Published books include, Experimental Writing: Africa Vs Latin America Anthology, Volume 1 (African and Latin America writers in English and Spanish anthology, coeditor); Zimbabwe: The Urgency of Now (creative nonfiction book), Finding a Way Home (stories novel), Revolution (poetry book), Democracy, Good Governance, and Development in Africa (scholarly essays, co-editor), Best New African Poets 2015 Anthology (African poetry in French, English, and Portuguese, co editor),Keys in the River (stories novel), Voices from Exile (poetry book), Zimbabwe: The Blame Game (creative nonfiction book), Zimbolicious poetry (Zimbabwean poets anthology, co editor), Pearls of awareness (poetry book), Playing to love’s gallery ( poetry book), Best New African Poets 2016 Anthology (African poetry in French, English, Portuguese and several indigenous African languages, coeditor).Upcoming books include among others, Zimbolicious poetry 2016 Anthology (Zimbabwean poets anthology, co editor), Writing on Language, Culture and Development, Volume 1 Africa Vs Asia (an anthology of African and Asian writers in English, Chinese, Kiswahili, Hindi, Bengali and several Africa and Asian Languages)…. I work hard to promote African writing as attested by the valuable and important anthologies I have curated and co edited. I have been shortlisted and won several writing awards, among others; shortlisted for a record 7 times by the UK based Erbacce poetry award, 3 times nominated for the Pushcart, nominated for The Caine African Writing workshop 2012… I am also an avid published and exhibited visual artist (photography, painting, drawing, installation, collage, video.), upcoming exhibitions include among others, Alice Art Gallery Johannesburg, April 2017, Le Corridor Gallery, Harare, May 2017, a sound/musical artist using mostly traditional instrumentations like the Zimbabwean mbira instrument. I am also a mentor, translator, scholar, theorist, reviewer, editor, critic… Work has been published in over 400 journals in over 27 countries, translated into French, Germany and Spanish.
CATHEDRAL OF DETOURS
Fighting on the shores of; the soul, memories, Beingness
Trying to escape angular poverty; empty books, brooks, shelves, she lives in
In subordination levels, hammering into the soul, such soul sinking oppression
The poet in her, she stinks to the moon and back
Floating her dreams in the vast deep
At her own beck and call
Poetry being her only religion, playing a dirge, the dirge a sacrament
More than wine changed into water or water into wine
Or the fish swallows Jonah, Jonah swallows the fish
It’s a jungle of minds, her insides
Walking dead on streets, empty streets too real for dreaming
Her eyes can see nothing anymore, only the wind
Unhurricaned wind, wild
The “too” soon of tearing, the wind parting the drapes of her mind
The wind, air’s chthonic suction, plenary in volume, in voice
Black, tickling leaves, muslin
She is a life painted by chaos
Her future is painted in a lead colour
Painting asking for a second, seconding, opinion
Screaming in the storm
Like lost beauty, the beauty she had, screaming
Bottles and pills, screaming for freedom from her
Her brain matter is suffocating the space within the walls
In the prisons of her mind
Heartache flows inside her, beaten thick with despair
So sweet the despair, so good like stolen food would taste
Drowned in the depths of a cesspool
That she has created, liturgical lock nobody will unlock for her
This ocean of despair is all too consuming
It’s kind of a zone
Blood zone, life zone, knowledge zone, grinding zone
Danger zone, separate zones, gaps sewed together
With strings zones
Life’s pendulum swinging between the two zones
Life and death’s zones
Death, to be stoned, it’s a charming death for her
Let the poet in her be stoned, she tells them, in her acidic liturgy
The needle is always too closer to my eyes
And my mind is frozen, soaked in fearful, tearful memories
I am a mind-damaged casualty
Recollections only, of feelings
As I journey into the blended earth.
WATER IS LIFE
As present as memory
Water is our lifeline
Like memory,
It doesn’t care for borders, boundaries.
The highest precision for wings,
It is everywhere
Water is spiritual
The silence of our ritual departing
I hear the call for water
I hear the call inside me
Water is who we are
We can live without food
Jesus, Moses, John The Baptist, in the desert
The daily bread was beyond their breakfasts
Trust me, we can tell this, or not
We can live without a lot of things
But some truths are ours alone
We cannot live without water
Water is why, when-
The grass wears its skirts of dew
A bionic vision of loving
That binds the natural world of life
In it everything crackles, gleams, shimmers,
Hums, explodes with life like a ghetto street
Water in her veins, nourishing
Our first Mother, Earth
Grows her plants healthily
Life goes in a circle
Water connects the circles
Rest is not rest- it is urgency
Water teaches us about change
Re-imagines the world through dreams
A struggle with eternal death
And of different seasons
Water in a mother’s womb
Her aims are helpful and compassionate
She is here. She is life
That bag of water that
Overlooks the marketplace of human life
Protects, nourishes, starts it all
Right there, accessible to all
Water that comes from the sky
Water that comes from the river, streams, lakes
Water that comes from underground, oceans
Water that comes from the eyes
Water that comes from the breasts
Water that comes in blood, in sweat, in wet
Water that cleanses, nourishes, grows
Care for this water
Speak for this water
Pray for this water
Dance for this water
Bless for this water
Sing for this water
Talk for this water
Teach for this water
Cry for this water
Don’t put this in the “maybe” file
Put this in the “save” file
Don’t let half of the “save” file
Become “miscellaneous bin” in the garage of your soul
Listen to this fateful rap on the door of our undoing
Oh, we can say we were (are) sorry
But that future never takes it back to now.
