BOTTLENECK

In Mafikeng
it’s hard
to play the
blues

lots of bottlenecks
to play bottleneck

but does it
have twelve bars
worth
the name?

gospel would be easier, better,
for all the hard-luck poverty
official and fly-
by-night

it must have well nigh
a thousand churches.

26 KILOMETERS SOUTH OF RAMATLABAMA

I

The rain came

the blind duo
outside SPAR warbling away
great guitar twanging counterpoint on
the great gospel classics

and me
listening, poised
uncertainly at
the flag’s edge
where falling
off the map
is not unheard of

Oh my
place of stones

your history
surrounding you
like the
ghost of
a ghost

along your great pioneer
hunter-gatherer trail
the usual museum-
worthy relics of
a lost civilization: condoms,
9mm cartridges, Castle and
Black Label labels
still legible amongst
the smashed glass

but this was no
celebration to
rival that
of an Empire
mafficking itself silly

thinking (for one crazy
deluded moment) of
the world
dancing in the street
from Cape to Cairo

no more
time here for
word of miracle
of fish, loaf, contract,
RDP house

here
under shadow of
omnipresent tombstone

the page behaves like rock
my pen bleeding ink enough
to save every pothole

so great a flow
it reminds the gods of
our time as
primeval sea.

II

Ah, let me
embrace you, my
Taung ancestor
(no point
here nor
place for
the niceties
of race)

fellow citizen, brother
consumer, heading back
from town with
painting under your arm
perfect to fill
that dining-room space

remember us
shabby poets, artists,
in that
strangely defining
Altamira genealogy

skipping between worlds like
trickster shamans
metaphoring you
again, again a
tale of
renaissance, rebirth,
of the beautiful pain
of deepest human desire

****

Gospel rapper
Jesus blaster

riddle me
why

Sunday must
rule supreme

spell out
the ding dong code
of our spiritual
sexual bodies

and what if
history
breaks its glass
exhibit case, walks

the street (like a
brash prostitute) brazenly, openly?

takes a stroll down to the taxi rank
guided by the smell of excrement
the very spaces so
well-memorized, internalized, now
radically defamiliarized

bringing
the next hotly revised metaphor
to take us, transport us
to head-place
of thinking differently

****

catch the breeze wonder
how many prayers
are kite-like floating
to Heaven on
the updraught

ballooning to
the size of Zeppelins as
they rise with
confidence, smugly
secure

****

city of potholes
of reductions, obligations
bureaucratic solutions to
lowest common
denominators

a
motion picture revelation
of hard Germanic economic truth

truth hard as
splintering siege shrapnel

as
crucifixion nails

as bad, beloved
British bayonet.

Steak
on the griddle

learn to forgive
forget
just
let it
sizzle

let the book close even
on stars than groan, stars
that scowl

be the poet
philosopher of
Minerva’s (now
featherless) owl

****

maybe I’m just
irrelevant

maybe
just waste

think thoughts of purpose
as the Sun sets behind
that huge, absurd
amphitheatre of
a sports confection

imagining an afterlife
trapped in the turnstiles

no chance to
flow, ebb
fall,
rise

something less even
than Cartesian consciousness
carried across
scratchy airwaves

than the life
spirit that

umbrellas in the rain
mushrooms under Sun

III

her body beautiful
but fading badly (pressure
of market value)

drifts in and out
of visibility

leaving its mark, mark
of ancient sexual
Empress
every time (ca-ching!)
there is a sale

Oh dark tonight of
the planet, dark
side of the Moon

garden of sweetest, urgent,
toxic blossoms

jungle in which the
dice always roll
snake eyes
(card is always diamond
trump is always spade)

and child Caliban clutching
your Kruger coins
already know will
have to
make do with ersatz,
with fake Miranda

whilst the wizard builds
banks on the
back of every storm

****

Meanwhile
who is the one
stalking you
following you
hop-
skipping behind you?

his poetry is full
of desert, there is
sand on
his lyrical tongue

if I were
orbiting or
strategically
positioned satellite
I might
give you feedback

tell you how
exactly you fit
(camouflaged/un-
camouflaged) in
this arid, self-
obsessed world

even though
you
strike me as
ant-small, lizard-
cautious, busy-bee
scuttling buzz-beetle
as you
drone your
way (every
day)

***

toll booths
taxes

proliferation of new
(imaginary) barriers
(but perhaps
frontiers)

things changing
words fading

war and
death
not inconceivable

let me stop
this Pharisee
stone cold ask
him

what he sees:
who will
cop it last, first,
fire the
corresponding shot

so much resting on
this or that

swinging like
a pendulum
marking
time

****

the rain came

put paid
to swirling
dust-
devils

as they conspired
to taunt the
parishioners
with thoughts
antithetical

thoughts outside
their frame of reference

and the SPAR couple
nearing a conclusion
yet still
twanging away

and a writer (perhaps)
writing with bone
the words
of ending returning
to beginning

finding the nowhere Rome
to which no
roads lead but

all return.

NOT TO PREACH ABOUT PREACHY TREES

NOT TO PREACH ABOUT PREACHY TREES

Just read a
line from
Wendy Xu in
which she
speaks of
“preachy trees”

lucky no one
in Mafs sees the
trees as preachy otherwise
they would all be
climbing them

it’s a town of shortcuts and
who would begrudge them
a quick primrose path
should one
fall into their imagining

only that it falls
brutally short
doesn’t even touch
cloud let alone scrape
the stratosphere

leaving their Heaven denies not only
but no chance to get to
steal any magical
wealth from
the green beanstalk giant

stuck there helpless but
boiling over with sacred sure-
bet hope whilst
the fire-brigade is on
its speedy red-shift
screamingly scarlet way to
lower them down
gently one-
by-
one (complete
antithesis to
rapture)

saved from a fate
worse than fate

stuck in a poet’s
anthropomorphic metaphor.

AUGUST WIND

The August
wind sweeping
through Mafikeng
just to
compel the dust

to make my life
that crucial, hopeless, nasty bit more difficult

on top of the great heaped sundae
of myriad minor life-irritations
the raw-red, rottenly poisonous,
globally warmed cherry

MAHIKENG

same bricks
same cement
but not
the town
I came to
not
my town

like Ezra Pound at
the Metro
I stand and watch
the rush hour traffic

so contagious
the energy of the dead

I FORGOT THE SEA

I forgot the sea
and the sea
forgot me too

moved so far inland
could not get harder rock,
dustier ground

words
rasping, like sandpaper
along your tongue
between your
teeth

dryness, their only
speech
like wind whispering
to dead sea shells.

MAHIKENG

they should call
this town Purgatory
call it
Insanity

they should level every structure
make it real place of stones

over which, small
redemption, when
it rains
the water may flow

gurgle

INVASION

he was in the museum
when the invasion came
even from
the dark quadrant of sky
no one expected attack

he emerged
having done his research
on the history of the siege
to see a world stricken, as
if fallen in love with disaster TV
and the new
imperial lords and masters
accumulating, colonizing

rescheduling everything, canceling
activities
leaving only the core
media skeleton of
propaganda programmes

ON MY WAY TO THERAPY

on my way
to therapy

sunlight glinting
off a muddy pool

so much rain
fell by way
of relief:
more

than this town
knows what to do with

IN PLENITUDE

his head
too disconnected to
describe his
landscape

unless, in absence, he
look to the street for plenitude
reading (as if a map) all
those cracks, stains, scuffs,
scratched, scars
as telling a
history
consistent with
the geography, every
stone in this place
ultimately speaking louder
(if only
we might hear) than
a man could shout