how my modernism limits love.
Now I eat from your plate
hold its blue to shore up my day
and rummage for my particulars –
budget, salary, tax form –
in a bin filled with plastic,
ash, mango skin and condoms.
2.
My land’s an expanse of rubble
and slogans, charters, accords.
Handshakes commit chattering guns
to obscenity and soap operas.
Every day, violence kitsches itself
onto front pages while, caught
in the sublime, the stars twinkle
and our minds race to countless edges.
The radicals drive limousines,
are driven in them, and host dinners
to court capital, promising restitution.
But we’ve seen the sharkskin suit
and the flashing smile, as we become
more and yet more, still, a people
of squatters, building zinc
and cardboard hopes over the words
that scratch at our reformed lives:
heroes bought by your country’s dollars,
by gold and dumdum; heroes leaving
our shacks to rickety revolutions.
3.
We all stumble on favourite poets,
by chance come across their books
scattered in someone’s wake
on worn carpets, or hung from eyehooks.
And within a week, we make them our own.
4.
I dream in poems,
small, short quatrains.
I dream of waking
and writing them down.
I wake and lose them
like leaving and suicide
like wiping dry
the blade of the knife.
5.
At night, bougainvillaea leap at me.
Moon waning fast, there’s no colour.
But I know, by feel and voice, that flower
slashing through a hoped-for night out
and caging me between the buck and warp
of language and the real: how yesterday
the moon hung, in a word, hard-boiled
above phone lines taut as an egg-slicer
6.
We lose again, dusk purling
clouds over Table Mountain;
lose again, though Venus is
twice brighter than ten years ago.
Bam bam bam. LKJ’s bass
pounds anger into the gloom,
clutches the gut. Martin mulls
the cannabis, rolls the bone.
Willie smiles and twitches
to the reggae. Amanda fires
tangerine rind
and Martin lights the joint
inhales, and lifts his thumbs:
Okay. But I, I dissolve outwards,
wander the sky. And wait for you
to come to my ever-hungry land.
Reliving
Winter breaches the vents, pushes
him back into the bath water:
a child crawling back to warmth
still brooding in last night’s bed.
He thinks of her blood, her hot
baths to soothe those aches,
blood thinning in the water.
Or, under the shower, running
red down her legs at times,
other times brown. Or when
she first shows him in the toilet
red wisps expanding in pale urine
and her blood caught like a starfish
in folds of tissue paper.
How they teeter the first time
drunk or resolved,
or both. And after sex lie and think
of nothing. Then
she sits up, reaches between her legs
to confess her early, unexpected blood.
And lifts away from the bedding
to show him the red butterfly:
her blood spread beneath their weight.
But there’s no blood now,
only the thud of calendars.
Curled in the bath, I wish
he’d bleed, colour
this pale, indifferent water.
This carting life
We were moving northwards
We were moving northwards, out
into a sprawl of black rock
while other epics lay crumpled.
Things down south were bad,
all talking, belching refugees,
and songs of prowess drawn from wells
dug from rock. So we lost our grip
time and again, saw our pleasures
fade in a cold, northern dawn.
Our worlds crumbled. Flowers
shivered in the gaze of reptiles,
and we pushed on.
Our clothes clung, our skins taut,
and the further north we moved,
the lighter we became.
The smell of angels and rock,
dust and aloe, moonlight,
these were the smells we now knew.
Free from the questions of our past,
we could move faster, shaking
dust into another dawn,
brushing hats and coats.
Free from dust, we moved
always northwards, always,
our hands down, swinging to a new rhythm,
our hair flames to gods,
those who would stay with us.
In a gully we came upon a scene
borne through the ages