There is You
There is where your eyes must be
There is that moment of meeting
There is a world of possibilities
There is where you have to start
There is where looking has to begin
There is a point, a place, a moment
There is you. You are there
Do you see it?
have we sounded the gong to announce our presence?
congratulations and decorations, at once!
boys and girls, please intake this phenomena
a thing in a thing, ladies and gentlemen-
it’s something left unsaid, a thought still in the head
in and of itself
what we have seen is what the world acquires
from the strangeness of the way we see
have seen, what we have heard, hear-
mere echoes of ourselves, of others
sometimes, we speak: echoes, speech
so pure, almost unrecognizable, indecipherable,
and it’s what we must wish for, for
no clutter, stripped bare, pure,
original, unswayable, colours
itself directly echoing in us
You are a moment, a place, a point
You are pointing us to you
You are full of possibilities
You meet yourself, you must be you
There is you. It is you.
Do you see it?
the worse part about looking at it for long
like looking at your chin whilst shaving it
is having to look at your face for far too long
staring at what has forgotten you
staring at the sight of lost breeze
that which is observed is a very wily,
mischievous, ruthless, insane, seer, seen (sin)
made up of eyes angling inwards (in)
willfully it produces the light by which it sees
everything that it does, says, thinks, feels
impacts, shapes, its soul
dents its world by, in, itself
it’s hard not to see the water
when looking at a fully flooded river
the river listening, seeing itself, flowing away
let the water’s voice lead the river
and some days the river is enough
some days the river knows our names
and calls us.
kissing
Constructing a meeting with her
She weaves an appearance
Allowing the impossibility to enter
South winds of desire rising
Ready to snuggle in cotton candy dreams
She kisses you: brown lips
Dark honey, the sweet lips
Dripped in spit like a newborn thing
Her tongue pushing in, bequeathing
Assaulting each other with love
Your heart is caught on her lips
Your cold, ideal slowly melting
Under her hot particulars
While the moon-red, soft
Inevitable, sizzles around you
It is a full moon rolling down
The stairs, like a heavenly
Body, gliding, crashing onto
The earth, the light, the weight
Of its heat pressing layers
Of your flesh down.
A deeply planted splendour
Burns beneath your breast
You are a teenager bursting
Into his surprising body,
Headlong and you, alive to the light
Telling you of steps to be taken
When the kissing consumes you
You face each other
With vengeance, ripped
Each other’s clothes, rolled
Around in the dirty
And make love like animals
So she is born, and you watch
Born of men, born in need
In lust that is in love
You are her world, she is yours
You have a partner for anything
Competition, copulation
Cooperation, conversation?
Night Carrying Night
The curved sun of the night lounges
On the floor of heaven, in its western skirts
This sun that no longer shines
On all four corners of the earth
As night comes for a visit
Night carrying night in its brooding wings
There is exuberant growth of confused images all around me
Crackling geometric shapes, shaping up in the skies
Many more images obscure my lines of seeing
I delude myself more as I move into this delusion
This hidden world which I inhabit
Is invisible to those who are not a part of it
So, how good is good, what good is good, what a lie!
Complex things are always out in the open
And it’s only what’s simple that is always hidden, what a lie, again.
But every night my cricket visits me
Sings for me for several hours
Sad pretty music that sings with the dark
Music whispering in sign language into my soul
A tale of choices, of reflections, of faces, of coincidences
It’s not so lonely, a story!
This night comes to me as one big continuous strand of night,
A waking world, the executioner of green thoughts
A magnetic field of wishful thinking
My thoughts escapes from me in the dark night skies
In little grey, greyish, darkish pieces,
I know I will never be able to change them back to green
There is memory of a man drinking
From the white basin where the sun prays,
Pays its respect, if he prays, tonight,
He prays that someone gives a soul
To cages that binds him in fear
That he would learn how to unlearn fear
He is in a room of things to lose
Outside stood fields of paths to chose
Ballsy as the blackbirds, but a pure sham,
An owl hoots its feathered fear,
Only darkness is its full stop
Whilst a foghorn booms bright light
In the dark night’s mind, ruinous light
And a moon waltzing to the music of the blowing trees comes
The Zimbabwean moon is a waning smile, sky shy,
Singed against the velvet of the eastern skirts
Waxen and dermal is this moon’s light
The moon spills and pours white light
On my sour night through the windows
This moon draws forth a wild mineral gleam on the windows
Holly with moon glow, with moonlight,
So charming, worth of magnetic truths
This moon houses the dead; I can see Michael Jackson’s
Worn out, crackling face= faces
The moon whose pieces are my heart,
The past lost, the past falling back down
Pellucid in some luminescent candling
Some stars are floating in the mist of my thoughts, of a past life
Eyelids opened are stars, as the face of God, laughing mischievously
Warping net of omnipotent laughter
He is near crying, he is near laughing
Telling me of a hope that pricks my fingers and bleeds and bleeds and bleeds
Even the most peeping sun will know that this sky is exhausted
Even the flight of a bat from the exhausted heat of the moon
As the moon licks the western skirts of the sky, half swallowed
I can’t make this moon whole again. Sew it back together!
It’s now at 2 AM, frogs confers on genius
Night falling away in embrace of dawn’s yoke
I have my sure footed truth of
How I could only learn through my fears
As the years have, I feel more and more
Like an old man apologizing for stains left behind.
And I know I am getting too old to die young!
Book covers and links
Experimental Writing, Africa Vs Latin America, Volume1
http://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/experimental-writing-africa-vs-latin-america-vol-1
Best New African Poets 2016 Anthology
http://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/best-new-african-poets-2016-anthology
