I am only one person but it feels
as if my sternum still splinters open for the
gunshot that killed me in another life,
like I have lived the lives of two different people.
A boy born with his father’s absence
and his mother’s milk,
already rotting in his mouth.
I bled my first verse at seven
stitching vowels with the knife he left behind
into the cavity where his voice should’ve lived.
Mother called it power
her tongue a whetstone for unsaid words,
the alchemy of turning silence into a scalpel.
She didn’t warn me how the handle would splinter,
how the wood remembered being tree,
how my palms would split open trying to carve a man from ghost-matter.
The web you speak of isn’t thread—it’s nerve, raw and glistening.
At night, I play lullabies for twin embers in my ribs
“one boy clutching a knife, the other a wilted hibiscus.”
Both still asking: “When the sky cracks, does the ground taste its grief?”
When the skin detaches itself from the flesh do my forefathers turn in their grave?
Whether he was too scared of seeing himself in me?
Fathers like ours don’t vanish. They metastasize.
Yours festers in the marrow of your maybe,
a static hum beneath every why
Mine? He’s the shrapnel I cough into the sink each dawn,
rusty and rhombus-shaped,
a geometry of never.
Mother said pain is a currency.
So I auction my childhood to the highest bidder:
Two front teeth, barely used. One shadow, slightly charred.
A heart valve that only opens westward.
The buyers weep, but no one bids.
Turns out, the market for broken boys runs on silence.
You ask about feathers and fallen heavens.
Here’s the truth no ancestor will admit:
a father’s love, when withheld, becomes a vulture.
It circles. It starves. It gorges on the flesh of your what-if.
You want to know why he left?
Because two lives in one body is a heresy—
a sin he baptised you in while drowning.
I tried to split myself too, once.
Peeled my skin like an orange,
found my muscles braided with barbed wire and old hymns.
The man in me wept.
The boy laughed,
shoved a fistful of soil into the wound, whispering:
no gloves, no remorse,
“Grow something this time.”
And the knife? O, I wield it.
Slice through the tension of existing as both wound and suture.
Watch the light leak out—not blood, but ochre.
I’ve known women who gathered red flags like roses,
let the thorns split their fingers
and still called it love.
My body is now a code scrambled
every 1 and 0 a shard of my pelvis
by the fingerprints of men who loved like landmines.
You ask how to be better?
Become the question that guts the answer.
Let your hands, cracked as drought soil,
dig until they find the boy beneath the boy.
Feed him sunlight. Let him scream.
Then, rewrite the myth.
Johannes Shikongo, an alumnus of the University of Namibia with an honours degree in biochemistry, deftly blends his writing prowess with a profound compassion for performance poetry. He is a writer, youth leader, medical student, and poet.