Siamese Twins
Eat Me
Skins
Yore Just my Type
Josephine Baker Finds Herself
Heads
Man and Boy
In Joy and Woe
Two Loves I Have
A Crowne of Sonnets
My Light Is Spent
Queen of Shadows
Scorn Not the Sonnet
O for Ten Years . . .
Not Death, but Love
Send My Roots Rain
Not Love but Money
On ‘The White House’
Babes in the Basement
Knew White Speech
From Africa Singing
R.A.P.
Osmosis
There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe
Step
In Invisible Ink
What’s Black and White and Red All Over?
Not the One They Read To Tell My Fortune
Lines
The Exchange
SHOTS
SEEING RED
1
Black mum parts my continent of head,
with glazed black cotton begins to wind
each division so fiercely my mind
bleeds black. I can’t close my eyes in bed.
White mum uses fading navy thread,
the tension less cruel, more kind
but the vision colour-blind
so I see red.
2
I read the instructions for shocking-red dye
(freedom has given me the green light)
yet bury the evidence under a head-tie
like the insight
that I see the world through a red eye
where blood and heart mean more than black and white.
POSTMOD:
a snapshot. Monochrome. A woman
in a ’60s rayon suit. A knee-length pencil
skirt and jacket with three-quarter sleeves.
Hot aqua and a mod original.
That shade translates to stylish grey. It’s me.
And on the back, someone’s scrawled in pencil
Brighton Beach, 1963
for fun because I wasn’t even thought of
in 1963. Imagine Rhyl,
’82, where the image was conceived
by someone with good taste, bad handwriting
and lack of a camera. Yet that negative,
in our heads only, was as sharp and real
as the suit so out of fashion it was in.
GREY AREA
We two sip wine outside a Jo’burg café.
Soweto’s bloody dangerous, don’t gotill it’s over she says. I don’t respond.
A white man swaggers by with a black
woman who’s not his wife, girlfriend or date.
A black man curses her in Xhosa.
Click.
The white man pulls out a gun and
I’m sitting so close I could lift my hand, touch metal.
Slow motion back
to our car. No split second.
The beer is ice-cold in Soweto, cold as lead.
Home is a grey area yet safe.
I don’t want to go.
SHOOTING ‘UFO WOMAN’
Action! Alien with Day-Glo afro
(wig) and eyes (lens) like stained-glass window,
mount silver stairs, float down to earth
(down-escalator Canary Wharf),
make earthling
