Poor Things, Please Ask Barbie and Ken What’s Love Got To Do With It
Birds sing, thoughtful and principled. In the greener valleys the foundations of the oceans are found there, bold and cheerful and brave. You are commanding. You are masterful. You are chariot and messenger. Believe in yourself, as I believe in you. The way I believe in you speaking gently, creator of the stars, the alignment of the planets and all the dimensions of the universe. I remain steadfast in prayer, mindful about breakthrough, reassured that I am loved the way I am and you never say I am too much. You document all my acts of grace. The power of the leader in you is qualified mother, maternal and paternal grandmother, Don Beukes, Eugene Skeef, Mikale Barry, David Max Brown, David Mazzola, Virgil Bruiners, Meralyn Barry, Nyambura Kiarie, Stanley Ejiogu and for all of the astronomers in my life constantly at work.
“Birthday Poem” for Julian Plates. Be honest. Be truthful. Be sincere. Be authentic. In this gifted museum my father’s books travel with me. Think with integrity today. You are my community of speeches. I believe in your extraordinary and Olympic succession. You are who you are who you are. Bound for greatness, for the cosmic universe. You are all my spiritual growth. Today I feel blessed with the relationships that I have had in my life and even though I feel overwhelmed by sadness this morning you must tell yourself that at least you have happiness in your life. There is your faithfulness and your progress and I know I will always have poetry in my life. It is human nature that makes life complex. I think of my own “existential falls” from grace. I think of everything with psychological insight and I go outside and greet the sun and write this birthday poem to you. Sometimes my loneliness is as emphasised as the sea and I think of all the people in my life who have gone on to do great things and remind myself I will follow in their footsteps yet. And although I sometimes walk in fields of snow even in the summertime, there is still the hibiscus flower, there are lighthouses and there is hope. You are gold with the agenda of angels. While I am solitary guardian, poet, listener, traveller where prayers find me in the stillness of this early hour.
“You”. You are all my psychological insight, significant genius. How to find a cure for this kind of loneliness. You are not as vulnerable and insecure as I am as poet. I tell my soul that you are courageous. I am awake now. I am the breakthrough found in the cold snow. I am the fugitive daughter fashioned out of clay. I am the book thief. I speak to the divine intuition in your every persuasion, Virgil the poet. I fix my eyes to the volcano of the sun in your eyes, on the spiritual sensitivity of your persuasion for you are tenderness and forgiveness and desire. I wait for all of your visions. My soul worships your soul. What do poets understand but of course abandonment. They shield themselves from this world with the sword of silence to balance out all the nightfalls. The goddess believes in female silence. The poet believes in the relationship between people and art. I love this planet. I carry its bloodline in the earth of my veins in the same way that leaves burden themselves with gravity. So, I found my way back to you, Virgil, the poet. Back to home. For you are gold. I am community and all I do all day is make speeches to you. Virgil, your approval matters to me most in this season of renewal at the pace of God. I think of having an attitude of hope now, believing in the inheritance of abundance, thinking of the more hope we can lavish on other people, the more hope we will have available to us. What I have in you, what haven’t I found in you, Virgil, the question begs to be answered. I have found the ark, your significant genius, all your potentialities at the edge of the swimming pool daydreamer. For you, Virgil, are my assignment. We came from different worlds only to fall in love and mark our territories with the phenomenon of gold. You taught me that the studying of the Bible, anything of Christ is wisdom. It is also a book about decisions. I found the nature of your personal velocity in the potential and belief systems of your mind. I am just a novelist. You are the inventor of sentiment. I do not want to live quietly anymore.
