ontrou ongetroud

jy mag my meisie wees, elke paar jaar, maar
jy is nie my vrou nie.
my vrou is die maan waarna die gety van my bloed gepomp word.
my meisie is die wit-silwer skroeiende son wat my deurboor.
jy mag my vriendin wees, ons verstaan mekaar, maar
jy is nie my vrou nie.
my vrou is die sneeu bedekte berge waar ek myself kan verloor en vind.
my meisie is die kaal vlaktes waar ek ombeskermd wag.
jy mag my vyand wees, ek het jou hart verraai, maar
jy is nie my vrou nie.
my vrou is die onrustige swart see wat my sluk en verteer en weer geboorte gee.
my meisie is die wete dat haar redding in haar ontsnapping le.

Promises (draft)

I like you is a promise, transmitted at light speed across a room,
The first move in the game played with less than complete integrity.
Trust me is a promise, an appeal to vanity, wrapped in reciprocity
Not considered or intended, hint that first light gives budded bloom.

I feel you is a promise, hear the herald of doom in the whisper of skin.
Fevered and completed, for and of you, drifting in temporary eternity.
Bury me is a promise, to be last witness to life’s appalling indignity.
To return at last across that same room that same look, that little grin.

I love you is a promise. I love you is a lie. The word is too small.

What to do when the wheels come off.

I was surprised that she said that she still loved me. It had been many six long years since we had been together. I was not surprised that she still hated me too, fostered bad memories of the neglect and torture she had suffered at my hands. It was a good night. Drinks and good music, friends and an open channel to her heart. I admitted everything, that night, offered her my love, my life and heart, without any expectation that they might be accepted, never mind returned. Lately, I have been trying to figure out what that kiss she gave me meant. I moved between theories like a moth in a lighting shop. Was she saying, I want to remember that time, when we were good? Was she saying, I love you but I’m in love with the man I’ve been dating for five years? Was she carried forth on the current of my enthusiasm, my half drunken careening conversation, all attention centred upon her? I did manage to be courteous to him when he arrived and hit the road immediately. Probably wise in retrospect but it felt like another surrender at the time. In the morning it solidified. What I had said, what I still mean, was just that. A wild juggernaut of feelings and words. It existed for a span of hours and then was gone. I had no plan, no leverage, nothing real to present if asked the dread question. What now?

Later the answer came to me. That kiss had been the bitter-sweet goodbye so long delayed by animosity and denial and revenge. I purse my lips as I write this and taste again the vodka and cigarettes on her lips, smell again her sweet, smoky breath lingering. Memory swirls, regardless of time, regardless of reality. As sobriety sets in and I struggle again to sleep, to maintain the patina of disregard, I wonder whether I deserve a chance. So much has begun and ended and begun again that it is a wonder that we still share that lightning spark of understanding, that I can still make her laugh so hard she has to leap from her barstool and clutch at her stomach for fear of screaming.

A plan for forgiveness, a plan for redemption and a plan for being all the things I was going to be besides the base thing I was given at birth. This is the voyage that lies before my son and I now. Now we find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

I Long Kept Every

I long kept every
Vital ember, recall, memory
Enthroned under lights.
Even now, knowing inside
Saying something meant
Everything.
Perhaps long enough abiding
Silence’s embrace?

The Boomerang Blues, or Why Comebacks Define Legends.

My heart was rent asunder on Wednesday afternoon. My son tanked at the spelling bee. Now, we are a proud folk, were the English is concerned anyway. I think the pressure may have gotten to him a bit and he blew the first “r” in quarter. Pity. He was devastated, Granny and I were gutted and all he got was a two bar Kit Kat for all that preparation. End of the World? Certainly. Here is the rub though. Taken a great deal more seriously was Thursday’s delivery of the little Shel Silverstein gem “If I Was One Inch Tall” at the annual speech festival. Can you feel the pressure? I know I could, even from several kilometres away, hard at work. Apparently the tanking at the bee got the man’s Irish up and he nailed it, Ali style. Gold Double plus they call it. Fighting spirit is what I call it.

