I have grown old before my time.
Not a romantic supposition, like those city-women with philosophy books
Who eat prose and drink tea and get snatched up by the beauty of Jacarandas.
No.
Aged like a city block which perhaps was once uptown
But now reeks of piss.
Decrepit like a skyscraper condemned to demolition
Fifty years ago and since remiss
Apathetically forgotten
‘was ‘n a bad parta town anyway.
In the springtime I dream of Provence.
Purple waves crumbling over hilltops and peaking
Only to tumble into valleys bleeding
The scent of affluence and sweeping
Up my mother’s white summer dress (when my mother was still beautiful)
in its haughty arms.
In the springtime I dream of Provence.
But I am a coin wedged in a grill
With nothing but memories of trade and barter
Stuck in the smog of dying ambitions and shadows
Each passing man a corpse or a martyr.
I will slip through the preface and forgotten remain
‘was ‘n a bad parta town anyway.
Iactura was once a rich man’s daughter but became a pauper’s child in her high school years. Both of her parents had been well-to-do entrepreneurs, her father having originally been an Advocate by trade. She attended Woodhill College for nine years and thereafter completed her secondary education through the University of Cambridge (whilst waitressing to afford it). She spent five years living in Douglas on the Isle of Man whilst her father worked as a solicitor there and her mother fell into an abysmally deep depression because of a lack of vitamin D or something like that – and considers herself to be Manx as well as South Africa stemming from this experience.
Iactura is currently in her third year LLB (law) and still working a soul-numbing 08:00 to 17:00 job in order to support her studies. She is mostly alienated from her parents and lives with her partner who is a history teacher.
She obtained her Springbok colours in dressage (a form of Equestrianism) but has had to lease out the one pony she managed to hold onto through her parents’ sequestration to a disabled girl in order to have someone be able to pay his keep.
She also owns on curly-hair tarantula named Shelob (clever Lord of the Rings reference), a cornsnake named Ka (clever Junglebook reference) and a crossbred mutt named Moon (I let my partner name her as part of the “we’re getting a dog”-agreement). Iactura would own a zoo if she had it her way, alas it is not practical in the apartment she currently inhabits.
Iactura spent a great deal of her adolescence writing prose and sharing it with her mortified teachers and jeering peers, however she lost this habit as she stepped into adulthood and realised how mundane life, which she had been raving about, really was. She also stopped consuming alcohol, which was previously somewhat of an addiction, because it had started to ill-effect her health – she still enjoys tobacco.