Circuits Poem by Thabani Khumalo

I'm shaken steeply in my sleep and I see passing pictures of people ailing to death.
I wake up oft after a very difficult night's dream from which I feel attenuated and weary,
it always feels as if I've had a busy night - but not within the access of my awareness.
Do I call it a nightmare or a message from my sleep?
I don't know even a trifle about a single little thing of life.
What do I say I am - or who should I say I am?

A stranger's ambulance just about my presence,
he inquires of who I am and I quite tell a blatant lie.
But if one asks one a true question, who does one say he is?
Ignorance has driven me insane for I stand alone in a room, yet I keep the veneer on and sabotage myself by telling me a circular set of lies.
Where is the sanity of one telling one a lie?
I travel with many demons that darken all my ways,
I obey all their voices and they command my life into oblivion.

The one thing I'm able to do on myself and feel injected with indomitable pride; I seek it out one and find out none.
What is the value of a life lived in a persistent lie?
Everything is proving out to be a lie.
I know not the truth of self for I ask myself a true question and I can't tell the least of who I am.
Only life is true and death is a lie, but all my life I've only been in manual contact with an infinite amount of demise.
I have only death to evaluate against all that I've learned.
Who is to account for my life except again for me? Until when am I to keep colliding with death? Where was life at the beginning of my days? These are the questions that make loud circuits in my head.
I hear mourning voices wailing in my head.

In my head I have many stagnant functions and I can't skim off or conduit the dams of emotional accumulation.
I scope it vastly and listen out for every phrase, still I feel as if I cannot at all heal.
I don't sit around in a despondent fashion and create a trend out of utter sloth,
I don't rise in anger and partake in violent rallies, I refuse to partake in functions of apathy and pointing fingers away in bitter blame.
It is very dark when I look anywhere else around the world, but the idling bus of death is the only shining light I have in my way.
I soon have to travel this route to wherever it may lead.
There I know I will collide with the basic reality of this way and not anymore will I oblige to live a lie.
Life one day went by and only death managed to linger:
Death is the only thing I know myself to truly own.

I look curiously into the words I have learned to use since childhood.
A fuller part of the languages are given in numbers which reduce the echelons of understanding any thought;
The numbers give size to the statements taught.
The reason they put mathematics out to be a difficult subject is that, man has to conceive mathematics as an ordeal justifiable to avoid. That is how they sell one of their best commodities: disinterest.
Numbers are a manual language to touch and to taste,
knowing a number through the two senses complete the meaning of the whole language given for speech.
This is another truth any man might glance and pronounce as hog wash.