FEMININE GAZE and FEMININE HAZE

-Amogelang Lesedi

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Of my watered world,

humilities inferred,

I leave sort of-

in-lung expulsion,

the cuss name orbiting a lesser fate.

Woman gorged, you, three times the woes of a lover and a father,

all of the man’s husk roaming,

Love has no use for fickle things corroding.

Love has no use for wheezing proclivity.

Ever the faze in which you are short breath, sprained, slumping with the unwilling body,

saying ‘I won’t’ with ‘I can’t’ is akin to pulling the skin inside out.

Soon, you must begin the work of waging a war on the root you once came from,

the formidable foot descending over and over cracking the skull fully formed.

It is not unusual that your hands are impatient with pretence of a thing rinsed off thoroughly,

disparaging the cost of pits with moulding tempers and implausible happenings.

While we lever pain to its essence, absence with its tolerance of a thing intolerable,

we are enduring cessation.

Any other task demanding too much of us risks our evasion.

It grips us down the side of the seams.

Wading through life eternally sanctioned, what exactly are we not made for?

At the back of each need a girl tacked on the severed umbilical cord wishes to be born anew,

the first birth having not birthed us whole.

Remember, often,

our story is as old as time.

Spanning the age, death setting foot in front of the womb.

Pressed into the crack of life’s forehead, a line to the tip of the body clutches for meaning (clinging

for clinging).

Adam’s petition to free name species is decidedly uneven.

When we say:

"Name us anything but sweet nurture affinities we tend to mimic for no good reason.

Make us anything else not raised to be ‘Participants’.

or ‘Task of certain oblation until the devil aligns some concept a sinking cause’.

The Lord will be our Portion therefore we will wait for him” and wait for him...wait for him...

We are drinking the black from the sky as opposed to tearing the throat out.

Our backs flat against an old wound, indefinitely phasing.

We are lamenting.

The precious manger permeating walls with coiled existence is warmth that has not yet asked for

names,

deep under the convent we huddle in,

we hide from aspiring hungers.

Although you graze the flesh proposing soft nature, we will fall of the things that pass ricocheting

across the bearer itself,

reeking of destruction which muddles and tethers us bare.

Therefore

we must laugh,

and laugh and laugh,

Commemorate the living hour.

We must laugh and laugh until the very end of us.