Portal for Writers and Poets in South Africa
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.
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.
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.
After leaving Mr Muirhead
Alleys. Streets. Wolves. Sheep.
The shores-of-Johannesburg do not smell like anything-like-Malibu.
It’s primitive living-for-sale.
Columbia
To the lighthouse soul.
To Sappho, Antigone’s divine-ceremony.
Go fishing in rifts.
It’s losing its darkness
Something is damaged –
There is a richness in dust – mother-tongue.
Post-apartheid things. Compasses.
The hours
You are a typhoon –
Waves in the folds of daylight.
Childhood stars are past.
Shade in my bedroom
The end of violence –
The world’s feast is not my home.
The heart of worship.
Inside a public library
I am the June guest –
Greedy for ritual. Sonnets.
Winter possession.
Success for personal growth
Orlando’s river –
Habits of tsunamis past.
What remains is life.
Books
I read as a child –
In books, there are valleys. Hills.
Worlds were within reach.
Haiku for Jean Rhys (suffered from alcoholism and manic depression)
The photograph in-the-red-box.
Like the juices of the succulent-roast –
The-death-kit it keeps me sane.
Haiku for Susan Sontag (died from breast cancer)
Fragmentary in-my-world-reality.
Here comes the blue nurses’ sleepwalking-again-writing-on-my-body
Ice-cometh with their death-kit needles-galore.
Haiku for Sharon Olds (suffers from and still lives with estrangement and divorce)
I like your death-kit-beauty that-pours-out-of-you.
Your territory so-pure-like-childhood – I-surrender-to-it –
Like Alice-in-wonderland, star maps, our-wedding-cake.
Haiku for Anna Kavan (heroin addict, died from heart failure)
In her volcano-garden there was-death-kit’s-silence –
Hellish ice-revisited. Human-stupidity. Heroin was-the-mistake.
Your weapons-against-the-tigers was writing-it-brilliantly off.
Haiku for Ann Quin (died from a suicide attempt)
The-portrait-of-the-sea- came with mansions –
Brighton’s waves shielded all this-drowning-visitor’s-barefoot-experiments.
At-the-borderline bloodless-flesh staying at-the-death-kit-hotel-forever.
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.
Weave your poetry – shamanic-wisdom
And not by accident it will prosper long-after-you-are-dead.
For-all-the-raw cutting edge of-the-world-to-see.
She slipped – she didn’t fall-like-a-body-or-wreck
Could have been a striking pageant-beauty-queen-in-a-magazine.
Then an-anonymous-connection-with-men. Bewitched them.
Flame. Troubled. Gossamer-hair. Flawed-and-most-powerful.
Saint. Perhaps-she-didn’t-know she possessed daydreamer wings.
The tunnel-though-was-infinite – a contract.
Child-lost-forever-in-time she never grew-up.
She must have heard them screaming-badly-to-this-day-even-in-her-coffin.
Frieda-and-Nicky Kilimanjaro-and-Everest-forever playing hide-and-seek.
Little-Buddha-eating-cheese-on-toast. Eye-on-the-cauldron. Ill. Ill. Ill.
Rest your head, a bird’s nest, tomorrow-you-will-go-on-living-in-another-realm.
You have missed out on-nothing-of-significance.
I do not have gills-but-I-wish-that-I-did.
Like fish at-the-end-of-their journey in their-river-of-convenience.
There were slits and God.
Profit, lily, soul.
Purse, emptiness, hard-boiled egg.
So-do-Eden’s flowers wilt.
Weakened. Frozen. Sight-hurts-and-can-sometimes-be-most-earth-shattering.
My wonder, my lamb, my forget-me-not-and-my-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow
There is a great deal-of-envy-in-flesh.
Gold is a marvel
To behold, but ’tis cold to
The touch: love it not!
My heart dances to free-
The world behind lenses.
Where the rhythm goes-
Through hidden doors
To find answers.
As the feeling grows-
Beneath the clothes
The vibe enters.
So don’t bruise and brake,
Just move and shake
Your five senses.
And for all human’s’ sake-
Shall it awake
Devine senses.
With shadows bright-
As candle-light
For blind lenses.
With endless height-
To anxious sight
My heart dances.
It is never a certain moment..but in every eye blink.
That I sink with you like paper likes ink.
Deep inside these moving memories I sink.
The nervous I forever minds what our minds think.
Trully, when our narative eyes speak..
It takes I to high trips…
Where the vibe is so hot inside skins..
as an inferno’s light beams.
You and I trapped inside cells as tight genes.
Where we flow on pumping water as floating on white streams.
When we meet, touch…the sight speaks.
It’s like scenes extracted from my night dreams.
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The more fire hotter…the more I stutter..
..struggling to align speech.
As I try each…word to word..with a quiet pitch.
Nervous and shyish..
That infront of you I wish to hide lips….
The melodic silence is like strings of violins.
Dear Queen..you are a diamond..
…grounded, down to earth yet smart and brightened…
…red-hot and shining.
You are a hero’s heroine..
…driving and riding on what’s inside him.
You are a blessing disguising…
..as this temperature-rising..
..Empress of Zion.
So can I take a trip..
..to the place where they keep..
The Greatest Gift?
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