I open my notebook and find a poem searching for my country’s faults.
Within the searching— a slam,
Within the slam: flipping of judges biographies,
The biographies? Masterclasses on nuances of my country’s crying,
the dialect amidst the tears.
A voice turns:
“Calm lacks the lexicon of a performance.
It is void of a revolution.
A revolution without a storm of gestures is poor grammar akin to a freedom charter
gathering dust in exile.
Note, rage is just a taught rubric of history.
Your country is a library of apologies from mouths that are not sorry.”
I borrow triggers from a struggle song to rage like the armed wing
I scream as though bullets are canines bitting into my skin
The stage turns into an undressed wound leading towards the inside of a protest.
AMANDLA
My stanzas are plagiarised screams
AMANDLA
How heavy is death to a name worn in a protest?
AMANDLA
I push out the song that our people knew as a co-written suicide note.
Within the notes, a cliché; within the cliche, death.
Loss is written by the same last breath
or the white hands Steve Biko borrowed for his suicide.
I turn his breath into background music
My mouth opens as wide as an anthology half-written or half-read.
I open the anthology and find a hand turning into an incomplete fist patient in pulling
a trigger,
The pose is a movement or an arrest before 1994
freeze!!!
You raise your hands like my performance is the gun.
freeze!
My poem is the trigger
freeze!
You hold the back of your head like your father did;
his knees falling to cover potholes
Like your votes failing to cover potholes
His name is a concept waiting to remind you how he died.
This poem is a chant of a millennium who does not even know how tiring a tyre is
around the neck.
I open my notebook and find my grandmother
choking on dust instead of tear gas.
Her body leans into what’s left of her lifespan as 1994 stares at her
like it is a tired pick up line.
I open the line and find a queue to the voting station.
She voted,
I slam!
My trophies are tombstones for all the obituaries I’ve written as poems.
I open my notebook and find my country’s faults.
I open
my mouth
and
SLAM!