ke itlhakotse ka shaga

dilo tsa bati

they say poets are born in the spaces between disaster and desire,
that no one writes honestly with a steady heartbeat,
that art only crawls out of the body when something inside it is dying.
maybe that is why my hands only tremble toward the page
when you touch me gently
or when you leave fingerprints shaped like bruises across my soul.

they say inspiration is a cruel visitor,
arriving only when your chest is too full to contain itself,
when grief sits heavy on your ribs
or love burns so brightly it blinds you from everything else.
and maybe they are right,
because i have searched for words in peaceful seasons
and found nothing but silence staring back at me.

give me heartbreak,
suddenly i am fluent.

give me sleepless nights and shaking hands,
give me unanswered messages and eyes swollen from crying,
give me the kind of ache that sits in your throat like a confession,
and i will turn it into poetry so beautiful
people will mistake my suffering for talent.

love me,
or ruin me.
either way, i will write. either way, i will make a performance out of survival. because there is something almost terrifying about the way pain sharpens language.
the way betrayal teaches metaphors,
the way longing stretches itself into paragraphs,
the way loneliness makes every sentence bleed honesty.

you make a poet out of me.
i will make you immortal. i will carve your name into every stanza
until strangers begin to feel like they have known you for years.
i will take the softness of your voice,
the cruelty of your absence,
the way your hands once held mine like something sacred,
and i will press it all into ink. you will become my muse.

give me pain
and i will breathe life into blank pages.
i will dress wounds in a pretty language
until people call them masterpieces instead of tragedies.
i will take every crack inside me
and let the light pour through it onto paper.

give me love
and i will place you on the center stage.
i will write you like scripture,
like the kind of thing people underline and return to when they need saving.
i will make your laughter sound holy,
make your existence feel larger than life itself. and if you give me lies,
i will still make art out of them.

that is the dangerous thing about poets.
we know how to decorate destruction.
we know how to make ruin sound romantic.
we can take a blade to the chest
and describe it so beautifully
people forget it was meant to kill us. so if you must,
destroy me completely.

tear through every hopeful part of me,
leave no untouched corner behind,
make me mourn the person i used to be,
because maybe then the words will come easier.
maybe then i will finally write something honest enough
to outlive my body.

maybe then all this sadness
will become something useful. after all,
what is a poet
if not a person learning how to turn suffering
into something others are willing to hold gently in their hands?