poetry
“To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.” — Robert Graves
I am hesitant to call myself a poet, but every once in a while I am struck by a spark of inspiration to pick a pen and scribble a few lines. Most of them are about love, but a few are about other themes. There are many poems of mine from before 2010 that have been lost. It is for this reason that I decided I was going to publish all my poems. These poems are personal, and I hope I do not regret sharing these on this public forum. My Poem Hunter profile is here.
I suppose it is safe to say that I love my family. Following the unfortunate demise of my uncle Rubuki, I penned the poem Dear Death. I was heartbroken and frustrated. It is also a poem that captures my dissatisfaction with organized religion. Around this time, I also wrote a gratitude poem for my mother entitled Mrs. Ramarea. This was before dementia took away the essence of who she is. No amount of words, especially from a badly written poem, can ever capture the amount of gratitude I feel for this woman. My father died when I was only 5, so unsurprisingly he did not feature much in my upbringing. Nonetheless, I have given him a few lines in the poem I Am...I Am From. I wrote that poem to celebrate the woman my mother was. It is a tragedy that we lost her so soon.
Sometimes my poetry has been a tool of "protest". What Is Life's Purpose is a very depressing poem that protests unemployment in Botswana and the education system that does not lead anywhere. From the tone of the poem, I think I was very sad when I wrote it - maybe depressed? This Day Was Not Mine was a poem I wrote on a day I was sad because my headphones had died, and I could not start my day with uplifting music as is customary. After moving abroad, one of the sources of sadness was the significant decline in success with women. So much I started missing old lovers from my childhood in Botswana, claiming they were Forever Engraved in my heart and they were The Best I Ever Had. Not Lost reveals how religion became a source of salvation in my days of darkness.
On my first day at UWC Costa Rica, I declared my Mexican Love on NC. Costa Rica was the creepiest I have been. In my defense, and this is no valid defense, I did not know better. I was obsessed with MDJM. It started off as a crush but it snowballed into something I am not proud of. To this day, I am apologetic for all the discomfort this phase of my life caused MDJM. I wrote a lot of poems for her. Poems like Untitled Poem, True Dream, and Standing Out laid out the love that I supposedly felt for her (in secret but in public). (I am a walking, breathing contradiction). Letter From A Flying Chicken reflects the internal conflict on how I valued the perceived success of studying abroad with the real loss of "charm with the ladies". It was also written for MDJM. One of my favorite poems of all time is "Letter From A Contract Worker" by Antonio Jacinto. While it inspired the previous poem, it especially inspired If The Wind Should.
But Costa Rica was more than just my obsession with MDJM. I penned Regiment VIII as a tribute to the guys I lived with in the Montezuma house. The time came for me to leave Costa Rica. It was a lovely experience but as with everything it had to end. When The Sun Rises After Sunset was written the evening before my flight back to Botswana. As I took off, I knew I was taking the Memories with me everywhere I would go from that point onward. But a thought that bothered me was I Wonder If They Will Remember.
There were moments when I was in love and when I thought I was in love. In 2012, I was catfished by two women in Gaborone. They were so good! I fell so deep I wrote a poem entitled Opelo (The One With A Heart), in which I promised to always be there. The lies we tell! 2014 saw me swept off my feet by BFP and The Sun Rose Last Night was written. You Spoil Me started off as a journal entry that was reformatted to become a poem. It was written after speaking on the phone with my then girlfriend IG. Perhaps Love was written for AH, the first woman I truly pursued at Stanford. That ended abruptly and I was heartbroken. I wrote in my journal about how I Miss Her and reformatted it later as a poem. I Need To Learn To Punctuate was a poem I wrote to comfort myself and basically remind myself that it is okay for journeys to lead nowhere. Then there was AK. I still remember the time we sat On A Bench Under The Moon by the Berkeley Marina. But not everything that looks like a perfect love story is one. To complete off my A season was AG. Oh AG! Every time I stood Beside You was magical. But that too, did not go anywhere.
One of the struggles I have had with romantic love, is more often than not I have confused the joy of companionship in friendship to be a sign of romantic love. I wrote What Are The Chances? as I day dreamed of my friendship with FF evolving into something more. I have also been in relationships where there was a mismatch in terms of expectations. The Heart, Mind And Fingers tries to capture this disconnect that sometimes exist. I wrote it because I felt some romantic partners were using me. But we learn and we grow. Toxic Enough is probably the one poem that captures this phenomena. I wrote it at a moment when I realized all the ways in which I too was toxic, and I resolved to do my best to unlearn all the harmful ways I have been socialized to be hurtful towards women. A Woman I Met In The Cafeteria demonstrates how I used to view women as prizes for men to take. I am still not perfect, but I am proud of the journey so far. It gives me the strength for the more work that is ahead. One of the things I learned was that often I Say Yes But... I mean No. Giving Shame A Voice is realization that part of unlearning and part of healing from toxic masculinity is allowing myself to feel negative emotions.
I have not given up on love. The time will come. By The Lake is a poem I wrote as I saw the sun rising over the lake in Tahoe, California on a summer morning. As I saw that and remembered how different a winter morning is, I was reminded of the seasons of life. So my love summer will come. You just wait and see. I just need to stop blending friendship with romance in my head. No more poems like A Poem For A Friend.
I have also written the following poems: