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After Leaving Mr Muirhead (a poem in experimental haiku)

Alleys. Streets. Wolves. Sheep.
The shores-of-Johannesburg do not smell like anything-like-Malibu.
It’s primitive living-for-sale.

To the lighthouse soul.
To Sappho, Antigone’s divine-ceremony.
Go fishing in rifts.

Something is damaged –
There is a richness in dust – mother-tongue.
Post-apartheid things. Compasses.

You are a typhoon –
Waves in the folds of daylight.
Childhood stars are past.

The end of violence –
The world’s feast is not my home.
Celestial routes. Fruits.

Love on a Cloud

She sent him a message …
A message of her undying love….upon a cloud
The cloud full of passion and love….embraced his soul
The silky white cloud resembled the purity of the love
That no force could ever separate
A love that stood the test of time
has reached the heavens!

Lamb (a poem in experimental haiku)

Once a boy was hatched.
Born with sonnet wings most heaven-sent –
Eased into planting.

Appalled by the world’s stage.
Tooth – radar splitting the hunt
Courage is exposed.

Brilliant inner sea –
His cry glides across the moon.
This mother tongue comforts me.

Ghost of a vision.
Every finger a stem –
Leaves antiques, tears sap.

Winter’s bone – a party’s birthday balloon
Summoning earth’s ripening –
Blades of pleasant grass.

Bough Down (a poem in experimental haiku)

Aloes from Bethelsdorp –
The green world’s-majority is not my home.
Only Goethe’s throne.

Mum’s June wedding lace.
Dad’s glove was lost at the church.
His Mrs. Dalloway.

There were her roses.
Granadilla hands in earth.
Ice lungs frozen. Night.

Dolls in childhood – dead
Things. Once attached to slippers.
Church. Girlhood friendships.

Origins of wives –
Daughters, girls. A dramatic gulf.
Ruined geraniums. Roasts.

Biko Hani Mahola Malema Daddy (a poem in experimental haiku)

Social media – flux.
Lunch. History wilderness.
Broken hinges. Spice.

Post-apartheid child underfoot –
There is footstomping-traffic in my house.
Toy guns. Cowboy hats.

I am the June guest –
Greedy for ritual. Sonnets.
Winter possession.

Orlando’s river –
Habits of tsunamis past.
What remains is life.

I read as a child –
In books, there are valleys. Hills.
Worlds were within reach.

My voice

My voice
I seek not to alter the fabric of space
To unwind time irreversible
What I seek, is the voice
The voice that stands firm,
Sets paths unchanged,
Moves mountains untrailed,
Sets fire unquenched,
Builds brigdes connected,
Calms seas untamed,
A beacon to weary souls,
Water to the parched heart,
Solace to the unembraced,
I seek the voice everlasting,
The voice pending,
The voice infinite,
The voice sustaining,
My voice an echo unchanging.

Married Life

I cannot condescend to it –
The parties I would have thrown.
The dinners I would have cooked.
The beets cannot illuminate anything
In their pink broth. There would
Be so many things that I have
To remember. I would have left
The feasts of nature to other brides

To decayed leaves of all things
I would have counted my chickens
Before they hatched. Only a virginal
Girl could be so terrified of the art
Of lovemaking not the victim of sex abuse.
The beets are still cooking while I am
Writing this poem for the world.

While I am standing on the edge of
Whirls of totems in nature. I have to produce
Something. If I cannot produce progeny
Then what other alternative do I have?
But to write and to write and to write.
Because writing is healing, therapeutic.
I will have no need for psychologists.

Why didn’t you love me mum?
Why did you give me up to the world
That has this infatuation with drowned
Things and the paper tiger empresses
Journaling romantic ghost stories. Clever
Experiments every one of them telling me
That there is something ancestral about a leaf.

The throne upon which it sits reminding
Us all that we are only guests
And that this world has our guts
For breakfast while women cook steak
For their husbands and bring life into
This world, watching their parents cross
Over into the eternity of the hereafter

And so I am left with the stems,
Flowers, with that great melancholy
Of the lonely mind. The hours
Are in my blood. The stain of humanity
That I am so obsessed with. Its canvas.
Its caves. There is the useful light
Tunneling away into the system.

