The Mind’s Eye by Chad Brevis

Chad Brevis | October 22nd, 2013 | a poem a day challenge, poetry | No Comments

Poem

I close my eyes
to open up a world
where ethereal winds blow
and smoke unfurls
to create perfect clarity
of a black and white landscape
that takes shape in this formless void
of an unfettered mind.

I speak memory, consciously
defending the thoughts of a liminal mind
defined both in and out of time
by the intertextuality of minds preceding me

and

book by book
I feel this infidelity
as I betray my generation
by thinking knowledge of old out loud.

I betray my ancestry
by neglecting my oral history
and hide behind a haze of interdiscursivity
that denies me my true colour: humanity.

Hate after hate
I debate over debates
about whether all the years of being
fed the ash of my incinerated ancestries
Is the frame that truly comes
To define me?

And yet, I am ungrateful to this teacher.

It is logical to learn patience from the ill patient
and love from the hated
who seeks to make their Maker,
the tyrannical miseducator,
a God within his own right,
not a God of small things,
not a God in their own heads.

Strangely though,
when we speak words that echo His word,
the sound reverberates
and the sound that echoes back
seems the self same voice
that sings for its stolen freedom.

From speaking memory to speaking truth
I hear the voices of our youth
that echo to the night the sensations of fright,
weeping;
we, too,
sing a fearful trill
of things unknown
over distant hills.

Poet Bio

Chad Brevis is a Masters student of English Literature at The University of the Western Cape with training in Ethical theory and Linguistics. He is currently working on a Full dissertation on taboo topics in literature. A particular focus is spent on the banning of literature and arts. During his undergraduate and Honours years he worked as a tutor for the Department of Religion and theology. He currently tutors in the Department of English. Chad also works as a staff writer for the Cape Town based cultural hiphop magazine IAM Magazine.

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