My Significant Other - Poem

In this era, you say you have a boyfriend and it sums up the entire relationship

But that name is everything that falls short of what I am hoping

I want to know when he is not okay even when I hear his laugh across the room

To be the first I call when my world rises or fall

To love everything about him, even those I hated in others

For when he calls my name, I melt

Cringe I know! but its better that than the typical

I want a man who knows I’m the toughest woman he is ever met

Who will understands "yes, I am fine” as I am not fine

Who knows that when I am lifting heavy objects is when I want my arms to hurt and not my heart

To know that unsaid I love you is the loudest I have ever been

That I am what life made me and what I made out of my life

That I am my truest self in my head, and when I look at him every fiber of imagination does not even compare.

That in all eras of history, no name comes to mind to what I am looking for

So I gave no name to it, only yearned for it

To kiss that person and know we were born for each other

Our galaxies beautiful on their own and universal when we held hands.

How do I describe that what I mean has no words

Yet the it must exist

For I am the half of it

It’s not what will leads to something

Or what ends in death

It is what shall remain when none of us are no more

That one look at me and he will know that we don’t need to understand it,

But only live it

That what time and space can’t grasp

Our spirits will engulf and our souls will become.

BY UBB

Sledgehammer

I got job once,

Do I go on? Or did you just tell I didn’t like it

I got a call one day

And with it, sealed my fate in white collar world

I was desperate and broke

And so any offer was on the table

I had just quit school

The naïve young woman I was thought

The universe would sing chorus of my triumph

Instead life hit like a sledge hammer

Not loud like I told you so. But loud let me show how so.

Life had been traced for me with centuries of failures before me

And so, you can imagine I wasn’t winning for myself

It wasn’t mistake, don’t get me wrong

I walked away from a possibility of ever looking back

And knowing i had a choice

But transitions are cruel

They come to you, knowing it will be your most tiring climb

And slowly my delusion hit me, I didn’t chose for things to come easy

But rather to know that any direction had a price

I sat every day in that black chair, signing and stamping away my creativity

For a solace of a paycheck

The solitude that my body will never catch up to my mind

Was such a loud cry

Every day I saw rudeness in all colors

And gave it such a canvas of a beautiful smiles

The wrenching feeling that time was slipping away, was all I could think

For my pain wanted no other perceptive

I handed out a summary of my experience to anyone who would ask

And they all seemed to want to tell just one thing

I didn’t have what they were looking for

And each time then would lead to my next time after

I was a lioness that had forgotten it could once roar

For I knew I was the hunted now

Each day tackled all my principles to the ground

To confront who was I without my writing?

Did each day take away a piece of myself?

I was doing everyone proud

At the cost of just being another one alive

And one day just another to die

Never a figure that changed the norm in a period of scorn.

 UBB

I WAS TOLD TO REMEMBER_POEM

I was born Rwandan.

It’s all I have ever known; it wasn’t just that I knew

I had always been told. My mother told me stories

In hushed voices I was brought to the knowledge that I had lost something

People, we shared blood and yet they will never know my name.

But I had to know theirs.

I was born 4 years after those one hundred days that claimed the simple joy of just being neighbors.

I had to know how ignorance told us we were different and our eyes chose to see a different face.

I was little and yet I knew I walked on a land that saw blood.

It became a recital, Ndi Umunyarwanda

To engrave in our minds that we raised weapons against each other.

That Laughter of old should have been enough,

And yet that rotten seed seemed to intertwine our hearts in a weave of hate.

I saw sadness in My Mothers’ eyes,

To lose a father she had never had the chance to know,

To a war that claimed to survive was to slay a friend.

Every year the elders remember, and young ones are told,

How one night, many woke up to be called names.

To classify us like animals ready for slaughter.

I sound raw but those nights and days were those our history came down to,

Forget that we were a flourishing kingdom.

Men on horses came and we forgot we had legs that once ran to the greatest battles.

Liberation came from men who knew how home could turn into a myth.

The handshake of forgiveness was extended,

So, we could never turn into what we once ran away from.

For our vision to be that we shall rebuild,

That we never saw an end.

Our voices were never muffled, we just never knew high our pitch could go.

Decades have long passed, as a history that I never got to see unfolds.

My heart wrenches from that unforgettable journey my mother undertook to save herself and her own.

That tale that sounds absolute. How human we are, and how to take and to give can be blurry.

For we are each other’s’ mirror, for from the eyes of your companion you will know,

Will I be lifted if I fall?

 By UBB

(I have no rights on this picture as most pictures posted on this blog; only the poems. just download them on Pinterest)