GOD MYTHOLOGY CREED
new
sins, old ones derived
from
bankrupt mores.
Tenets
to prop up
atom by
atom,
a new
religion
banded,
nailed
to the
coffin of dignity–
a new
dark age ascending
ruled
by gods of war
lemming-like
prying off the poor
rising
glory of evil
the
broad path
peopled
by silent dissenters
with
back-packs,
peering
at their feet
marshalling
them against
toddling
off the road
laid
down by power.
Published in Fractured Poetics, CA: Social Design,
Inc. 2018
HOTEL FIRE
The Hotel hangs in the sky; it has lost its foundations. Should it be lowered it will skid off the sea sand choking the growth of plants, flowers and trees. The windows are blackened. The doors are red, the shape of hearts.
The roof like ebony graves.
They came to the Hotel for rest, a vacation. The Hotel opened its door and welcomed the tired stranger.
The hungry.
They connected in the sitting room, moved to the dining room. The table was laid out, damask table cloth, glasses, cutlery. They brought their own chairs, custom-made with carvings of their desires. One sat on pineapples he craved, another on diamonds, still another on gold.
Tall buildings grew around the Hotel. Most of them were empty. The people who’d lived there had disappeared into the ruins.
The barren landscape advertised for people to live there, to remove the sea sand, to scratch for fertile soil and plant trees and flowers. There was also a need for hangers, because every hotel needs hangers for clothes. Clothes meant travelling from this continent to that, in ships. Clothes meant belonging, identity, a scarf a meeting place for those who were like-minded.
They wanted to fix the Hotel; its doors had fallen off. Its heat had disappeared. Who would be the receptionist? The Devil. God. Whoever won the fight to create wealth and taller buildings, taller people, taller poetry and discourse.
This Hotel had been sold to who you ask.
The light in the passage is from the Hotel. The rest is dark, like you can imagine. Dark, like skins. The hotel serves bodies on plates, silver plates carried by taller than buildings. Men. Who sneak in the corridor, sliding on their shoes, breathing fire.
The hotel is in darkness, just the light under the door. Eskom load shedding. What is in the lighted room? No one knows. We are afraid to find out; there is comfort in darkness, the contours of familiar furniture holding you, keeping you warm. What if we let go of the darkness to explore the light? Where would it lead?
Most of us want the familiar, from morning to night, from the cradle to the grave. Darkness in the womb. Darkness in the grave. Nothing to interfere with a settled lifestyle, settled ideas, settled norms.
Suffocating familiar lines of knowing, of dreaming.
A fire that is not of your making, but exists. You don’t need to check if it has wood and coal, a good fire starter. It can burn from stars, the universe.
(Eskom, loadshedding: an electricity
company, a blackout)
SOMEONE IS WEARING MY CLOTHES
In lockdown
A new dress faded like memory
A blouse blooms a scorched rose
A jacket stained like rust
Slippers soiled
Nobody here but us
A mystery
Jewellery broken in its box
Like my faith
THE WIND
Small
humiliations
of day
to day life,
each a
stone, Heitsi Eibib,
piled
into a mountain
to
revere, obstructing our view.
Each
stone stacked up, Heitsi Eibib,
a stone
of greeting on every grave,
a
mountain.
Standing
to stand up, sometimes not,
a woundedness
in our family,
from
great pain comes great evil
truth
uncomfortable
its
brightness can blind you ̶ if you want;
much
better to take a stick
and tap
in the darkness.
A fire
wind
burnt
blackness
not
being able to see
a
national blindness.
Don’t
wake the sleeping titan
of
wounds collected
lest it
rears up
and
incinerates everything in its path.
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