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

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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

I am a random coincidence

A pregnancy test gone bad

I am the result of an accidental collision

The meeting of bodies

The greeting of bodies

the excretion of bodies

I am fluids spilt in the name of procreation

Emancipated in the name of recreation.

I am the culmination of banging bed posts

thrashing hair

the agony and ecstasy

Sweat and calamity .

I’m lack of protection, imperfection

Conceived in drunkenness

born in awkwardness.

I’m the lucky dip

The crinkled chip

The dancing DNA strain.

I am generations of insecurity and joy .People that died alone, those that died happy.

The current’s of two collaborating streams

in flood and drought.

A luggage lugged

A baton grasped and passed in the sweaty palm of history

I am genetic procrastination, the anti evolution.

Question mark? The cul de ‘ball’ sac (or T junction) to another’s realm.

In possession of this, this suitcase of ghosts, bursting at the buckles -history ailing. Memories wailing

To be recalled. Vicarious and precarious .

A thousand years of neuroses, loss ,gain.

A culmination- devastation, celebration

a pin prick of pain .

Both dog and semi enlightened being

otherwise a shit fly. (For which I’m thankful I’m not)

 

India –a love poem

 

I fell in love with a woman so vast

Her head rests in the heights of the Himalayas

And her toes in the waters of the Indian

Men can only ogle her full tragedy

Her resplendid beauty

Her epic daily unfoldings

From satellite dishes

 

She rides a scooter

wearing Sari, Sunglasses and high heels

Baby balanced on one shoulder

Cell phone in the other

 

She makes love to me

then leaves before I wake

 –with my wallet-

 

Kisses my hands

Then cuts them off

Hands me a crutch

Makes me beg for her

 

 

Feeds me with feasts

That make me shit for a week

Opens my eyes

Then sweeps dirt in them

Sings me to sleep in palace beds

Lets me wake in the gutters

She likes to stare

 to make a ridiculous spectacle of herself

Celebrates life and death

And if there was no distinction between the two 

 

‘Bolly would

 if she could

But she couldn’t

So she slept in the slums and dreamt of the stars’

 

She is a million scents

One minute piss the next minute petals

Saffron and sulphur

I no not the difference

 

Brash, brazen, bold, stupid

Sultry, intoxicating, seductive

Putrid

 

Her body a map

 bruised and divided by history

 Her veins -holy rivers and tributaries

Consecrated and desecrated

A countenance

Battered but smiling

 

Divorced from her ex colonel lover

-Pakistan

And pursuing ruthless custody

Over reluctant child

-Kashmir

 

Nursing not her pride

But bastard children

In shadows of shame

 

Her head pushed into a new age

Whilst her heart resides in the old

Indelible and Incredible

Adorned and adored

(So the brochures promised) 

Abhorred and abashed

(Some details were emitted)

 

They try to incinerate her on the pyre

Throw her sturdy hips to the Ganjess fish 

but she is stronger then fire

She can only rise

                          Rise

                               rise

 

 Kali wrecks havoc on a surfboard and monstrous waves

But she is stronger then water

She can only Swim

                          Swim

                                   Swim 

 

A fairy tale princess

Pursued by

Kings and princes

Politicians and demons

Possessing such beauty and horror

That mirrors and men’s hearts

Shatter

When they gaze upon her 

 

She has no happy ending

Only an endless beginning

 

My India