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Conscience Fiction Posts

Stars/scars

Published by Ilva Pieterse on 28 April, 2012

I am waiting for the stars to lead me
Away from this late night double-feature
But I just can’t get these scars to leave me

Our time was too short
For me to realise
That a five-star last resort
Was all I was to you

I should have been the wiser
I should have seen the womaniser
In time to stop myself from
Building you inside me

I fell in love with the beauty in the bridges
And the richness of the ridges
Connecting you to me

Can’t you see
How this poetry
Is defined by everything I’ve ever laid my heart on
Every race I’ve ever had a head start on
Every game I’ve ever played a part in
And every end of a new beginning of mine starting?

How can I wake up
Into a new day
When all I have left of you still belongs to this one?

How can I be redone
When I can’t even say
The sounds that make up the music of my name?

How am I supposed to move on
When everything still looks the same?

I’ve bid farewell to the vows we’ll never take
And I’ve said goodbye to the children we’ll never make

Yet I will wait for you indefinitely
And like a dream that’s blown apart
I will wait for you
At the bottom of my heart

I wrote a poem for you

Published by Ilva Pieterse on 12 March, 2012

I wrote a poem for you
The day before I met you

When I didn’t yet know a soul can be shipwrecked
Or that the sun can have secrets
When I hadn’t yet learned to look for symptoms
Or dreamed you could become my weakness

You entered me like a sickness
From your first ‘hello’
You whispered my world red
And smiled it yellow

You came to me; a sonnet
A decorated soldier
Dressed in sentences and statements
With which to catch a schoolgirl
In succulent surprise

Your eyes kissed me
Long before your lips did
And under the spectrum of your splendor
My heart bloomed a blushing orchid

I was a slave to my sweet-tooth
You, a dulcit daydream
That knew just how to turn me
From still life into story
And in so doing, you cast me –
A shapeless statue –
Into your private purgatory

You created a planet
With just us living on it
And a snakepit, a sinkhole
With which to swallow me whole

I wrote this poem for you
The day after I met you
I thought it worth to mention
Why I started to regret you

So please pay close attention
(As I’m trying to forget you):

My innocence
Though far from inner sense
Was no less common
Than the unoriginality
Of your sugarcoated sin

Phenomenal reader support

Published by Ilva Pieterse on 9 March, 2012

Since posting ‘I’m not depressed’ on 3 November last year, the poem has received over 20 500 views. Reaching so many people and touching many of their lives has been a true inspiration for me. I want to sincerely thank all you readers for taking the time to read my stuff and for all your generous comments. It is this kind of feedback that makes a writer’s work worthwhile!

Keep writing, keep doing

Ilva

A lucid doodle

Published by Ilva Pieterse on 5 February, 2012

With a tracing of my dreams
I’ll draw for you
In the shapes of streams
And the sounds of seas
A lucid doodle
The colour of waterdrops
To show you where my world stops
And my bones begin
I’ll take you to the place
Where my poems sing

I’m not depressed

Published by Ilva Pieterse on 3 November, 2011

I am not depressed
I’m just deflated
Out of style and over-dressed
At second-best, I’m overrated

An old birthday balloon
(Out of breath, somewhat bated)
I hum my jingles out of tune
One-hit-wonders soon outdated

Like a song without sound
Mourning a muted meltdown
I’m at the point of no concern
For my inability to yearn

I am –
Whatever comes after
The past, the future
The cries, and the laughter

I remain –
Whatever came before
The purple rain, the midnight train
The virgin and the whore

I am a pixelated painting
Understood by few
Inexplicably containing
Little drops of you

You’re my middle C
A sepia photograph
Of my mundane eulogy
And my previous epitaph

You are my bitter half
The gall in my bladder
My nervous laugh
My endless chatter

You’re my history rewritten
My once shy, twice-bitten
My state-of-the-art
You’re the bottom of my heart

The top of my lungs
You’re my talking in tongues
The motivational quote
In my suicide note

And although I’ll never be free
From this heart on my sleeve
I’ll always wish you to be
The Adam to my Eve.

Wonde wonderwerk

Published by Ilva Pieterse on 5 July, 2011

Ek het ons storie geskryf
Met ‘n lem op my lyf
Die son was te helder daai dag
Vir my hartklop om langer vir joune te wag.

Ek het die mes soos ‘n kwas vas gehou
En diep snye geskilder – ‘n van Gogh vir jou.

Ons verhaal het verskyn
Op my vel – lyn by lyn
En dit was helder – so rooi, so vol lewe daai pyn
Ek was seker dat die seer in my siel sal verdwyn.

Die letters van jou naam
Het bebloede kuns geword
Op al my breekbare vlaktes.

Soos ‘n straatbrak het ek jou vertrou
Waar is jy nou?
Hoe waar is jy nou?

Daai dag het die son so helder geskyn
En daar was net te veel kleur in ons samesyn
Ek het jou les diep in my spiere gekerf
En my lyf met jou lou-warm liefde geverf.

Cocoon

Published by Ilva Pieterse on 6 June, 2011

She spun a cocoon
The colour of a silent moon
Around what remained
Of her lost and un-gained.

She bound bone to bone
Stitched smile to song
And calmly coloured her cries
In the shades of reason gone wrong.

But when she saw
That her loss was a learning curve
And her being
Not a noun, but a verb —

She shed her silken armour
Turned her body to the sun
And remembered the shape of a hug in her arms
In time to embrace her battle undone.

Captivated

Published by Ilva Pieterse on 1 June, 2011

Hold me like a promise;

Break me like a vow.

For today I am as fragile as the secrets of a child,

And as desperate as a dream dressed in dust.

Another woman

Published by Ilva Pieterse on 15 March, 2011

There is another woman living
In the friction
Between your hips and my thighs

Do you think I haven’t seen
The memory of her
Swimming in the moisture of your eyes?

Do you think I haven’t noticed
The sadness
In the lines around your smile?

Do you think I haven’t realised
You’re somewhere else all the while?

Do you think I haven’t measured
The distance between
What you say and what you mean?

You’re not the first to show up here
With a broken dream
Slung over your shoulder
Heavy with things you never told her

How you’re wishing you could hold her
As we’re lying on my bed
I can hear her broken promises
Resounding in your head

I’m tired of being a consolation prize
I’m tired of soothing away silent cries
I’m tired of picking up the pieces
And wasting all my kisses
Wondering why no one misses
….me.

Should I just accept the fact
That she’ll probably want you back
Once she remembers all the things
That are making me fall in love with you?

Bourbon Street

Published by Ilva Pieterse on 30 January, 2011

You and me
We should be poetry
We should be prose
The way our breathing slows
And our hearts beat
Like wings on Bourbon Street.

You and I
We should be together
Birds of a feather
Flying like time.
We always had rhythm, you know
We just never had rhyme.
We committed a crime together
And should’ve served time
Been brought to justice…
But it was just us
Perfect in our alibi.

We may not’ve had rhyme
But at least we had reason
We committed treason together
And should’ve been tried
We should’ve been been true
Me and you
On the corner of Bourbon Street
And Fifth Avenue.