Tag Archives: family

BOGIES

BOGIES

we called our push
carts bogies

tue richer kids, from
up the street
ordered theirs, in
screw-together
streamlined
   formula one kits

mine
   my grandfather, my Mother’s
father had to make, mine
pram wheels and axels
and an old
pantry shelf he
painted purple
“the mauve monster” as
it was dubbed
     my the flash kids, the
speed aces,
the titans
   from the top of our road
as they sped past me
effortlessly

but they did not get to see
this man of few words
and (to me)
much mystery
at work, an engineering
marvel of
perfect proceas
or check the Great War
kit pinned up
high on
his cellar
workshop wall

same cellar where in 1940
as my Mother told me
her elder sisters
    returning late
had tried to sneak in
delivered,
   by a tank and
this man, their father ever
vigilant
   had caught them before
they were able to sneak
unspotted up to bed

sure they were
Hitler’s finest, having
ditched their parachutes
sneaking in
through the cellar to
take their revenge

for what he did
in his twenties to their
uncles and fathers over
his two years
on the Western Front with
the instrument of
mass death that
saved him
    back then
a genuine water-cooled point
303 Vickers medium
machine gun

without which no him no
daughters no mother
ultimately
      no me

I wonder when it was
my Mother, still a child
must have
fitst noticed it
what questions she asked
what she thought
what she knew, imagined
of that war

back to the bogies, my
purple bogie
      last memory of my life
in the North
of England back then

bogies
    such a strange war-haunted
Battle of Britain word

the skies back then full
of 109s and Heinkels and
Dorniers
      fight for survival, standing
alone against Nazism (and
new old
enemy Germany)
all for
democracy (not Empire) and
all that is good in
mankind and
noble
in the world

my Mother
became strange as she aged,
my father too in that still
clinging to
colonialism pre-
liberation South Africa

others came
      we left

my Mother so aghast
years later
    to hear who it waa exactly now
living in that house

place of her menories
(and who
     know what subtle, pervasive,
inevitable
family warfare)

source of my
purple, magnificent bogie
its maker
and his
machine gun

long time passed, younger
in years when he did than
my age now

TYGERBERG

TYGERBERG

vacuum cleaner
sucking up dirt and fluff
absurdly early, not even
sure than it could
be called morning

from the kitchen
war
seems about to me
declared, easy to
deduce from
the manifest hostilty
openly expressed
in the friction and
firefights between
the pots and
the plans

a clash for the ages
all that was, peace and
domesticity
come clattering down

and so
thus chastized for
my laziness and hurled
into action
I boot up
this then state
of the art dos computer
read the green
dissertation text which
sadly, does not
show any inclination
to save my academic bacon
by writibg itself

big mistake this
returning home
for my sabbatical
to save a few pence

drive my way into Rondebosch
from out in the
lower white middle class
Afrikaans speaking
industrial suburbs

hoping
this will not
become an error
of truly epic, horrendous
proportions

first in
a long long line
of bad, wrong choices
I never
did resolve

STALEY BRIDGE  STALYBRIDGE

STALEY BRIDGE  STALYBRIDGE

this is Staley bridge
my father’s birthplace

here is a picture
of me in a pram
my sister
in a pram

on a big bridge
crossing the Tame river

this is not
that Staley bridge where
the Saxons crushed the
Vikings
      rushing back to

meet my
Norman ancestors at Hastings

and we
know what happened there

****

Yes, here we are
up front Mossley
in that picture, my
                       Mother

daughter of a war hero
pushing our pram

and there, no doubt,
the great cotton mills
still
     doing their job though
not now in
their hey day

          postmodernity,
postcoloniality

what landscape altering modes
of production ushered
in in
     their wake

      and here is Engels incliding
text on this place in his seminal
work on
the working class
in England

and here I am
years later, studying satire living
in his monument house
in Oxford Street Manchester

water
under this bridge, water
connecting
us all
    Tipperary, Stalybridge,
Mahikeng South Africa

figures
      in a Lowry paintimg
                                  they come
and they go

water
    under this bridge then
so much water we
tend to
   forget about
                        water headed
to the port of slavery

same water in the skiffle
psychedelia of those

Sergeant Pepper people
magicians of the airwaves
conjurors of
                        a whole new
line
    in identity
fruit of the clash of
working class proclivities
with
    transcendental
mind

clash, I say,
but what a melding, beloved
blending

without which
no way this space, or place,
or room
       to talk

gone these guys
         or finally fading

gone
those mills of my childhood
Spitfire stories
      of how
                we stood alone

everything reconfigured,
outright repurposed

voices (and their words)
I fail to recognise, alien
strange

elevated above whilst
so out of frame

somehow talking all
necessities of suppression
       commandeering everything

stretching

    the distance below
to above

       to breaking point

viewed from
the Southern tip of Africa, product
victim of
all that this is metonym of
all this place
             this life
of which
           I speak

ths
shock
     could not be more
                               extreme

(so dark
               these river with
their druid name

                 we cross
all our lives

each
    every day

        so quietly  all
determining)

HISTORY CHANNEL

HISTORY CHANNEL (KIND OF REMEMBER ME THAT SIEGFRIED SASSOON) watched a video on World War One who started it who finished it who went who stayed at home who came back like my Mother’s Dad big gong of a medal around his soft young neck which is just as well otherwise wouldn’t be here myself to waste your time as Siggie’s bishop himself didst poetically proclaim the ways of God being satirically strange watched a video on the channel on World War One same as the last one same people won

HEIRLOOM

HEIRLOOM

there will come a time
when you step
out of your front door

only to
find

the clock in the house
old family clock,
heirloom
    that both of them
for all their
differences obvious
and concealed, real
and imagined
     will both swear and
schedule their lives by

only
   to find

heirloom, heirdoom,
        doomloom

time inside and outside
could not
        be more relative

and there it is
         out of nowhere
a growing pains singulaity
                          suddenly
extreme gravity
cosmic, yes, but
              when you speak
them in the boat
whirling around the vortes
just
   outside
  the event horizon

you will learn the apt term,
which may, in this case,
well be
psychosexual

and there they are dictating,
prescribing
       these great theraputic
gentlemen

who never in the world did
you expect
to see
    in real life

persuading you, pleading with
you
    imploring you

to find your negation of
this house of fiction, parental
palace
    of delusion

and until such time
        use the back door to
leave

quietly
     and at peace