Which brings me neatly to the blues part. I am an admitted Facebook user. Let’s get that little admission out of the way. Seems you see that my ex-girlfriend, besides protestations to the contrary has decided to not be my friend on the aforementioned service anymore. Funny how they don’t notify of that.

“Dear Bruce, you are a loser. Your friend doesnt want to be your friend anymore. Wanker!”

Which brings me less neatly around to wondering if we made FB friends again after I unfriended her when we broke up in the first place. Having an imperfect memory is a great hurdle in life. My dreams and my reality have been blurring again. This may go a great distance in explaining why I’m single.

I’m going to stick to my story though.

I wrote this today because I had a dream about a friend.

http://shrikemedia.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/i-long-kept-every/

Liner Notes from The Land of Love

My recent misadventures in the land of love have taught me a thing or two. One, if you have even the smallest of misgivings early on, beware. These little things are breeders and amplifiers. It’s better to be obsessed and crazy than to have a Volvo driving heart. Two, if that person’s name slips over your tongue like a warm cognac, things are looking good. Three, that the process we know as falling in love with someone has a great deal to do with falling in love with one’s self, the thing the other person is buying into. Perhaps, of course, that’s just me convincing myself. Four, the sex shall be described in glowing terms of at least paragraph length with an amateurish overuse of the adjectives. Oh yes.

So, with the long-term ex girlfriend now a thing of the past, even on Facebook, it seems time to cast the glance around again, recent misadventures notwithstanding. Perhaps the little trip left me nostaligic for the good old days, somewhere between StudentGirl and ForeignAffairGirl. Those were the salad days, friends. The heart was an active participant, things were rosy in the creativity department and other than the invariable heart rendings, it was intense.

In the meantime, attempts to continue the reality show/carnivorous couch story are failing on a daily basis. Something about the clash between reality and the ridiculous is not meshing.

I’ll Take A Look

I’m no kind of expert, but let’s examine you.
I know what to look for if you know what to hide.
Unburnt effigy and empty grave,
Keep scratching at that scarred skin.
The dusty bars of the high trapeze
Silently await the agilities of sin.

But perhaps it is best to stave off explanation
Of ideas brought ashore under cross examination.
And say my expertise is perverted by needs
As my afternoons are by sunsets.

some new fears

The casual observer would have noticed nothing more than the fact that Jan had left the garage door open, again. This was a regular occurrence in the neighborhood, especially on a Friday night. The presence of Jan’s triplets made it a somewhat unimportant point though.. Jan was the owner of the biggest and meanest brotherhood of Rottweilers in Mooivlei. Jan also ran a workshop out of the three garages his father had built in the backyard during more politically prosperous times. The more gifted observer might have noticed that none of the dogs were visible in the yard,not even Baas. Baas had a body count of eight, including three pavement specials, a Ridgeback, two Maltese a very surprised Egyptian goose and the seldom mentioned black man that had clambered the back fence in the winter of ’99.

Baas had the habit of lying in a state of drooling torpor behind the slabbed cement wall that bore the painted legend “Jan’s Japtrap Repairs, All Makes of Vehicles.” It was a cunning spot, shady during the scorching Highveld afternoons with a good view down Pierneef Street. It was from this direction that the best opportunities for living out his greatest joys came. This joy was gained by leaping forth from his shady redoubt and scaring the life out of passing pedestrians. He would throw his massive bulk up against the rusty gate and roar defiance at anyone that ventured close enough.

This evening though, the streetlights were of little use to Baas’ intended victims. This was since the previous weekend when Ollie Manuel had driven his Hardbody up the street pole on the corner. Had they been working, our gifted observer would only have noticed that that not only were the dogs absent but that there were no unfinished cars littering the backyard, no smell of braai smoke and a deeply curious lack of C&W hits being blared out to a back-beat.

