I want out!

the dancer is you in the Savanna rains
When you ask the bus to go on forever
and
the looking glass is you when
definitely
Yu ask my buttocks of images in paraffin
roaring burning black in haephestus' furnace
the days are calabashes of dead palm wine
that blossom into red blood in the black ambulance
yu say your life is my presence
turned into destitute vocabulary

but I forget
Joan of Arc was White
Very White the paper of hell's menus blistered
and scalded my Steve Biko fingertips
When I looked back
the wayward bus was right in front of me
Its single tyre Cyclop's smarting eye

When they began talking of digris

She looked at me at my empty silence
but you write write poems
how come you got no degrees?

the stamps in this detention mind
turn livid like a charon capsizing in Urine
the smudges on my face is debating faeces
the wormz these my fingers are typewriter keys
the Cry in the raining nyt trying
trying
to mangle the english language

I
forget
my dreadline is close
I have taken my poems
I'll get the books when I
bring your money
the typewriter was neva mine

When the becomes so real
and the poem refuses to end
enslaving to write all hours
I
know longer have tears to cry
remember
when I insisted on paying the bill
and yu knew I had no monies
and stared as I ate piles and miles of
spaghetti bread yu didnt know
that was my first meal in 4 days I
never said fasting was voluntary
Out the Savanna music kinged
for appearance's sake
lets hold hands

between pages of blazing gasps
your thighs when they crush me are delirium bantustans
and the flags
words from Senghor silences the Wind!

The Winter moon imprisons girls
poetessez with thighs like akhmatova
and
!
blood red blobs drop on this poem

Im not trying to emphaSIZE!
the blooddrops in my plate
Scarlet a red soup of gritty tears
gravel of brain sawdust
on the drill of time(s)
answer
What race was scipio africanus

the rains in the Savanna dance you
definitely.


Phillip Zhuwao

this morning nigger

The days have been like this
these past 4 days

I've been trying to sell
my 2 copies of New Coin for few coins
Veldfire ravage evicts
mice hares locusts and her beauty to the hunter
to believe
I've walked to town and back
to try and secure that University scholarship

It's vain and vulnerable
achille's heel my roofs crush me
over the hills the beautiful Vumba mountains
the grassy drakensberg the sand-particled kalahari
my biological homeland Barotseland
Lewanika's eye and my true identity

My heart is now a bomb
the dish of water that pilate washed hands

Indians smoke peace pipe
When I'm reading Oom Smut's autobiography

We can sit in this sun
or beneath it

God's footstools
So long as
I have a single beer

When she crossed her legs on Farewell
She mentioned Upsaala Heidelberg
Then british airways, She was gone.

Baring the wolf's ivory fangs
trying to blaspheme if God slept at all
Wondering why poetry is personal
Why I'm not yet dead the cat's whisker twitched
SHIT!
Again the blood and snot clotted in my nostrils
to the shouting outside

this dark little room where
the unmattressed bed
the tens and tens of books
the oversized jacket behind the door
the holed shoes
are POETRY themselves.

Phillip Zhuwao