Cheswayo Mphanza – Frame Six

  ”These days I wake in the used light of someone’s spent life. 
     I am often a stranger to myself;
       I have no place of origin, no home.
  I keep remembering everything in two time zones at once.
    Who knows, maybe I myself am called something other than myself.
     Not so much a name, but the result of a name.
It’s a strange sensation to yell out: This is me!
       In every place I’ve watched caravans of sorrow— 
    I run like all the other men, chasing my shadow down alleys.
              Sometimes in the spaces, there is fear— 
                 my mind deepens into them. 
       From calm to fear my mind moves, then moves—
     in light part nightmare and part vision fleeing. 
The voice rises on a storm of grackles, then returns—half elegy, half serenade”