ENOUGH
managed to scrape together
enough time
to write this poem
which none
of you are going to read
I could not be more convinced
the days of carving, shaping,
wordsmithing lines
together
seem so
long gone, irrelevant now,
sweet for the stuff
they wrote in
a bygone age
Medieval, Renaissance,
Romantic, Victorian
and
mind-
bending modern
or shamelessly
meta and (self) reflexive
decidedly
post-modernist
EASY
sit back
take it easy
but let me know
when I happen or
indeed contrive to
infringe upon or
let alone
trample upon
principles
upset
all your apple carts
or wreck your
comfort zone
aside from that
no words are necessary
let
nothing said here.
spoil your enjoyment
nothing here
disturb your stay
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
AND THE GLORY
how it must resonate
with you
helping speed
along Biblical
divine purpose
(but the exact
chapter and verse
seemingly hard
to locate)
marching your way (sorry,
all our ways) across
dead landscape upon
landscape
into the book
of revelations
wrestling all into submission
as they meet
head-on, full
frontal attack
the power and the glory
no moment more
opportune
to jump
the gun
bring about that
eternal pastoral, ingrained
memory that it must be,
of all
that precedes us
predates all sense of purpose
that we have been
called upon
to execute
the template of divine
empire, downloaded from above
NATIVITY SCENE
time of war
hard to avoid
finding yourself
immersed in everything
images, text,
flooding in
from everywhere,
challenging
those last
assumptions about
how good
we are
how precious
our humanity
the targeting
of children
the heroic burial
of some
or other
soldier
strangely, suddenly
striking me as
the absolute
antithesis
of the nativity scene
TO SAY
history rhymes
this, being said, be
careful how
you recite
always here
a terrible price
need to
figure out
what you are doing there
reading
from a hymn sheet
adding to the chorus
the words just pouring
out in fine tune
not a thought about
the whats
and whys
so much structure
in the music
out there
chaos, perfidy, deception,
entropy
serving the interests
of what now calls itself
to assume power
stripping me here
of anything, everything,
all I have got to say
TRANSPARENCY
I have a secret camera
snap snap
captures
everything
comes fully equipped
with three sixty degree
X ray vision
everything in your heart
I see her delineated here
on this
transparency
fully exposed.
CAVEAT
do not read to deeply
unless lurking
here
you locate
an
abyss
or stumble across
a
v
o r
t
e
x
get effaced
disappear off this page
victim of reading with
just too
much focus
outrageously appropriate
imagination
if you
got here unscathed
you obviously
ingested my
caveat
read with a standard lack
of acuity and
image identification
but for those
readers truly blessed, soul
brothers sisters
who did
not get this far
to share
this moment
falling, as I do,
by the wayside, amongst
thorns,
slap bang
in the middle between
Scylla and
Charybdis
as is my
proclivity
on a
perpetual basis
take my hand
dear deep denizens too
ALIENATION
this is not an idea
that flew in from nowhere
per flying saucer
it is not a rupture
inducing word
but one
to faithfully reflect
every schism
that we have
every aspect of our dividedness
where what is same
seems so
fundamentally different,
radically other
and life, meant for living,
is disjointedness itself
SOLUTION
“there can only be
a creative solution”
Gilles Deleuze
when you talk solution
I kind of dissolve
was only 15
in May 68, that most
year of the Monkey
Woodstock music festival
Jimi Hendrix machine-
gun divebombing
the Star Spangled
Banner the
following year
cannot speak French
(the language
seeming
to resist me
at every turn)
but so
into that opera house
of philosophies
that medley
of theories
thought it a kind of
light in the darkness,
laser mental surgery
but now
here we are
won nothing,
captured nothing
intrigued that there is such
a curious parallel
between
endgame in
my life
and endgame in the world
at large
privileged to
navigate this sludge of
landscape
having honed
that Barthes template
critical
apparatus of sign
and code
deconstructing to such
a fine tuned degree
I feel an insider in
the clarity with which
I am
there with Zizek and
the punchline
of his jokes
liberation there, losing
oneself
to right genus and
species of rigorous laughter
poems 2 die for