the belt buckle reign

belt buckles rain down
the devil’s hail
in appropriate private spaces

o, father of violence
o, father of terminal lies
o, father of red-hot welts

i am soft underbelly pillow-protected
an urchin turned upside-down
a cord-yanked silence

papa was a rollin stone cuts-out
hard arms edged
thee devil’s pincers

i am choke-throes of burning stars
i am black-red
liminal space

What I’m Reading:

“There was this woman who fondled me with teargas in her eyes. There was this man who hung about as silent as a gunshot. They were my parents. He would pull the trigger and her eyes would smart and burst. The echo played a rapid tattoo on the windowpanes … I would hear another world raging inside my skull as though at any moment I would spin like a silver top and disappear out of my head … He pulled the trigger several times one night and she like a cyclone wrung all the silence from me. I howled. Howled like a sinister symphony at full blast … I had somehow entered the wrong room, come into the wrong world. I had to escape. I have to escape. The shrill whine tore through my ears and deposited three policemen who froze the bright picture. The man was carried out of my life.”

— Dambudzo Marechera / Black Sunlight