ENCLOSURE
I slept in your gardenof divinity
plucked
from the tallest trees
the sweetest fruit
and some really exotic low-hanging stuff
really accommodating and utterly tempting
this
unit men with clipboards
summarily walked in
told me
these days of gathering
were definitively over, not
just numbered
villains from
world of William Blake
on steroids guess
they must
have been
in the sad history of enclosures
the final chapter
and thus
kicked out, I wandered around,
my mind filling up
with thought most nebulous
crazy stuff, of the kind
even new-age conspiracy would not allow
such as
the ambivalent, alien to us
yet close
to us. gods
that walked the Earth
were trying to communicate with me
in ancient images and symbols
rendered post-
industrial via the most
license of translation.
And so
a fruit factory it is
must accept this outcome quite
unselfishly
(ancient Dionysus locked
in legal combat, unable to claim
himself as
his own intellectual property
now industry has
proclaimed themselves
the gods of music, dance, drama,
chaos and wine)
Oh so
much anger
now I know
where Blake was coming from
now I know
how he feels
wicker man burning
in a basket of fire
that you
might have tea and scones
with cream and jam on them
that you might
return from the hypermarket
with blood red Shiraz or
greengold Chardonnay
****
no third act
possible
so don’t
get your hopes up
here
through this door
for the second
and tracking shot
across the galaxy now
in deepest starless space
or perhaps
downtown Johannesburg
(no, definitely not
the backslope of
Devil’s Peak
in Cape Town
where
the life sort-of
behind this poem
contrived
to
get defined)
Ah, yes, Hillbrow
I saw that picture
saw what
lies behind
each
high facade
space
is power but
here I fail
I am
no warlord, no
Genghis of the rent
(each crevice in
the housing laws
begets
a Golden Horde)
no
place here
for those
who do
not have
the gene
for war
left Sun Tzu’s treatise
out for show,
to impress
purely for the art
of other conquest
seemingly ever-ready
to be
re-consumed and
to re-inspire
strategically positioned on
the love-pillow or
naughty night stand
***
be fruitful and multiply Johannesburg
when I
said there was
no
third act, well,
sue me — I lied!
divesting myself of my no-place-
in-this-economy milky
minded mindfulness
throwing it out
of the window
through the pod
bay door
so to speak
so to speak
not the place
for any kind
of would-be, needs to be,
less long suffering
poet in residence
for Plato’s moral
mathematical citizen
infinitely less
(for how long
have they, these philosophers
been telling us
the Cosmos
needs a lube job
and other
acts of essential housekeeping
to ensure
it is
a much, much
nicer and more human
better prison
this to which
we are condemned
as consciousness
(at this point the poem
just breaks off) .