WHOOPS

Tags

poem, poetry

WHOOPS!

Whoops!
I was interviewing a
guy called “Lucky”
(ironically) for
my drunken history
of South Africa

when by peculiar
mischance the
microphone
happened to slip

fell into a runnel
which fed the Jukskei river
is by now
no doubt heading
to the Atlantic, to
the Indian Ocean

to those vast bodies of water
that swirl around the African landmass
baffled by a continent’s
geographical integrity.

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AS I LET THE LIT MATCH FALL

Tags

poem, poetry

I was born unto
a house of mirrors
and dead sun gods

images, voices
still lurking

in the
cellar and attic but
once they recognize me
for who I am
they will be swirling

he said he was a god once, or God Himself,
it’s hard to recall which exactly though
no lightning struck him
down if indeed
it were blasphemy

I laugh
pouring from the bottle marked
“highly inflammable”
wondering as
I let the lit
match fall

whether that makes me highly inflammable too
and what will happen to
the images and voices
contained in
this storehouse

will they be
resurrected yet again, go
eternal recurrence

cart their not-quite-believed-in evil
(like down-on-their-luck
ramshackle immigrants
like I once was
like we once were)

across other vast fluctuating ocean
not to stark tip of Africa
but to some
true alternate universe?

SOUTH AFRICAN BUKOWSKI

Tags

poem, poetry

SOUTH AFRICAN
BUKOWSKI

they dug for gold
for diamonds;
still dig

throwing up dumps
leaving holes
big enough to
bury the Moon

but the South African
Bukowski takes
it all in his stride

his clothes, his hair
his skin “indiscriminate”
squeezing between
the jondolos
as he navigates
his own quiet
social history of
terminal poverty

and yet
kind of
flying

wheezing through
the acrid air
everywhere
he looks

gold,
diamonds
no one
figured yet what
absolute abundance

image of
the breast that
never lacks for milk

KING (of MAHIKENG)

Tags

poem, poetry, power

KING (of Mahikeng)

the town
lost its
king

became a
dull, dead
disconnected thing

place of
desert and
of shadow

of the broken archetypes
that rend being

RENAISSANCE MAN

Tags

female, poem, poetry, sexual symbolism, Universe

RENAISSANCE MAN
“Deserts of vast eternity.”
Andrew Marvell

counter-intuitive it may be
but when I walk down
the road after
hearing your voice
I feel the cosmic
pull of gravity
sense the degree to which
time is stretched and compressed
according to
relativity
and therewith every
rhythm in my body, every
beat in my heart

you
are dark as the night
the stars are set in

and so many
stars, huge
blue-white stars

and pink ones, our colour,
our sensual, together colour
greater than
the Sun, our little
almost-forgettable Sun
for brightness
and for overwhelming size

in this Universe where
our connection began
eyes, mouths first and
then
every molecule

the sonnets for her
pouring out my pen
(us just
your average run-of
-the-mill dark lady

and her
a little less than word-
worthy
Renaissance man)

BREXIT STUFF

BREXIT stuff
is old hat

heard my
father and mother
talking like that

many years ago

just before
a

whiter
than white
rabbit popped
out

saying we
were on
our way

to apartheid
South Africa.

SHARK BLESSING

SHARK BLESSING

a shark blessed me
this morning

but first jumped me
as I wandered the town
in the morning like
the crazy person
I am,
have become

they grabbed me
asked for money, unfolding
a butterfly knife (which
they assured me
was about to
stab me)

but then realized that the
one they had trapped was
some kind of
broken soul, penniless
wanderer

and so
blessed me

and
left

DASH

ran out of dash
but then
bought some
more

so much booze
to dilute (and
so little
time)

so we talked pussy
whose baby mommy
was best
in the sack

but then there were
tanks in the street
and the TV
exploded

luckily
we went out earlier
to buy more dash

(note: “dash” = South African slang for any mixer like orange juice, lemonade, cola etc)

SHADOW STRADDLED

we stand in the shadow
of a colossus
well, not so much stand, as
scurry like rodents, everyone
now Boesman-and-Lena-ed

scratching an existence under the
impervious eye
of he who
straddles us, taxes us
to the poor limits of
our endurance

DIGGER

DIGGER

let me
dig for you

can dig through
to to the Antipodes
can dig right through
to China

can dig all the gold out of
the Witwatersrand
shoveling my
way

past the bones
of so many miners