No Tiptoe Love

I don’t want no tiptoe love

No get me giddy or I get shy when you show up love

I don’t want no butterflies in my stomach type love

No I can’t look you in the eyes because my throat gets dry and my cheeks turn red,

No re-playing our contact sessions and regretting unsaid thoughts & feelings when alone in bed

No getting tongue-tied or because you ignored my text I cried

Then ignored you back because I allowed my pride

No conventional kind of love

I don’t want Bonnie & Clyde, I want above   

I don’t want no uncertain about your feelings towards me love

No you getting in my head just because you know you’re suave

No you acting passive because you think you’re tough

I don’t want no tactics love 

No scheming or plotting on me love

I don’t want a shifty or shady type of love

No second-guessing or disruptive love

I don’t want no mediocre love

No original

No ‘normal’

No complacent love

I want a crazy love

The, you don’t got to hassle me about what I’m thinking

Cause telepathy already has our minds linked in

I want a – gush out like the pillars at Katse dam broke down

And as I would in the water, get lost in your love and drown

I want a- because I’m your Queen you will always protect my crown

A soak me up with happiness and hose down my frown

A squeeze my bum and act like it wasn’t you when we walking around town

Or you drop the verses while I lace you with the beat like Kev Brown

-Type of love

I don’t want no tiptoe love

No innocent love

No pristine love

No unscathed love

I don’t want no easy love

I want a, waters run deep type of love

A stand the test of time and turmoil love

I want a ‘lets be friends first’

Because we have the rest of our lives to catch up on the rest

An eternity to explore one another’s’ crest

I want a, it almost feels like incest

Because we bond like siblings kind of love

I want a, curse the sh!t out of each other when acting like arses love

I want a destroy that bottle of wine and cuddle on the couch until we pass out love

A ‘lets play 30 seconds by ourselves so that when we invite our friends over we already know which hints to drop for which words’ love

I want a lets free up our afternoon schedules, go out for coffee so we examine contexts and themes from NoViolet Bulawayo’s ‘We need New Names’ in detail type of love

Or because the new Nas album just dropped, our entire universe stops so that we give it a thorough bump and then rate it kind of love

A lets take long drives out to sit in solitude with the mountains type of love

An explorative love

A curious love

A revolutionary love

A learned love  
  
A spiritual kind of love

I want a competitive love

Not the who loves one more than the other in this relationship love

But inspire me to be better tomorrow than I was yesterday

The, you’d laugh your eyes out if I ever fell in front of you but I know I’ll get you back when you pull the push door

The, my Nae Nae moves are slicker than yours yet we both know we look stupid

The, we arm wrestle because I convinced you I’d win but I don’t

The, lets compile a list of male and female duets and hear who sings their part better

The, race me from the parking lot to the entrance of the mall

-Sort of love

I don’t want no ordinary love, no stale love

I want an extraordinary love, an impenetrable love

That, if we woke up in a different planet I’d still choose you

The, if you wind up dead then that would also be my cue

-Kind of love  

I want a messy love

A passionate love

A spontaneous love

The, sometimes I hate you so much I want to kill you right now bro

But I’d still take a bullet for you if it were ever in tow

The, its raining cats and dogs yet you hold the umbrella over my head and not yours during our street row

Not because you enjoy the raindrops as they flow

But your main priority is still to shelter my ‘fro

And because you know if you left then that would be a bigger blow

So instead you stick around and we argue some more

Kinda love

I don’t want no tiptoe love

I want a real love

An enigmatic love

A never-ending love

Be strong for whom? For what?

 ---“A woman’s greatest strength is in her weakness” - Unknown---

Firstly let me get the disclaimers out of the way, I have said this before and I will say it again, I write from the heart, a place of honesty, one that is filled with real life experiences of myself and everyone else that I come into contact with. Having said that, I would just like to re-iterate that I have come from a very dark place in these past months. I am finding my way back to the light now, hence I am able to sit down and write, writing has always been therapeutic for me but this dark space had tied me down to the point where I thought I would never write again.  

I will not bore anyone with the nitty-gritties of what this dark place was like, (at least not right now), I will not bother sharing the details of how I got there in the first place, only that it left me feeling unhappy, weary and mad depressed. For the longest time I could not reach out to anyone because, well, some people really do get a kick out of seeing one down in the dumps and secondly, I would like to believe that I am really not one to go around disrupting people’s routines by piling my problems onto them- because of this, I tend to be very selective of whom it is I chose to share the intricate details of my life with.

Going on, it was during this period of darkness that I reached out to a sister of mine that I met while at varsity in Grahamstown about this depressive mode I had gotten accustomed to and in true sister form, she did her best at cheering me up. She is always such a bubbly character with an extremely positive outlook on life so I knew what I was doing when I let her in on my downheartedness, I was looking for my ray of light and she would be the one to shine it down on me.

