South Africa – Page 5 – poems 2 die for

OLD JOHANNESBURG

OLD JOHANNESBURG

waiting by the roadside
in old
Johannesburg

maybe
resurrection
will
befall me

maybe redemption
will come my way

failing which
perhaps

a circus or carnival will
come
round the corner

sweep
stubborn old ideologies
off the street

as serious joke or
perhaps just giggles

a parade of Zizeks
tumbling past me as if
Red Square
comedy

where figures from the
Commedia del Arte
are here
to replace tanks

look
seriously at the world and
it suddenly goes
Toy Town

confirmation bias
on open display for
everyone to see

fat
conspiracy here:
buses passing every few minutes
not stopping for everything
the drivers
believe

waiting for the curtains to open

waiting for the means
transport a boardgame
on my back

set
of lewd Cluedo
for whomsoever might
wish
to join me

help me
to survive
life on a billiard sphere

hustling to get by
wanting to be Master
always
a slave

waiting for the lights
to darken

have
lost the book
in which
I was made

****

after a
while

everything
slithers

snakes and
ladders

perhaps better to
devote time
to generating boardgames
rather than
squandering my existence
writing
poetry or composing fiction

****

bumper to bumper stacked together
owe it to them

to not close my eyes,
keep looking

or everything before me
will disappear

and this funeral procession
miss its target

some poor
exclusive dignitary

about to skip his rendezvous
with captivating tombstone
of proportions extreme

so much here
so mechanical

yet so many
vital nuts and bolts

****

bureaucracy
is horror

bureaucracy
is death

I sat with
Slavoj Zizek

through yet another sunset
telling jokes

about philosophers
telling jokes and
the end of the Universe

(not that this necessarily
implies a causal connection)

today the lawyers
of old and new Johannesburg
are
heading North
with a holy bone to pick.

I sat by the roadside
play after play

oodles of
words, scenes,
dialogue
even

still in my head

ghosts of tales
still
to be told

(media marvels yet
to unfold)

old Johannesburg

TUXEDO

TUXEDO

tuxedo
is name of
the game

you file your suit
hoping
to agree
of definitions

promise not to fight
over whether
this or that
homonym
accidental or
intended

all puns here
quite intended

but here they all are
creatures
of the South
my fellow-travellers

fat portfolio in their satchels
speaking in each codicil
humanity out loud

arguing
that a single sluk of
this evil
can
erase angelic face
pollute the God-given concept
of eternal, outright righteous

hold mirror up to Emperor
to deconstruct
all mind of god

yes
a time when
courage must be superhuman
to vouch for
civility, decency

to put us on the spectrum of
one indivisible being

and this to argue
before history, in
tuxedo

lest the lie, the quite lie
the brutal lie, the truth
denying
crushing line

find its path to become supreme

FARM STORY I am all farmed out Tick tock me here on your doomsday clock on the farm you will see I need my tik I need my beautiful tribe of B to get me atomic golden shower of abracadabra (hashtag Hasbara) help me to isolate myself stand against every creature, every animal calls itself humanity doesn’t rwconize tgd beauty of a bunker buster pure cluster bomb (failing which there is always the nuke in the cupboard) but this just the beginning every true alpha needing its omega its sky raining gamma needed to sort out everything unspeakable that crawls yes my dear saviours in your sanctified flavours need to demonize every farm imsect out here every stick of farm produce every evil land mime of flower only B’s Heavenly true propaganda hits the spot righf spit can correct my poor eyes attune to the power show things as really are.

CHALLENGED

Like all criminals
I am arithmetically challenged

cannot count up to,
never mind beyond
20,000

so many integers missing
fractions and
decimals
buried under the rubble

so levy your articulate accusations
against me

that I am
chlld of darkness rapist
animal in
league

with the Devil

go through the text, this text,
if not the eighty-odd
closely argued
pages

and we shall see
before Heaven and Earth

whose soul
is damned here

awaits
historical damnation.

