Mpho Leteng

My days are filled with flames of nostalgia;
sin peeled away the walls of my heart,
torn my faith apart...
like burning acid it consumed me!
...

Fragments of my fractured heart falling apart at the seams;
i crawl towards the fading light,
in my mind logically interweaved thoughts of my parents lost identity
a false believe they held from the craddle to the grave
...

I want a plain substandard coffin,
Wide enough to contain my wishes of more livelier offing
A much more humbled prospect; a faultless unadulterated vision!
...

Now that i shall sink and die in the nadirs of my own house;
And my tears shall trickle down and fall on the distrait soils of my land,
Now that i shall fall and wither
If at all I have to free myself from the need to be free
...

From your disheveled intellects I seek none story, I seek no poem;
For I fell short not of a story nor poem!
I fell short of undoubted reasons to why I should read any of your nonsense!
...

I too would rummage around for one to stub out my thirst;
To unfurl me with familiar lies and tamp me with such taste,
Or as luck would have it find mine woman holy, innocent and chaste.
...

Our walk is a walk of fatuous minds to their massacring field;
Our walk is a visionless walk through the foot-path of obliteration,
Yet we still walk down that same road!
...

When raindrops hit the grey floor,
we all mythyfied the truth for a purpose that really go,
but the beginning is a contradictory lie to the end.
...

You put me through the mangle,
interrogated my mind with quizful smiles;
and when you walked away my heart wore a green willow!
i covered my head sadly with a pillow...and cried...
...

(Written by Mpho Leteng & Jennifer Legotlwane, edited by Onalethuso Petrus Ntema)

1. So you are still out-and-out with that old passion?
I look cogently at you actively warbling that song, unchanged,
...

I will wing higher than eagles soar;
I will speak; I will rumble and roar,

Fear will not conquer me,
...

We get gulped in depths of impassioned passions,
Emotional emotions, a tempest raging, a force too strong,
Love is no longer the endearment of Shakespear's pen,
The true love that concurs all is only a poet's mirage,
...

When the earth bleeds;
fights abound about like Aboriginals tales,
memories of words that abut prophecies unveil,
multitudes of no fixed abodes occupy psychiantric hospital beds...
...

cloaked in the dark waves of a Kachikau winter night;
the last faint gleam of hope glide,
scared out my wits, no one by my side,
who can i trust?
...

When they imprisoned our minds into the grave...
among the dead we found breathing bones,
When they crucified our bright crude crave...
some of us died battling a way out
...

My heart is wrapped with codes of death;
future foreshadowed by doom and gloom,
i fade away like a lengthening shadow
but thou i die, this i've been graced with will die not,
...

Nested in the far deep,
beyond the the distant tuples of moreish smiles,
beyond the reach of a dayheat intoxicated sleep
faraway but not too long if you walk a few extra miles,
...

Don't stand before my grave and weep;
For like poetry I only die in theories of my sleep,
'Rather merry with aromatic culinary mead,
Until myriad tear-tribes flow from your eyes and bleed.
...

I fathered that night to dawn and hit the roadway early,
If i remember well Kachikau was waving hazily and giving a wry grin!
I paused for a moment twiddling thumbs of my chaffed hands,
...

Gritting his teeth against distasteful pain,
Imbibing objectionable spirits of his faded familiar bonds!
Breaths strenuous to swallow up like a lump of gristle.
...