The Dream of the Faceless

By Teedzani Thapelo

i am the silent part of the machine
forgotten gear in the belly of its steel heart
each day a copy of yesterday’s grey,
i am faceless
lost between the minutes clocked in.
but last night in the static hum of the factory floor
i dreamed of unemployment like a field of wildflowers
where the air smelled of freedom and rust.
beneath my feet the earth was soft as worn-out shoes
the horizon a riot of colours dripping with absurdity
in this land the sky was stitched with paper forms
floating like indifferent gods untouchable and vast
each cloud a rejection letter, each raindrop a bitter ink stain.
i walked on streets paved with shredded résumés
beneath towering trees with limbs of copper wire
fruit hanging low—briefcases and broken promises
and the wind whispered in tongues i could not unlearn
numbers and names swirling like dead leaves
catching in the hollow of my throat.
i saw myself
a reflection made of sand
crumbling under the weight of unfulfilled duties
and somewhere in the distance
a monstrous bureaucracy slithered toward me
its eyes were dead lightbulbs…its arms countless
paper cuts ran like rivers along its endless coils
as it swallowed whole towns without blinking
spitting them out as forgotten data points.
the world beneath me trembled with paradox
jobs grew on trees too high to reach
the wealth of nations was a pile of broken machines
and around them men with hungry eyes and hollow bellies
ate the metal scraps of what they once built.
i bent down to touch the soil
where coins sprouted like weeds from the dirt
but they withered when my fingers came near
as if my need itself was poison.
in the sky i saw solutions shaped like balloons
absurd swollen with promise but too beautiful to grasp…
they hovered above the factories
pulling upward at invisible strings of hope,
and the workers who leapt toward them found only air
falling back into the dust of their own desperation.
i turned to run
but the streets were filled with mirrors
every reflection showing me faceless; nameless,
and the world around me dissolved into smoke.
then came the waking, the machine’s hum still in my bones,
i slipped back into the steel and the grind
but the dream lingered a bitter aftertaste
and in the spaces between the gears
the scent of wildflowers still haunted me.

---

Thapelo is winner of the Botswana Book Centre Scholarship, Tutume McConnell College, Institute of International Education Fellowship, University of New York, and Africa Guest Researcher Visitor Scholarship, Nordic Africa Institute, Sweden. Thapelo is also second runner-up winner of the 2017 and 2019 Share Botswana Tourism Fiction Awards. He is author of the Botswana historical novel Seasons of Thunder (2020), 2nd Edition (1445 pages), Omnibus volume, Ironmantle Books, Virginia, USA.

In Botswana he has published poems, “Okavango Delta’’, in 36 Kisses and Other Stories: Anthology of Botswana Writers, Nascali Publishers, Gaborone (2018), and “Dry Heart’’, in Blue Train: Anthology of Botswana Writers, Nescali Publishers, Gaborone (2020). Thapelo has published several poems and short fiction in Petlwana: Journal of Creative Literature and the Arts, including the poems “Madness, Learns to Fly,” “Heretic Mountain” and “Lost in the Screen Light”, and the short story “Dry Season.”