Part 1

Dear Reader, oftentimes this is how it all starts

Lost love shatters a heart into a thousand unspoken words
A mind plagued by shadows and phantoms is a prisoner of silence

Unannounced cyclones   

Unexpected storm clouds

Unprepared for the hurricane

You are burning up in flames you don’t even feel

Sometimes –

you are thrust amid blazing battles

Fires started by psychos armed with gasoline lighters

This is where you lost yourself – the how, matters not in the slightest

Randomly –  

You are drowning down a drain in someone else’s lavatory

with a vice grip around your neck

in their hand, they hold a plunger that had seen better days

They remind you of your role in their world  

These creatures come in shapes unexpected; unpredicted

A boss who mistook you for a ladder to their aspirations

A leader who mistook your silence for consent

A master who mistook your freedom songs for rebellious chants

A lover whose kisses are hemlock in controlled doses

A cutting word uttered eons ago

For the eye never forgets what the heart has seen

A hostile home: a workplace, this was once a safe place

Now an invisible battlefield, constantly in combat mode –

These demons need no voodoo dolls to send them to hell

For what they fear the most in your world

Is your resilience and resistance

Your determination and your lack of hesitation

Your courage and your endurance  

Whatever the battle and wherever the battlefield

Rise up warrior and sword up

You are

the weapon.

For only a ravenous fire can quench the thirst of a raging inferno 

Part 2: Unrequited Love

Dear Reader

Unrequited love is a parched heart drowning in an oasis
It is the relentless heaviness of unarticulated afflictions on the soul

It is the moment Cupid’s arrow misunderstood the bow’s intentions

Love unreturned is a heart on leaping flames

It is when the shining star in your eyes is an eclipse in the eyes of the one

It is when the other heart is deaf to your anguished screams 

Unrequited love is more than boy loves girl who loves another

Love unrequited is every situation that rejected your humanity

Unreciprocated love is every situation that rejected your worth

Unrequited love is a disease not of the heart

But of a society that has put your destiny on a tight leash…

Part 3: We do time –

Dear Reader,

A poet will come along armed with these cliches

And telling tales of times that heal all ills 

I will tell you this, time holds no such power

Freedom of the self is a negotiation between your resilience and their silence 

It lies in the little cracks between their hesitation and your desperation

Meanwhile,

We keep our voices down

We mind our tones 

We desensitise

We cease to shout about every little bout of affliction

We have filed, in locked steel cabinets, all that we fear  

These dead voices now buried six feet under in shrouds of shame

And in censored graveyards that we carry with no restrictions   

Dear Reader,

Once I saw a man’s freed hand lynch his suffering soul by the neck  

He said this is what doing time does to tongues on the fringes…

Then he offered himself to the sirens that had lured him into the belly of the ocean 

I was among the spectators who played the lute on mute  

I was curious only of fragments of the beautiful song he sang as he went down –

I swear my silent lips will remain forever sealed and deprived

That my naked eye will be haunted eternally by his truth and the unspoken

I watched despair ravenously feeding on the remains of his spirit.

Dear Reader,

Perhaps your pain is more than just a little perplexing

Maybe your graveyard is heavier than any load I have carried 

Listen – I promise not to use poetic words!

But mind the mass graves of grief you sweep underneath your pride,

And under that burst of manic energy –

Because this is how we drown beneath that load!

B.K Knight