I love my tears.
I love my tears. I love my tears.
My tears have paved my way through healing.
To be whole, one needs to recognise that
I'm good when I'm good.
But when I'm not so good, I'm not so good.
Ups and downs and ups and downs... that's life.
That's life... and it's about opening yourself up
and accepting that.
When you're not so good,
it's okay not to be good.
They say wisdom is only found at the bottom of the well.
So you have to dig deep... you have to.
Get to the root of it. Uproot it.
Dissect it for what it is.
Plant it somewhere else. Transform it.
Poetry does help me make sense of a lot of things.
At the break of dawn
I pick up my brush
and carefully I paint my smile.
I draw the lines and I blend them in.
Now, now it's time for the concealer.
But it's empty.
So with a little push
it farts the last blob of truth.
Dusk is drawing near
and now time to wipe my canvas.
Because with tomorrow another day of make believe arrives...
pretending that everything is okay.
Currently, I'm good.
I'm at a place of healing.
That's how I answer people when they ask me now how am I?
But looking back, I haven't been good for a long time.
And I had to realise that in order to work on it.
I've been controlled.
I've been told what to be.
I've been told what I would be
by my father.
He was... umm...
verbally abusive.
He would call me a whore.
And that I would become a whore.
I know why my father said that.
It was my father's conscience speaking when he called me a whore.
Because I was his whore
at the tender age of five.
I confronted him.
I told him that I remembered everything from my childhood.
And you raped me.
I said to him I will not keep quiet about this.
I need to heal from this.
And in order to heal from this, I have to speak about this.
It has to be brought out into the light.
Because I don't want it to hold me captive.
It's for the sake of my own soul.
It's for the sake of my own sanity.
It's for the sake of saving another woman.
That's why I have to.
The weight of the pain and the shame,
it becomes too unbearable.
I don't want that for myself.
Freeing myself from the guilt, the shame,
that goes along with keeping it all bottled up.
I don't have to be afraid of anybody finding out anymore.
I'm a free woman,
you know.
My father just passed away, the second of May this year.
And he called me into his room
and I stood there next to his bedside and he said to me,
'I want to ask you if we can forget about the past?'
And I knew that was his way of saying sorry.
And I said to him the following,
'I'm at a place where I'm forgiving you papa.'
'But you've got to forgive yourself.'
'I love you. I've always loved you papa.'
'And that will never change.'
That was my lesson that I needed to learn.
I needed to learn how to forgive and let go.
From darkness we transcend to light
in order to illuminate what lies hidden within.
I want my poems to help other women and men
through their journey of life,
to propel them for the journey of inner healing.
Because you are a gift to this earth.
And it's for you and up to you to find your special gift,
and live that.
You are the gift, but within you there is another gift.
And in finding that and in living that,
that is a gift unto this world.
I want to be remembered as someone
who was helped the souls of this earth...
how can one say...
bloom.
Life is good.
I am here, you are here.
Life is good.