By Thami Prusent

My stolen love drips from ink-stained fingers
with which I crossed my heart and hoped to die
My swindled love bleeds torn like birth tissue
nourishing the roots where x marks the spot of smoke-screened smiles
and forgotten declarations
My menstrual love leaks of mangled hope and forcibly taken innocence
My severed love gushes to the beat of stomping heads, kissing batons
and rubber bullets
My plundered love reeks of fits of promises served with a sprinkling of teargas
and reshuffling of posts
My bleeding heart died on the concrete bed of El Tahrir
South bound and seething
the smoke of my discontent smoulders in hunger
of hollow-eyed babies and half-lived lives
Poisoned in love, my dream deferred in opulence and blood
A genocide of hope
where I don’t like what I write
My people angry and weeping
as my bleeding heart died in the platinum belt of Marikana