Johannesburg - Much like being hurt, hurting someone comes in many forms. Not only the physical.
Perhaps this is where mental health comes into play.
But remember that we are angry. We build castles of dismembered body parts of our lovers and leave them in the streets.
Our wedding rings are nooses around their necks. We stab, and leave them hanging in trees, laying in bushes; half naked, partially burned, and completely lifeless.
Burnt beyond recognition. We are nearing mastery in plaguing fields with ashes.
Hell-bent with sadistic intentions.
We are aggressive. Aggression is a commonality for a number of different psychiatric conditions, medical problems and life circumstances.
We say ‘teach our boys’. But look at how the country is failing to teach our children.
The Basic Education department is considering options in a quest to make up for lost teaching time. There is no such thing as ‘lost time’, just the time we have. So when are we going to teach our boys, while we are still struggling to give our girls sanitary pads?
What are we going to teach our boys?
A brother of mine once said that love is the epoch through which we forge forward, and I agree with him. But you can't teach love to our boys, even our men barely know it.
And those that do, barely show it. There are too many charred women's bodies to unburn.
The problem is that we think we need to teach our boys, while they need to unlearn.
Perhaps we have been in the pits for too long.
And it is dark here. That darkness is blinding.
Our thoughts are binding.
Perhaps we don't understand the voices in our heads.
We are never really quiet. We spend a lot of our time listening to ourselves speak inside our heads. Whenever we read a book, whenever we think, or imagine, we hear our inner voice.Yet we don't understand these voices in our heads, and they are taking over.
It is the woman, child, LGBTIAQ+, they/them, man, who feels the wrath when our primal instincts have grown too strong.
It could be time to own the word, savages.
How we dismantle, attempt to disintegrate and discard their mothers and sisters bodies, we are too close to eating our young. The same young we flung from the rooftop of a shack, at Joe Slovo informal settlement in Port Elizabeth. The same young we buried in a tiny, shallow grave covered with rocks in a field in Soshanguve.
Newspapers read: Husband kills wife and children, leaves house burnt. Mom kills 4 kids and commits suicide after dispute with husband.
Perhaps we have been in the pits for too long.
And from below the depths of the basement where our wrath is locked up, bubbling - both woman and man, but mostly man - shall erupt a raging inferno that nobody can stand.
Perhaps we don't understand the voices in our heads. And we take them literally.
How is this not where we take mental health seriously?