Fought Poem by Thabani Khumalo

Above reason,
I fought as though I was a pugilist.
I put contusion upon the skin of
African men like I was drawing tattoos,
I'd been for long battered with a stiff rod
and the crack of a flogging whip had
almost dragged me to the floor of the grave,
the tumid skin was bleeding at the torn line
of the tenderest strife.

I was a magnet of sticky trouble and it was
absolutely difficult to establish a sensible kind of control.
A nasty rebellion had been triggered in me,
it had occasioned in me an occluded manic,
a manic that once lay dormant and quietly between the skin.
Even the school we had been lured to give trust without query
had imparted a resoundingly ill-disciplinary rite at the true regard of education -
so when we were being raised at childhood in entirety,
we were technically being drilled and predisposed to complete failure.

It was an excruciating difficult paradigm to be under.
It couldn't be refuted that I was indeed contumicious
but dim the unfortunate phenomenon that befell us unopposed -
a mad teacher's instruction was a law that couldn't be
obviated and I was rendered by necessity, in all my life,
to cause him to diminish from my sight, little by little.
If there was no colloquial contrive to attenuate his case -
because if the teacher got a bit perplexed
about the packs of his job -
he'd turn his ugly side up and begin to swing
the dead batten against the living butt chick,

Because I was contumicious,
I'd starkly go all out and bicker us to a bog,
most days the teacher didn't even know what it was he taught.
Solitude was the multi-diurnal recourse and I began to feel
as though my mind was sinking into the deeper murk.
That was an onerous feeling above all that's really difficult.
I was sick of the teacher citing in incantation spells of his dilettante attitude.
He put me in a mentally bad state,
he caused me to be lazy.