indian friends who will make you curries and biryani, hide that single malt whisky at the underside of your chest of drawers, having those Muslim friends who will bring you samosas’. Society doesn’t want you to imagine in angels. A moveable feast. You can be a author, be a poet, be anything that you must be. They need you to earn minimum wage before you begin climbing the ladder, getting that promotion, running marathons on the weekend, treating your pets as in the event that they were your kids.

They need you to flip burgers before you turn into a professor. They need men to marry an intelligent woman who’s thoughtful, affectionate, warm, loving, and sincere. In other words, society wants you to marry your mother except a sexier version of your mother. A girl you possibly can take to bed. A poet will let you know that illness and disability are beautiful strangers. Blood is thicker than water. They need you to recollect a myriad of things. When aunts and uncles hurt you. When strangers comforted and loved you.

Whenever you ate watermelon in childhood, gravitated towards peaches, adored pears for his or her shape, their sweet fruit, and when the self-portrait of their juice was like a novel discovery like aloe sap. A phenomenal landscape was at all times useless to me unless it contained people, a sunrise, or sunset. I had to watch something within the wilderness history of all of it. Study minutia.

The night angels got here to my window. Angels without wings. The fractured wind wed birdsongs. Driftwood spilled out of purple seawater. My bones live once I swim. Swimming gives me some relief from the every day grind of labor, of affection, of play, of fun, of lovemaking, of gardening within the dirt, of planting. The road is full of chameleons with their shark teeth, with their colors of the rainbow, with their tough skin. Their skin is as tough as a crocodile’s, haunting storytelling, enormous giants, grotesque freaks. Freaks whose faces are covered with fur. Female sword swallowers in a circus. Dwarves. Slightly person. Little people.

Individuals with hearts of gold. Individuals with hearts period. Their visions will not be handmade and visions will not be crafted by hands, indecisiveness, and alternative but reasonably by a god. What god do you worship? What god do you praise? The god that you simply decide to imagine in. The god that you simply grant access to, passage to your dreams and your thoughts. Your successes and your failures. Your exits. You inside and outside. What does the physical illustrate if not the fantastic thing about mankind, the entire minor angles and the foremost distributions of humanity’s ins and outs, struggles to come back to terms with bereavement, denial, grief, and singular loss?

Within the search of cold, winter guests (rotting leaves within the gutter, wet paint, black leaves, Portland, Oregon) invited uninvited entries in journals. Ultimately what matters on this world? Sickness. Does it matter? Is there logic in losing someone that you simply like to a terminal illness? Is there logic in domestic science, in domesticity, within the domestic goddess who dazzles together with her recipes, her grocery list, her exploding trolley within the supermarket, her pathetic frustration at not finding exactly what she wants if it happens to be fish fingers or pineapple juice. I’m a whale due to fish fingers. Take a look at me. My fried chicken thighs. I make circles on my plate.

That is what the maelstrom of chaos and disorder of illness can do to you. You possibly can crack open the peanut butter jar within the early hours of the morning. It’s a source of loneliness, isolation beckoning. It says, hey there. I actually missed you.

People matter. Earth matters. Chilled earth. Bulbs. Butterflies up in flames. There’s something poignant about dandelions. Real lions. Images and frames. Shooting through the lens. I mean that is known.

There may be the sunshine exploding into perspective like Mrs Dalloway, our mother within the kitchen after church in her Sunday best. The chicken is far-off from all of us now. It has its own memories of loneliness and lust. Its white meat has begun to resonate within the oven. Make waves.  We shall be going to the beach within the afternoon. If we’re good, we are going to get ice cream.

I remember the sale on the breeze. Its gift in my hair.  The beautifully understated smell of salt. Fragments of winter. In all of its unstable geometries. There may be a journal there. There may be a winter journal there. Are you there God listening or are you having conversations with a prophet with their garden way of thinking?

Life is a mystery to me. It yields a kaleidoscope, a mountain, a meditation of going up the mountain. My brother doesn’t know anything about life or sex yet. I don’t see the sexual impulse, the sex drive shining in his eyes yet. I wish I had someone to consult with about this. I kissed Oupa’s cheek when he was within the intensive care unit on the hospital. A kiss for the dying. People leave me alone. Why do people leave me alone? It’s a postcard. It haunts me.

I feel of Ouma’s kitchen and the way I couldn’t get enough of her potatoes. Television couldn’t give me enough introductions to being raised on Hollywood squalor and rubbish. I hardly watched the documentaries with their green hope a-plenty, and an abundance of green feasts within the jungles where pygmies lived.

Key in pocket after school I’d open my front door to an empty house and pretend I used to be a runaway or an orphan. Does God answer prayer? I returned to the book of miracles, Noah’s Ark and Jonah’s whale, Daniel within the lion’s den. Were they not odd people just like the diary of my family life?

Within the lonely afternoons uninterested in the dialogue in soaps, the prophets kept me company. The impressive Jesus, Moses within the wilderness, the burning bush, Aaron and Miriam. They were my manna. So long as there have been glaciers, there would at all times be urban cowboys, and kites on the opposite side of the world.

I unearthed scholars of trivia, lunches of blood of beef and potatoes, the aftermath of the forced removals during apartheid South Africa that was what my father the creator called the ballad of South End. After all, there was mental illness on my father’s side of the family, alcoholism, breast cancer, fertility problems on my mother’s.

There are odd people within the slum of Helenvale. There are ambitious girls who’re also promiscuous. Please help.  They call that intimacy once they are in a room with an older man along with his gifts of superb wine, expensive chocolates, and perfume. With a sigh, she lays sleepless in his arms.

He says to her. That is my inner vision of you. You might be a lotus flower. Thirst. Primitive. A virgin. An innocent. I’ll teach you all the pieces I do know. You’ll leave the lamentations of this world far behind from this zero point. The survival kit for mental illness just isn’t therapy, it’s water. It’s when sleep cometh. He encouraged her to maintain a journal.

When bad moms occur, it’s as in the event you are eating a bitter orange. Pretend that the inside of the pomegranate is mental illness within the wards of Elizabeth Donkin. Pretend it’s Biko, Hani, Julius Malema, and Daddy. Tell yourself. Welcome to Sarajevo. Consider water. Consider hours, water in wild places and once I make like to you think that of the land of milk and honey.

Who’s the laughing carcass? Whatever happened to the ballad of Dulcie September? Has she gone the way in which of the flight of dandelions, swans and geese gliding through the air, when women had wings? Men know the right way to become profitable (that’s their shot to the massive time). Women know the right way to nurture and develop life skills of their children (that’s the width of their thread).

I used to be a slave to the sophistication of art, the heritage beyond the dream, my hot tea, and my slices of bread and butter. The external world. Did that make me bitter, torment me? There was the vision and the goal. No person knows my inner lifetime of eating bread and cake within the depths of the night. Within the early hours of the morning, I feel of Sarajevo and Susan Sontag.

The thing about Sylvia Plath is she was luminous. She was America’s gift to the world. While I garden, I feel of the land that borders on God. Rilke’s world.