life: acoustic & amplified

your profile is fading from my memory

Telephone

I dial L for love, 1 4 7, blank space, then 0.

Oh that’s my password, I hate what I feel for you, “I’ll never love again”, that’s my past word, I feel your presence, you’re a gift from god.

I try so hard to be simple, I make love to the page, the words get intimate.

I see a white picket fence, a swing and a baby’s cot, no punch lines to hit on you, or maybe not.

Damn Maxine, what have you done to me?

Somebody help me, somebody tell me.

I’m drowning in pool of tears, it hurts to see you with anyone else, though my heart is blind, so it chose to see the best in you.

The innocence in your vices, the angel in her, to give her wings, to fly away from the hood, the child in your flaws, yet the woman in the smart choices you make…

And all the rest in you.

Telephone

We can hang like laundry, the thoughts that wring in my head.

Wishing to get a call from you, to tattoo your face in my memory, to cloak these scars.

To hit it from the back like a bass guitar, then pulling you closer, let me not take it far.

You wouldn’t understand, cause nothing lasts forever, cause even the word friends, finishes off with the word “ends”.

So I want you to be my nothing, cause “nothing” lasts forever.

Your name flows in my veins, I bleed you, my drug of choice, I need you.

Flow deeper than the ocean, my eye seas you.

You are the best poem my eyes have ever seen, am I just another friend?

So your boyfriend presses the answering machine.

Zeblon Thwala © 2018

who knew my pain would have such brilliant colors?

such intense shades of red, yellow, green

flaming neon orange, the most shocking pink you can imagine

no bland grey pain will do for me

no dark night will hold me captive

I light up the sky and shake the earths foundations with my despair

with the very abundance of my ‘why me’s?’

I will take all the oxygen in the room

I will explode like a blazing star

yet it will never be enough

When I speak the heavens tremble and planets begin to fall

I will demand to be released from the grimy, peeling, poorly painted prison walls where I find myself

I will demand every damn day to get what I want

I will demand my colors be the brightest in the land, why would they not?

I demand my genie lamp be refilled with endless wishes, it’s only fitting

I say, I will walk in the light,

no matter the cost

I will spark fire in the dark,

no matter if it causes forest fires

no matter who dies of fright

I will conquer the night with my one endless question, repeated over and over

I will paint myself myself, as a reflection of what I want

I will fight and fight and fight

I will not go down with the ship

I simply will not understand

I simply will not surrender

I simply will continue to suffer

I simply will continue to paint the world with all the vibrant colors

of my intensely shaded, publicized pain

that is what I will do

who knew my pain would be so colorful?

I’m pretty amazed at that shocking blue I just conjured up with my anger

and that razzle-dazzle raspberry I just made pop with my angst

💥

– Amy Lloyd (about a girl)

I have taken back my own listening

The weeping cherries have cried their last for me this spring and are spent and ragged from their bouts with this wracking grief

We have eaten cake and shared a toast or two, full of promises and new love

The dogwoods and lilacs having waited, now bloom just for me perfumed air follows me for all these miles

My heart is still full and empty at the same time, life is always bitter and always sweet. always both at once.

Flaming bushes hatch their eggs and throw holy joy into the blue sky

My tears find their way to the ocean, to mingle with their brothers and sisters

Freedom is never free, the cost is always found on the edge of a cruel mans sword

I lay on feathers of lost innocence those birds plucked for my dinner I will eat with relish

My body, still adjusting to this new age, burns away the old days, realizing this present moment is all I have

What does it mean that I spoke, for a minute, about you, about good hair, you in a suit and tie, aesthetically pleasing to the eye and ear

I wonder what will become of me in these nexts, in these upcomings, in these wild, deep blue yonders

A new friend reminds me,

‘Don’t wander off alone in thought lest you dear feel lost’ – I have not listened to this well-intended advice

I am forever lost to my own thinking, forever making towards the light of my own future, forever stepping into the now of my own footsteps,

forever inhabiting my own self, forever revealing my own hearted purpose for be-ing here, forever knowing myself as I am known

Over and over I find new truth, for better or worse, I am that I am

❤️

Amy Lloyd