GOLD

Ah! Mr
spokeperson all
that glitters

you shred what
was written

cover to
cover

as aligned with
every slurred devil
every
monster that
blasphemes

and this

before you
even read it

not even a single
painstakingly argued
ruthlessy documented
worth

sent
from ths South

our humble submission
where
all are
savages

know nothing
write anything.

AI poem in the style of Shakespeare: South Africa taking Israel to the ICJ

In lands afar, where shadows cast their veil,
South Africa strides, justice to unveil.
With heart resolute, they march to the fray,
Taking Israel to court, to have their say.

As rugby kings, and champions of right,
They face the champions of woeful blight.
Oh, how the irony sings in the air,
How shall Israel maneuver, now, to bear?

With twisted tongues, they’ll surely plead their case,
Beguiling words, their deeds they shall embrace.
Yet, in this court, a reckoning awaits,
Where justice’s scales shall decide their fates.

For Gaza’s plight, the world’s tears they’ve shed,
In this epic clash, hope shall rise, not dread.
From Shakespeare’s quill, new scenes shall now unfurl,
As justice fights against a twisted world.

FEAST

Thank God that guy Pope
never put me in his Dunciad
or any other
South African poets there
for that matter
which is a bit
beyond belief

long since Roy Campbell
Wayzgoosed everybody
from Cape Town to
Durban to Maritzburg
Joburg and Pretoria

enough idiots with pens
and processors around now
to make
any such revival
a royal satirical feast.

FROM THE SOUTH

FROM THE SOUTH

South gives you an
wrong-way-up perspective

right way up
as we
see it
though

blood rushing
to your head, helps
you think better

in the Tarot
nobody clearer
in thought

more clued up
on the road to redemption, than
eye to the sky hanged
upside
down man

and so
I spoke to this soul
looking for liberation
and he
told me what to
tell you

which I
do relay here:

you are not
free from
and will
never
be
free from discrimination
(by the
sharpest of logical
definitions)

if you
do not
free yourself from
the Liberty
to discriminate against.

CEMETERY ROAD

CEMETERY ROAD
“may not mean to/
but they do”

I’ve read that
this be the Larkin poem

by any metric
it’s a real shocker

give it its due
painfully spot on
must have
begun somewhere

with Adam and Eve
tragic trace elements
springing out
of the big
bang
catastrophic for
the happiness of our species

and so me
not yet teenage

about to be whisked, nay,
catapulted to Africa
and apartheid
South Africa
at that

far from this little British
cul-de-sac
joy there in the sweet
English place of
pastoral they
call
a pastoral

where my father dutifully
taught me how
to ride
a bicycle

not much interest in my
life

this broken life

after which
my father’s little dream
of upping
roots, defining
his Empire

somehow not
translating

finding purchase, believers,
means of manufacture

will not
let this poem end as
dead at
point blank range
as Larkin’s does

SETTING (for JM Coetzeeon his 83rd birthday)

SETTING (for JM Coetzee
on his 83rd birthday)

the pain
is embedded
has become
geological

so
deeply impacted
revelation is going
to be
extinction level
be seismological

and there we are (time
as we now
see
thing quite unreal)

looking down from
the reverse slope of Devil’s Peak
out over the flat suburbs
(dust and sand
of ocean reclaimed)

but your mind is
far into the interior
digging up the bones
that tell us
pain is history;
history pain

somehow they cannot convert
your cerebral into spectacle
no technicolour out there
to match your austere

somehow
intensity here has
of necessity to be
sharp
and sweet

somehow
these titanic currents, seas
meeting
twisting, contorting

all going to
flow ultimately
transformed
in that wash

for now
so precious little melding,
blending
hope
for the rude rudiments
of a comfort zone
(plane almost scraping the
lids off shanties take offs
and landings
whole other, true,
South Africa
cannot just wish away)

and there you are
delivered
of all our quandaries
all our questions
bitter conundrums

absorbing the crimson sunset light
in your paradise of refuge

do you
not think of us recall
what was lived through?

take a
last look our way

scan sky far
to the West where Sun
is forever setting

Sent from my iPhone