?
Wednesday, early morning
It is the 22nd of July 2026
Waves of Charles Bukowski’s making
Our father
is finishing radiation therapy
on Monday
My back hurts
It is the middle of winter
At night, he looks at pornography on my computer
The computer that people out of the kindness of their hearts
fundraised for me
I am greeted, good morning, in the darkness
By curvy women
And busty babes
An online casino, rainbow lights flickering
Is this what his despair feels like?
Every night, he
surfs the web
Looking for
Curvy women
Busty babes
There’s nothing I can do about this
There’s nothing I can do about online casinos
That I find on my computer
The cigarette ash
The packets of marijuana
The crystal meth
His pipes
Dear God, please tell me what I am supposed to do?
When he makes a fist
When he screams, Dyke!
Yes, this is what I wake up to
Please, make it stop
I just want it to stop
And I don’t
want to read
this memoir
that he is writing
I have
a terrible cough
and headaches now
because
he smokes
all the time
in the house
He has a vape
He smokes that
He smokes cigarettes
He smokes marijuana
I don’t know
if he is still using tik
He used to hide
that in his drawer
Where his son
played computer games
Is this
what suffering is,
Or is it terror?
Is it the stuff
that nightmares
are made from?
This is what my despair feels like
My sadness
my yearning for days gone by
The longing for the brother
I used to know gone up
in webs of smoke
The zol a cobweb in his hand
What am I praying for?
Your soul?
Yes, maybe,
I am praying
for your soul
Maybe that is
what a sister
is supposed to do
for her brother
I just don’t know
how much more
of this I can take
I am living
on the edge
every day
My mental health
Is in a precarious
state of balance
I am scared
I will be hospitalized again
My sister says
that she thinks
I am sick
and I need
to see a doctor
They pay no attention
to my brother
who is the cause
of my distress
I am the problem
I knit
I knit
I am knitting
a scarf
for my niece
I don’t know
how long I will be sane,
this time
I ask my father,
How can my own brother do this to me?
How?
Why, why, why?
My father turns his head, and says,
There’s nothing I can do for you now
I have cancer
Look after yourself, my child
There is nothing
I can do
for you, my brother
But I will
pray for you
For an about turn
in your life
How I can remember
All the tides that came before
The shift and change in my mood
Like yesterday, like yesterday
As I feel it comes upon me now
How sacred
your boyhood was, once.
Once. Once
I think of all the harm
that you have done to me,
I think to myself that you
would never have done
that to the women
You worked with when you
were a credit risk analyst at that bank
The white women, the pale Amazons
But you did it to me,
To your sister
What kind of a man are you,
Or are you just a drug-fueled monster
At the point of no return?
I have forgiven you
What else can I do?
For me to live my own life
And care for your children
What else can I do?
I make you a cup of coffee in the morning
How did you sleep, I ask
We watch your daughter as she stands between us, watching us
I know now that it’s not your fault
It was never your fault to begin with
Addiction doesn’t discriminate.
Addiction does not discriminate; truer words have never been spoken. It sucks your sold dry and leaves nothing but a worn-out husk behind. hang in there
Thanks Alan. I feel seen and heard. I never felt seen nor heard as a child. Just very much invisible and part of the furniture being moved around from pillar to post. Your existence reminds me that I am not alone. That I must strive to be brave and funny and warm. That most of all I must love and forgive and never give up.
As a mental patient I was outwardly rejected by my closeknit paternal and maternal family. They reckoned that they wanted absolutely nothing to do with me. In my early twenties when the girls I went to high school with were settling into their dorm rooms at university, I was homeless, living at the Salvation Army and then at a shelter for abandoned women and children in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. It is a life I wouldn’t wish for anyone else.
It was never any kind of fairytale existence. Only my time at film school, and then later as a volunteer at a top television production company in Johannesburg. Up the road was Rosebank and Hyde Park. I could almost taste freedom from my dysfunctional upbringing, from a mentally cruel mother and a father that had abandoned me, or had I abandoned me, or had I abandoned my siblings, my younger brother needed me? I see that now as clear as day. Now I don’t know. Now I am not so sure.
I pray a lot. I pray a lot.
Thank you again for your comment. I am looking and loving and am concerned about my three year old niece as best I can. More than that, I cannot do. I just have to see that she receives sufficient love and care, and that my love for her will always be unconditional.
It is difficult. I am trying at this stage of my life to build a support group around me as best I can. I know that as a poet, I will always have a community of poets around me, and that I will always have poetry in my life.