"It's in your fibers"
My LOVE had to throw me
Into the fire to burn it out
I had my suspicions
But now that I see
Clearly...force
Force has nothing
No part of giving and
Receiving the fruit
The act of patience
Waiting with desire
Building...fire
A secret hidden deep
So deep it split the mind
Other children to care for
But this one, not this one
She makes me a whore
Away...oxygen
Sent with a pure heart
To heal and bind up
The broken heart and mind
Yet FORCE held up a hand
Pushing back all attempts
To KNOW...LOVE
Aborted from the womb
Written by Trudy Schrader on 08-10-2026
I'm an analyst
a strategist
an execution machine
in a singular mind seen
with memories of being keen
I give something my whole heart
then get it back torn apart
repeat the cycle again
till I'm left with shattered remains
trying my hardest to stay sane
Shouldn’t a vehicle move straight ahead,
unless it makes a U-turn instead?
Why in mine I’m blindly led,
leaving me to burn,
no brakes to halt or learn?
In this moment, I’m a fern
trapped in a sunlit meadow—no return
Even a robot needs to reset
so it can preset.
When I try to slow and reset,
I get haunted by regret,
as if I’m drowning in debt.
Forced to love, forced to choose things that do not feel well.
Forced to please others and not yourself, makes a person feel unwell.
Forced to act like your happy, when your body is screaming let me out of here.
Forced to be someone you are not, makes you do things that are not nice.
Forced you are, but things will bend, time and space will change, and you can mend.
Like all of life, things happen, then later we look and realize things we did not see before.
Do not give up, you can get better, you can ask God to hold your hand and help make you well.
Love and pray for better days, for life is a journey we all take day by day.
Lifting prayers to God, today and always.
They told her
to quiet her thunder–
to fold her voice into corners
where no one could trip over it.
"Girls who speak too much invite war,"
they warned.
So she stitched her lips
with threads of fear and politeness,
and swallowed storms
like rage was a sin
girls weren’t sacred enough to carry.
They called it grace
when she walked like a whisper.
They called her peace
when she stopped rising questions.
But no one noticed
how she flinched at her own thoughts,
how silence grew teeth inside her chest.
She wasn't safe.
She was surviving.
Every time they praised her calm,
they were clapping
for the cage
they built around her.
Because when silence is forced,
it isn't peace.
It's punishment dressed as pretty–
a lullaby
layered over a scream.
Some writers struggle
Coughing up words in a painful way
I feel a bit of their agony as I read their missives
A jumpy spotty difficult flow is painful to readers too
A tarriff should be earned..When freedom is
Spurned, maybe for a year? A while.' A time.'
Till free speech and expressions can again
Here chime..Can ring..Can raise valid points
Extoll..Quite a blunt weapon, to let commerce
Take its toll.' Still by any means.' Unstifle the
Tounges, that would build and strengthen
All truths true daughters and sons.!
A whiff of my kitchen, a medicinal pill,
the side order of rain drools at a windowsill.
An utterance precedes a service; the rumble,
the window slides itself shut. A bumble
bee ricochets off a glass pane
moaning louder than our train
of thought waylaid with bacon sizzling up a storm.
There's an anxiousness trapped inside as warm
as indoors petrichor's marshmallow mood
steamed under nostrils fused above burned food.
A swirl follows itself in a perfect circle
on a smartphone screen. The attentive middle
of somewhere where I don't know where I am headed
while time and place are forgettably wedded,
O lips lit up, no doubt, by the whitening screen,
words digitize what would otherwise burn green.
When rhymes are oddly forced
And there is no plausible pattern
Or hint of natural rhythm
I think “what was the point?”
A rhymed poem should pop like a song
It is something you begin to sing
It is jazzy like a nursery rhyme
If you need help rhyming, buy the Mother Goose book
Read her poems aloud and sing them
This should make rhyming easier
If I am forced to relinquish ten things, these are the things I will abdicate:
Politics
Liver
Rat poison
Cars without chrome
Dirty windows
Housework
Mean people
Gossipers
Drug dealers
People who don’t like dogs
I am more right-brained than anyone I have met.
Being left-handed goes along with this and my dyslexia.
An old-maid old-school old-faced teacher decided to fix me.
I was forced to wear a thumb-less mitten on my left hand.
Thanks Mom, thanks Miss Kneeland, first grade teacher.
After a year I tried to be right handed, but I never felt right-handed.
In these days children are allowed to be right and left handed.
I envy them. I wish I could have been one of them.
On a happier note, I can type faster than anyone I have ever known.
The redamancy flowed from within,
jumping down the line,
the nacarat sun;
blinding the ones alive,
listen to the canorous sounds;
blowing in the wind,
even though they are flagitious,
their nature seems forced,
how vociferous they can be;
lacking intrinsic will,
dripping with such disabuse,
we are fairly full of commination;
thus, we must sashay in the other direction,
the dreadful dream of flying free,
receiving nothing, yet staying fain;
their misery is effable at best,
dropping left, flipping right,
their beginning was left behind;
deep within the past of time,
any and all forgetting their Elysian minds.
some African presidents forced the retirement
of some military generals and others removed them
from some key posts yesterday
After the coup d'état of Gabon.
Some African presidents
who think to own their countries
and stayed on power for decades
now they have much fear to lose powers
like Ali Bongo and others.
This strategy won't help them as the young leaders
who are majority in the army many African counties
need change of some regimes.
It is difficult to stop those coup d'états
As the African youths
understand what they are doing.
It is called "no retreat, no surrender operation."
August 31/2023
I was always enraged at twelve
mother forced me to plant marigold seeds
their bright green sprouts made me smile
ruffled and perky with oranges and yellows
they uplifted me
SOUL BIRTH : 71 HORSTLEY STREET, DISTRICT SIX
Swathed in golden fleece
White light dancing
Cigarette smoke twirls
Waters break and gush
Bright as the nearby ocean
To say hello to the midwife
Preparing the birthing table
A violet spirit comes
A birthing through channels and layers
The room becomes vast
Souls linger about
Radiant and receiving
Onto the Earth Dimension
Task complete
Melancholy sits here too
Cradling the unknown
Too delicate to hold
Waves dance in rain and white wind
Ice cold separated by time
Here I sit in a District in the South
Watching myself being born
And red blood
Flows…
©GhairoDanielsPoetry&Song +-1980s
LISTEN TO POEM READ BY POET ON YOUTUBE
[ This is one of the poems I wrote on my experience of Forced Removals from District Six, South Africa under the Apartheid Government. Nine of the poems are published in the Testament : District Six Memories, Thoughts and Images /edited by Martin Greshoff/ Attic Press 2021. This is the first of the set. Watch this space for more poems on Forced Removals ]
Forced Tipping
Miracle Man
5/16/2023
I have always been a tipper,
amount based, service driven.
But in adding 20% to my meal,
it then becomes taken, not given.
When you’ve taken from me,
my independence of choice.
In essence you’re then guilty,
of stifling my voice.
A thought worth considering,
a living wage would suffice.
From the pie that you call yours,
give employees a tiny slice.
It’s about customers helping pay the help
so they don’t have to. So lately I decided to go to the store
and just make my own. I had to check myself out and pay a service fee
for using my card. Ha ha
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I feel better.
Tom
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