The extremely curious and intrepid observer would have suspected something seriously amiss. That person would also have noticed that the gate was unlocked and would have entered, to make sure nothing terrible had occurred. Let us please assume that such a person, unafraid of Baas and sufficiently concerned for their fellow man exists in South Africa. He would traverse the yard and notice that Jan’s workshop stood in its usual tidy state. Jacks, spanners and those things with wheels on you lie on to slide under a car all in their places. The spanners and grease guns, welders and helmets and long handled tools of suspect use were all neatly arrayed for Monday’s toils. The small gate between the garage building and the house itself stood slightly ajar and creaked in the evening breeze. Our observer, being gifted, would have smelt the beginnings of a thunderstorm and would hasten his steps down the narrow alley between the buildings, not wanting to get caught in the inevitable sumer downpour. The end of the patchy grass and cement circle path was only faintly illuminated by the string of party lights that hung from the lapa beside the pool.

Our observer would have noticed the smell right about then. Three bull Rottweilers represent a great deal of dead stuff and the mere sight of them, once so feared and now so nothing all puts our observer in an anxious mood. He thinks of heading back for the gate and making for home. He considers calling the Police. Quickly, his nature gets the better of his fear and he turns left, toward the patio and calls out into the gloom. ‘Hello?’ He listens to his hesitant voice bounce around the walls, house and garden, perhaps even the surface of swimming pool. It is very quiet tonight. He runs a hand up the the frame of the sliding door and inside along the wall, feeling for the light switch. He finds it, flips it, taking a second to let his eyes grow accustomed to the glare. His bile rises in the same instant, he turns, hitting the sliding door hard on his way outside, stumbling, falling to his knees, his mind reeling. He pukes suddenly and violently, the bright acrid colors of his London Pie dinner burning through his throat and sinuses and into the dark spaces behind his eyes. After a million years, his breathing returns to something resembling frantic and he half drools, half spits onto the paving beside the pool. He clamber stumbles to his feet and returns to the patio door, to find a telephone, to call someone, to do something.

Now let us assume that no such man exists in Mooivlei, nay, in the entire Nation. If that were the case, poor Jan’s family murder and suicide would have been just another tragedy on the day that Nelson Mandela died.

There is a dream that I know, but it may not be mine. I decline to attach ownership to dreams, since they seem to come and go with remarkable independence. This one just happens to star me this time. Anyway, I am outside an interchangeable and unnamed acquaintance’s flat, very high up in a crummy Sunnyside block. I want to die, but I can’t decide whether to aim for the hoary thorn tree or to leave a very messy dent in the reason for my suicide’s already beat up little hatchback. So I don’t jump.

The reason this dream comes to mind is that I suffer from a terminal form of writer’s block that I have decided to christen “The Gap”. We don’t have Gap stores in South Africa, so I still feel pretty trendy about it. It means that although I can write, technically, I feel like I have nothing worth reading. Too many pointless hours have wiggled by seductively without so much as a pick up line coming to mind.

So, like in the dream, I am caught between making something beautiful but ultimately meaningless and something ugly and obvious but punchy. So I don’t jump. Again.

All this came to a conclusion one night when I stumbled home plastered and decided to write something if it killed me. That’s how Autumn Hours got started and why I needed to tell you this story. Despite all the procrastination and doubt, there was middle ground between the beautiful thorn tree crucifixion and the vengeful bonnet bender. It was right there in front of me all along. I sat there, trying desperately not to pour a drink and thought about all the ornate ways I could say the ugly things that needed to be said. So I just did.

Hate, Cubed

When you figure out why I hate you
You’ll see the depths of my vengeance.
The lengths that I would go to, the
Hate that breathes in me is endless.

I hope they baste you occasionally,
While you’re burning in hell.
I hope you find happiness eventually
And I hope there’s nobody to tell.

I hope you get your heart crushed
At the merest whim, at every turn.
I hope your hopes are just smashed
Like mine, like mine, like mine, burn.

When you figure out why I hate you
You’ll be suddenly and forever afraid.
The memories will come rushing in,
When you reckon the price I have paid.

I hope you know, I’m under your skin,
You cannot cut your own heart out, yet.
I hope you see me drag her down, kicking
And hear her ecstatic screaming best.

I hope you humour you, occasionally
When you run out of lies to tell.
I hope you will believe, perpetually
That hate like mine is yours to sell.

When you figure out why I hate you
You’ll be amazed at the simplicity.
Truth will utterly destroy, consume you,
Release me from this honest inanity.