Poetry Bulawayo

When the world sees me,  When the world hears me When the world thinks me-  It is the bulging stomach,  It is the hopelessness in big brown eyes –  And long thin arms  Holding up a large begging bowl.  I am an African too  So please PLEASE!  Leave me in this muck of degradation, shame  For I have reason –  Good reason to be in this mud! Globalisation, Colonisation, Mcdonaldisation, Apartheid, Humiliation, Good reason – see! (...besides, it is too familiar a friend to leave now... and kinda warm) I am an African too –  So I dance  And dance  While the world, ululates, claps gaps –  Because the jingle to which I dance  Is of the chains around my wrists  So I cannot take back what  The world owes me. .. it is the jingle of the chains  Around around my ankles  So I cannot go to where my mind has been  – So I dance –  and I tea...

When love must, it ends. Where my naked feet trod the same dusty lane Of fragments already tattered and torn, Left by one Charmaine, Silent echoes are thrown in my mind Men are all the same, Simply not worth the dreams and longing   Of women. No need to mention him in my next poem, He plays no part in my life story. Instead The attention he dignifies with the words love, Provokes several displays of the rhetoric- He had to hurt one,   Why did it have to be me? He had to love one, Why couldn’t it be me? When love must, not even the best of lies or sacrifice can keep us together...   When it must,   It ends... And it has.