“You”. You are my museum guide to the spiritual enlightenment of Monday, my foundation journal entry for today, you are all my tourist hopes, and I give you this invitation to all my fears, my memory secrets, my thin needful of dreams, my wild wilderness land of insecurities and the philosophy of my self-doubts. Can you handle these sweeping truths, can you handle fragile me at the best of times, even at the worst of times. Now we are supposed to educate ourselves on the morning, the break of daylight through the curtains. And remind ourselves of the self-taught possibility in everything. I think of the divinity in your writing instructions. I think of the phenomenon of gold in everything that you write about and I invest in it. The fullness of the substance of the wildflowers in your destiny. I still have hope. I still dream of hope, the narrative of love, Virgil, the captive poet, the epic writer with the novel in my heart and to you I write this. The motivator, the communicator, the inventor, the significant genius in you who is sleeping to dream of building empires made up of self-fulfilling prophecy and I will tell you all my dreams Virgil, the poet and engineer for a thousand years if I could just see you again. And you see everything with vision. You see the illusion that I carry masked with me wherever I go. Your empires are all anointed, you are mastery and masterful. I worship all your kitchen table wisdom. I am standing at the edge of the river, the mountain, the swimming pool, the diving board, will you catch me if I fall? How romantic is that thought. I am unaccustomed to waking up the poet in someone else. I say this with absolute love, Virgil. Hit repeat on the next line. Here is my anatomy of loneliness, all my hardship and despair, Hercules. I go and tell it to the universe for you have been crafted Virgil with purpose. Poet that you are with the insight of an engineer. You build a robot in the wilderness in this century while in my hands insomnia flows and seawalls melt to form glaciers instead and faded out with summer is this spiritual journey, lessons from my father and a new book. A startling novel filled with reverie of which the hero is a visionary thinker. I can’t reach my destiny, without you Virgil. You’re my Rilke, philosopher. You’re my muse, teacher. The roots of grief were spinning in my daylight hours today. How to deal with the loneliness, the lonely hours, the lonelier silence breaking like the downfall of the sea against the infinite walls of this room. Will you teach me all of this? Will you show me how to? Will you take all this art and give me the breath of a spool of thread to mend this fabric of the universe?
“You”. Everything I write to you is in code. And when you fall, I am reaching for the light that guides you in this universe. I am allowing for the pain of our separation to transform me. I call it bonding. All things vanish into the oneness of the relationship. Yes, but the emphasis and connection and commonalities for being in love is different for everyone. Light, the witness can be painful and I know the old mind patterns of nightfall. Look at this scenario. Even love can be savage in her outlook and the response of her ego. To the freedom of salvation, I have his to say. You are not selective. You want to see me all the time. I am in a clear space. A love field, but is this relationship more illusion or authentic demanding of all the power of now. I listen to your stories with the golden days of the entire waves of the body of my childhood sea, authentic breath and my exceptional being and so I overcome every break in this world finding the portals of identification with you in it. And like the wildflowers I have existence. I too have substance and you are resonance in all of its glory. For you have always been the journey.
“Don’t Forget to Have Some Tea”. A poem in response to Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and my beloved friend Ndifreke George on the celebration of his marriage. All the love and happiness to you in this world to you and your bride. “On your human development, you are fundamental truth. You are possibility and complex thinker. You are meaning and being. You are gold and you fulfil me and make me feel safe. You give me passages on the nature of consciousness. You are more profound and insightful than anything that I have ever written. You are greatness and loved. You are the present moment in my every existence. You are all the clarification I need that the universe exists. You resonate with the aliveness of humanity with the uninterrupted peace and bliss of your generous and caring soul. You have been designed for greatness. You are luminosity. Your genius is significant to this world. Your genius is not bound by time or by any one singular thing. You masterfully open me up to all this expectation of love and hope in our relationship. You don’t hurt me. And I think of the achievement of all your higher learning and all your intelligence as the crown of your human development, as extraordinary and restorative. I see all the dimensions of reality in your life. Your independence. Your laughter is as exquisite as your soul is. The analysis of your existence is this. I think of what you know and I am constantly amazed and transfixed by your mind. I love you more every day than words can say. And in all of my heartache, my suffering and sorrow, you are my northern star. There is no one quite like you in this world. You are my Paris, my truth and all I am is imperfect and in-progress.”
“Filament”. A poem for Eugene Skeef, Don Beukes, Mikale Barry, Brian Walter, Brianna Albers, Virginia Phiri, Amirah Al Wassif, Malumfashi Ibrahim, Osy Mizpah, Chukwukadibia Onyenezi, Chukwudi Nwokpoku, Su’eddie Vershima Agema, Yemi Soneye, Nzube Ifechukwu, Stanley Ejiogu, Bila Vonani, Ayanda Billie, Zomzi Ntshona, Lisa Fugard, Ndifreke George, Kharys Laue, Khanyile Joseph Mlotshwa, Amitabh Mitra, Ampat Koshy, Antony R Owen, Harry Owen, Henry Williams, Nyambura Kiarie and Vincent Le Roux.
I am following through on something new. Opera is to be found there in my childhood sea. I think of the organizational behaviour found in wildflowers, in driftwood heaped up at the edge of the shoreline with psychological insight and bold maturity, and the capacity that we have to heal ourselves. There is much symbolism to be found in nature, in the supernatural, in fields of dreams. All of these chapters are mysterious and I am thankful for so much. The clock is watching and listening even in this age of anxiety, this temporariness and I serenade the world, to Paris, the Paris in all of us, especially would be novelists who are also poets and perhaps it is true that I am driven in everything that I do by fear but there are ladders to the stars that await me. That await us all.
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Poetry: Abigail George
Image: Microsoft Co-Pilot AI remixed