As I had expected, she told me nice things, all the things that someone who is in that state of mind deserves to hear, she told me that all my rainy days would come to pass and that joy would find its way back to me, that we all deserve our bit of challenges so that we can appreciate the good that will inevitably come our way, that after revolt must come peace. She said these and so many other nice things, as we were ending the conversation, she also told me that the hardships we go through make us wiser and stronger.

In response, I told her that I was definitely looking forward to the being wiser part but not so much the being stronger. Quite frankly, I have never really understood what people mean when they tell others to “just be strong” during tough times. It is obviously not meant in the literal sense and even then, I do not think it would help much in healing anyone emotionally.

I do not want to be strong because it has served me no real purpose thus far, you see our mothers and those that came before them were praised for their strength, for being single mothers and housewives who weathered the storms of raising their children alone. Our mothers were commended for flourishing through dusty circumstances and because of this so-called strength; we wear the burden of having to be strong as well. Yes, these women who have been tumbling in troubles long before we knew what pain was but they also carry emotional scars that are too ugly to bear, scars that I wish to avoid by any means necessary.  

Although I am the product of one of the strongest women I know, I do not want to be strong. Being strong is not only emotionally taxing but it is also exhausting. I want to be soft. As soft as the cheeks of my nephew, as soft as cotton candy and pink marshmallows, soft like an over-ripe summer peach, I want a mellow type of softness, the kind you get from a Norah Jones record. Forget being strong, or hard, never mind about my street credibility- being strong is for those who can live with the façade- me, I cannot so I have decided I am going to be soft, I am going to be vulnerable and gooey and sensitive and mellow and sweet, I am going to cry when I need to, I will no longer hold back the tears all in the name of being strong, no. I will be as soft as they come, don’t get me wrong, I will be no enabler, I will not be feeble or weak, I will only allow myself to be the delicate flower that I know I am.

I chose to be soft because that is when I can be easily molded- by God and the Universe. When I am soft, I allow the intention of the universe to move me with ease, when I allow myself to be soft, I do not fight circumstances, instead I allow them to happen, accepting everything is it comes, questioning nothing and choosing to be a part of my own experiences as they occur.

So friends, no more being strong for me, if your advice to me during future periods of turmoil is that I be strong then please - no disrespect- but do spare me.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People...

---“Is there an answer to the question why bad things happen to good people?...The response would be…to forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all…no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened” –Harold S. Kusher ---

I have been of the page for about a minute now, I am not even sure whether I can still spill words out with the same intensity and knack as I used to, but alas, writing is truly the only way I know how to heal emotionally so here goes.

I am generally a good person. I know this not because I gave a coin to a street kid on a random when they asked for it, not because I go to church almost every Sunday and pray every single morning and evening, not because I once tipped a waiter even when my cash flow was a little stagnant, not because I spared my lunch for the mentally handicapped man roaming Kingsway, not because I feed the poor or give away old clothes and toys to charities but because I have a good heart, because I genuinely wish the best for everyone I come across and because I’d rather be the one hurting than to encounter my family and friends go through any kind of pain.  If you ask me, that is the end-all of being a good person, a good and pure heart. 

I do not need a second opinion on this, I know it to be a fact, pound for pound, I am a good person fam, but bad things have been happening to me of late, The kind of bad things that had me losing all faith, believing that there possibly cannot be a God out there because if there was He personally would have made sure that I never experience such pain for as long as I live. This is how confident I am about my being a good person. But being a good person does not guarantee that only good things will happen to you, although we may wish that this was the case, unfortunately we are all prone to a little sting every now and again. As I said, I have had a re-occurring series of bad events for the past few months, however that was not the worst of it, the nadir is when the people around you, your friends and family, the very people who during the good times promised they would stick around even during the bad decide to bid you adieu.

No amount of strength and honest living will prepare you for that gut wrenching moment of betrayal from your loved ones, no matter how much of a saint or how quick to forgive you are. Having people turn their backs on you during your driest spell, whether it is financially, professionally, emotionally or even mentally will have you cursing your very own existence. And just to rub salt to a wound, it is more unfortunate when those very people claim that they still have your back meanwhile you feel them slipping out of your life, slowly but surely. 

But I figure that when worldly people decide to leave your side at a time when you need their presence the most then it might just be time to head back to God because no matter how many times you trip and question His or Her existence, God will always be there, waiting on you to return to His arms- no judgments, no reprimands, just Her waiting to remind you that yes, bad things do happen to good people and that it is nothing personal. She will gently remind you of Jesus- how He healed the sick, comforted those in grief, prayed for our sins but still, He was chastised in the worst way. Look at Princess Diana, hers was a soul so pure, truly good- at least as far as the world could tell- but that did not stop Charles from leaving her for a woman that looks like a horse (this is not my personal opinion of Camilla, I came across this on the internets somewhere).

