The man rants and raves.
What dare I do
but accommodate him
as the TV is doing
as the TV is designed to do?
Tweep! A message arrives
on my phone: it’s her
wishing to cheer me
but the words (as those so very different ones
spewed out on the TV)
have lost their lives, their power, their meaning
they float past me, before me,
devoid of anything that can help
anything to bring a positive change
O, my caregiver
what dream have we lost, seen collapse into
electronic whisper, media fantasy?
your beautiful face
floating before me
as I turn away finally
uncouple, unlink, detach
from your orbit
my paper though, no nearer to completion
writing on radio during apartheid
and the strangely challenging, alienating
alternate-sounding world
of the science fiction programme
otherwise mirror on that
abhorrent, obnoxious
dehumanizing world
where racial logic collapses
in the face of strange conjunction, limitless possibility
possibility that
I just walk through this mirror
(in which I so often
imagined
our worlds colluding, colliding, collapsing, combining
together, if not forever, then
but for a few
delirious hours)
away from her, away
from the single-eyed, raving
racist Cyclops god, nay demigod,
of the television
into a parallel, if not indeed
universe, then at least
some stable, ungenocidal, alternate realm
where someone is writing,
is writing me (as I stand ghostlike,
peering over his shoulder
her shoulder
reading my story
being written, my tale
being told
hoping against hope
he does it differently.
Sent from Samsung tablet
