You left me with…

1.) A green piggy bank (in the shape of an elephant). Loot from one of your car-boot sale trawls.  A relic from some Afrikaans bank promotion in the 70’s.

2.) A fridge full of inedible leaves. Watercress wasted on me—my resourcefulness with salad stuff extends to boiled eggs and iceberg lettuce- what does one do with watercress?

3.)A wobbly vintage bed side lamp, fond of conking me on the head during late night reading sessions.

4.)An ID photo, carefully placed amongst our shelf of Chinese wind-up toys, solemn eyes to keep a tin army in check.

5.) A Jasmine vine on the balcony which, in the absence of your patient fingers, now competes with fellow tendrils to topple the TV Ariel and strangle me in my sleep.

6.)A sculpture you made in second year: A concrete cast of your upturned hands, left outside to cup the evening rain.

Each morning I wake and empty two generous palms-full.

All this talk of beauty

Brecht’s stuffed donkey

Actors in falsetto

flailing about in three interminable acts of crisis.

Artistic arsonists

Setting mountains on fire

So they may weep

and in turn inspire

Modalities, meta-text, sub-text, intertext–tual, Sexual, Meta-sexual

Meta-sexual-inter-textual-ality

(There’s one for the PHD)

Collaboration… interrogation… provocation

Self….. sacrifice….mutilation…congratulation

Hypothetic… thermic…academics

And if not scraping the century old mould from the kitchen sink

Then off plundering the mythic imaginary.

That endlessly recyclable realm of post-modernist-modernisms.

So removed and obscure that you dare risk meeting any part of yourself  inside of it.

Hoary tales made heady with whimsy

Unfamiliar with cliché

Here?

Too depressing…recent…..relentless.

There…..

Glen miller records on a scratchy gramophone.

Surreal fairy-lit French circuses, butcheries and freak shows.

A mass of rock cuts off the rest of the continent

As onwards the Southern tip wafts

in an un-complex cosmos.

On a hospital slab. Insides out, body parts in plastic bags, cotton wool taped over eyes. The anaesthetist reaches over and touches a braid of his dying patient’s hair.

Admiring the simple tapestry, he meditates on the day when devoted fingers (whose?) combed and collected each thread of fine hair. Each tightly woven braid the product of what? A mother’s love? Aunt’s persistence? Daughter’s reluctance? Hairdressers indifference?

He will never know though he likes to imagine she laughed at least once during the sitting. Laughter in between shrieks of hair wrenched at the root, laughter delirious on some stoep out in the August sunshine.

As he detaches his machine and watches her body  wheeled unceremoniously from the theatre, he focuses again on this head of knitted hair. Zigzagging contours rising from the neckline.

Each braid: three rapids, tributaries tumbling and tied inseparably into one. Unity, he thinks, unity when everything else has unravelled. Unity in a body come so irrevocably undone.

Beauty in my review mirror

Squinting nonchalant into the sun

Friday

5 o’clock traffic

Head cocked in half thought

Lips shaping the lyrics to some song

Beauty but a bumper away

Shifting lanes

Parts the pestilential smog

Drifts indifferent

through scorned swarms

  Read the rest of this entry »

Slide open my bathroom window framing a far- off freeway.

Clear sleep from crusty eyes.

Three am.

Suburbs still

except for the sound of just woken hounds

machinery sawing metal

moans from the interior of mangled cars.

Medics and firemen

all hands on deck

Sirens respectfully on silent

still winking blue and red

proceeding with the procedure

cutting limb from carnage

life from crumpled tin- foil wreck.

If I could eradicate the myth

What might that leave you with?

I have my own

less prohibitive

but they are myths all the same

Means to balance our precarious realities

Unrealities to make precarious our means

 Give me

step ladders and terminaly ill light bulbs

Blinking to the painful end

Give me

the silenced song of my grandmother’s singer sewing machine

Your afflictions with the found and forgotten

Objects— do not bleed

Though may break or rust

bodies

far more inconsistent

prone to collapse and lust

Read the rest of this entry »

Four years you sat in mom’s closet.
Behind the birthday soaps, hand creams and Christmas-card packs.

In a closet
In a packet
In a box with plastic engraving on the outside.

So tightly sealed that when it came to the hour
of your belated release
you would not budge. Read the rest of this entry »

Jesus jumped off my bathroom wall this morning. Cracked his sacred heart. Last night there was a police helly hovering over my head woke to the sound of chopper blades like a marathon runner’s heart a smugglers pulse at a particularly tenuous border crossing search light spotting something frantic through foliage and into windows of little sleeping suburbanites must be a fugitive from the westville prison he said rolling over back to sleep but I couldnt so lay awake counting butterflies with blades for wings while remembering how last week that truck carrying tons of sun flower oil on the freeway by my house caught fire sending neighbours breaking telephones and bending ears with news that revolutionaries had taken the local bridge. Hoards of us brave enough gathered on the bank to learn the actual cause but more I feel to feel the furnace on insensate skin. Mrs Jacobs banged her bible as flames that smelled of popcorn swirled around her head.The mouth of hell fell open but not one of us went in

There was an uprising on the mountain side yesterday, just over the decrepit old fence with its rusted barbs and rotten wood poles, on the slope beneath the black shadow of the cloud.The field of fierce yellow flowers curled into my palms with the seduction of a kitten. They coyly brushed their petals against my cheek and coaxed me into lying amongst their long green stems.

Then with all the petulance its petals could muster one stared me deep in the eyes and spat at me, at my kind. I took it by the throat, between my two fingers and threatened to snap it at the veiny top of its stem. It wept drops of dewy sap before I let it free, and it shook hard the remains of my fingerprints.

We are fighting she whispered, her yellow companions nodded emphatically in the wind. The war against mankind, against your kind. We have mustered up our defenses of barbed acacia and prickly pear, we have spoken to the rivers and babbled with the brooks. We have conversed with the messengers of the skies and signaled to the insects to prepare their defenses. Such a pretty flower had seen one to many a companion, picked and fondled, plucked and fingered, stroked and straightened to brighten up the vase of dull living room.

I pulled the burnt scabs of old bark off dead tree stumps, the limbless trunks, the mutilated black licked wood , gray and soulless. Waiting to burn in the stone cottage fire place.I felt the dying warmth of daylight on the rocks blunt ugly faces, I kissed their gnarled lips and wondered why my head was not as a peculiar shape as theirs.I exchanged my pain on that mountain beneath the black cloud shadow, I listened and they listened, crouched in their density, peering over my ridiculous web of stupidity