I guess what I am trying to say is that no one is exempt from bad times despite their nature. It does not matter how holier than the rest of us you consider yourself to be being good is no assurance that good luck will befall you, we just must take it all in strides and be grateful for the lessons that such situations come bearing.  

At the end of it all, nothing beats smiling through the tears, being at perfect peace and knowing that everything is happening just as it should because whatever it is we go through, it was always Gods plan for us- because God never left- She was always right by our sides even during that prodigal phase we all go through. She was right there, waiting on you to return to your senses and when you finally do, you smile a little more, a bit harder because you know everything will be okay in the end. 

“This is why we have to make room in our lives for people who may sometimes disappoint or exasperate us. If we hold our friends to a standard of perfection, or if they do that to us, we will end up far lonelier than we want to be”

Until next post,

Afrika Rising, Peace & Revolution...

I Noun Hip Hop

---"For many people Hip Hop was that first friend… the first to talk to us, the first to understand. Hip Hop has always been that kind of friend to me. And like any relationship… I watched it grow, I watched it change" --- Sanaa Lathan

Like you and yours I am a fiend for good music, whenever my view on life becomes foggy and I have difficulty finding my path I find my focus back through music. Any music. Through every situation I have ever faced in my life, music has been the pillar on which I leaned on, from the African drumbeats roaring in Oliver Mtukudzi and Mama Mirriam Makeba’s sounds or the upbeat rhythm I find in Glen Lewis’ Mid Tempos and DJ Fresh’s House Definitions, it could be the catchy melody in Trompies’ Malabulabu or Thebe’s Sokola Sonke, the blues in Nina Simone, the jazz influence from Chrisette Michele or the sound of the cornet from Olu Dara’s melodies to the near perfect cadence of his son- Nas- as he laces rhymes over tight beats.

The point here is I love music, all kinds of it, but at the same time I cannot front on this compulsive love for Hip Hop, the history of this blog is enough to validate my lifelong love-hate affair with it.  For me, Hip Hop is not just about fresh lyrics over dope cuts. It is a way of life, it is the air I breathe and the bounce you see in my step. That is why I speak about her in third person- as a noun, as an adjective, verb or any other way the English language permits.

This is also why today I peep from my shell to write to Hip Hop, to stress her impact on my life and to lay emphasis on my disappointments with the path she chose. I don’t write to change who and what Hip Hop has become, I write to get the load of my chest, to shed feelings and thoughts and to heal from the pain that she has dragged me through.

I know I should have heeded Nasir’s Message

When he told me that a thug changes, love changes

And best friends become strangers

I should have known the prerequisites to this love and hip hop shit

That you just don’t open your heart and let her hit

Ya’ll forgot to mention that there’s levels to this ‘follow your heart’ stream

The roses may be admirable but they are also as prickly as they seem

Now I feel the thorn on my hide, still I should have known

That she would stay mine, that is until her head got blown

She went mainstream, became relatable and then unfamiliar to me

Neglecting to remember that I was with her from the start

Or the person she was when we first made love

She fed of off my middle and my mind and then let me starve

And when I brought it up she act like I said I wanted half

What’s funny is she seems oblivious to what we were from the genesis

She found herself in the heart of the city and that’s where she thinks the love is

Dimmed memories as she waters down the role that I used to play

Omitted thoughts- when she was down it was my knees that hit the ground to pray

I played my part but you Hip Hop played my heart

Took me for a fool used me as a stepping stool and left me in a rut

The accolades came they were wrapped in fame

I understand now that shit could not have stayed the same

What hip-hop never understood is that those who pioneered her stay possessive

It’s their disposition although the new school thinks it’s regressive

I mean how do you introduce me to Grandmaster Flash’s The Message

And still think I’d feel the same when Soulja Boy Tell Em?

You acquaint me to KRS’s teachings on peace, love, unity and having fun

And expect me to still hail Wacka Flocka and Chief Keef on their run?

I know of your origins, I practically held you through them

You can’t blame me for seeing past your malleable façade in this new term

I’m serene for knowing that I gave her my all

And although our demise she had tried to stall

She and I both know that it was inevitable this fall

So to you Hip Hop, I hope you’re happy and that you’ll forever have a ball

Because now I know

That Hip Hop will not only come to Break You Off and maybe Break Your Neck

But it’s also bound to Break Your Heart

I might fight for her and have my way cause I know with me she came to stay

And even if she got around and asked for a new start

It would change nothing; I’d still rest one eye up