Am I A Victim of Things I Need to Maintain?

“Am I a victim of things I need to maintain”

Words of the late Tupac Shakur

A thug who needed a place to let his head down

Cause the life he lived, came with discomfort

He was human, like me, like you, human

 

Early this morning I made a call

A call that would prove that history has no repeats

But man, oh man, was I up for a surprise

This is not the first time, this is a repeat of the many times

And to think taking a different approach would be a change

I take it I was wrong, again, for the many other wrongs

 

I have been Jack for a long time

Everytime I hop out the box, I get pushed back in

And everytime after that, I would have an excuse

Write it down, as therapy, what an excuse

Kick myself, say life’s a bitch, scratch my head, excuses

Like now, life’s a bitch right, excuse

 

This is not a poem, but written in the form of one, not an excuse

 

I have a stone in my shoe

Getting rid of it, brings a bigger one, after the other

Ten years is much as an excuse for more years to come

I have a grave yard field with them, one on top of the other

And I am sick of TRYING to bury the word “excuse”

My anger gets me heated, and this is much a release therapy

A place to let my head down and rest just a little bit

 

My phone is buzzing for life, and I’m disrupting from it

How do I recharge my own as easy as recharging a phone?

Where do I begin, I know from the bottom, but where?

Where are the doors I’m looking for, where are the ones I’m not?

Is God really with me, can He listen, will He open a door for me?

Or am I just a victim?

Beautiful be your name

Every time my eyes fall on you I fall,
All my residual images and thoughts of every other person crumble,
And there you’ll be!,
Not only in my eyes, but my mind, my head,
All alone on that wall of fame with no competition at all,
Governing all my emotion,
You are beautiful.

Do you’ve a talent? rhetorically I ask,
Only to see if you’ve eyes to appreciate who you are,
To see that which is for all to see and thus yourself obliged to accept responsibility for,
So if your answer isn’t beauty, I am disappointed.
Scientists sat to find out the origins of talent,
Was it congenital or influenced by the World’s pressures?,
They concluded,
But ooh how wrong they were,
practice only perfects,
Talent is the only thing we bring to this earth and take with us to the grave,
wasted or utilized,
What I wouldn’t give to see you shine and stay beautiful.

Yours is a unique talent,
Skin deep it may be,
But what is the world without skin? A horror movie!,
And a world with yours is blissfull, full of mirth,
A sign from the heavens of perfection that awaits us when we hurdle past the horrors of this life,
I see the pains in your eyes,
The burdens that a talent displayed for all to see bear,
The carnivorous men feasting on your flesh and hurting your soul,
But weep not and stand up straight to face the world in the eye,
For you are an Angel!
Your smile embodied with Jiu Jitsu flowing your veins can conquer and command the world,
Send chills up and down every man’s spine and consign them as far as at world’s end,
Because your beauty enslaves manhood.

Name?,
Letters, words put together desperately trying to define Us briefly,
Give meaning to what, who and why we are,
Yet it seems burdensome an art which none of our parents have mastered,
So to me?
Beautiful be your name!

Family Life (a series of experimental haiku)

Ethan

Infatuation –
Winner of America.
Paper tigers ghosts.

Lauren

Beast in the kitchen –
Drowned thing with her rosary.
At war with the roast.

Ambrose

Throne. Ghost. Leaf. All guests.
Pale. Ancestral bloodlines – a clever-experiment
In romanticism.

Mum

Beach-life. A green-ish plate.
Swimming towards velvet rays of light.
A child’s-laugh (bees). Sea mist.

Dad

Jasmine passion – reel.
Flowers in a lonely mind.
Illness for breakfast.

Cody

Children underfoot –
There is traffic in my house.
Toy guns. Cowboy hats.

Remember me

The weather that day. Rain and-then-it-stopped.
Flesh. Skin-on-skin’s-compass. Perfume. And more rain.
Keys to not buying post-apartheid things.

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