Motampane Molekwa
The happy times
Now for the happy times,
as the shacks are burning
behind our backs.
Shots are mixed into our
jubilation.
Last season was the season of sadness,
madness, the season of despondency,
in our township nobody who did not cry
buckets of tears, except for the very young
innocent babies, who laughed at the guns.
Now for the happy times
this rebirth, this practical castle
in cloud cuckoo land
where the ones with the bellies
and the benzies
are talking and talking and talking
about the happy times.
My bicycle has acquired wheels
and is driving through the streets
all on its own
carrying a standard eight pupil,
and my sister is beheading the Port Jacksons.
It is the uitlanders, those tsotsis,
she is quite xenophobic these days.
But now for the happy times
when we will be all one
and the vultures will eat our children
off the roadside.
It is hard here,
and I need lots of money,
lots of shirts and new shoes
but that is nothing, let us talk
about the cellphone and the microwave.
Being without a bicycle I think
I will need to acquire a car
what are guns for and why did we learn
how to pull the trigger?
Now for the really happy times
with new machines in the kitchen
and travels to Britain or the USA,
I need a double garage, for my four-by-four
a new nose and a girl every night,
some cane spirit, perhaps a minister's chair
and his salary, not to talk about the stock exchange.
Today I received a letter
met an acquaintance who spoke to me
saw a car burning in the next street
in our new-won freedom
which sprawled bone and flesh on the dirt roads.
Nothing is nothing is nothing.
That's what we need to remember, so
better to be a good-for-nothing
than a have-nothing.
That is how we enter the really happy times
of our continental rebirth
depending on the wind and el nino
and how well we have been able to sleep
last night. Because dreams can be exhausting.
You see the streets full of dead people
and ask yourself where they came from.
Motampane Molekwa
PEACE-PISS
Noisy birds roam the country side
black and white crows
and in the city centre in the big house
they deny that I exist
while the war-lords in my back-yards
demand that I be dragged from the city
and hanged from my heels
with a wide gash
in my stomach
they play dice
on the street
to decide who can keep my shoes
while the buffalo roams the neighbourhood
goring innocent schoolgirls
Crossroads you scare me
Philippi makes me walk in fear
I don't carry a gun
which these days is
an unpardonable recklessness
so I am barred from my home while
the rain-bird calls from the reeds
of the vleis on the sand flats
mourning the death of the python
Motampane Molekwa
OH LOVELY DARKNESS OF MY DREAMS
for Joyful M.
for some time now
I have these horrible dreams
my cousins are all around me
kissing me on the mouth
and on the arse
with no kindness or humility
what is worse
they shove their guns
into all my body orifices
and threaten to pull the trigger
that wakens me everytime
rather rudely
and my soul is in tatters
no more thinking for today
and I don't know about tomorrow
or whether anything will have meaning
ever again
under this very limited sky
above my flat's window
so I sing a song of six cents
having lost all faith in the Rand
and the eternal exchange rate
I carry my dick
viagra-stiff
ahead of me
like some politicians their virility
even down and outs like me
have their price
and I can imagine
another way of living
than this whoring
shitty
baptism by fire and petrol
Motampane Molekwa
BURNING
sunwind
for the last week
fire on every mountain
around the city
trees in flame
ashes
blowing across the bay
Motampane Molekwa
POST-
A friend of mine
told me
there are 100.000 poets
in the US alone
I will be lucky
if I get a footnote
in the literary history
of South Africa
in the 21st century
Abner Nyamende
Jameson's stairs upheld their proud possession
as they always do
a robust body of men and women
yet today without language without words
we challenged the perfection of a painter's dream
amazing what words have done to us
a bunch of confused talking tongues
as we cut and slash
razor sharp voices rising
to mix with honeyed voices half-crying lov...
peace must be an enemy of the human voice
for away it goes when tongues are lashing hard
somewhere among the cement forms
a pigeon was lamenting mournfully
Winston Powell
FOAM
Time and space are curses
sleeping in my brain
caught in loose-limbed verses
scimitared by pain.
Foam and whistling stories
only know one space:
do forget the loeries
and the lotus in this maze.
What has happened to creation
and to South Sea beatitude?
Drowning in our slime inflation
I forget my upright attitude.
Lumbering succession
tragic evermore
let us end this session
exit through the door.
Winston Powell
GRAMMAR
English is
a foreign language
which nobody ever spoke
it only speaks itself
English grammar is a machine
which throws out millions of sentences
every second
into the mumbling of communication
The tools of reproduction
have no other function
they produce human beings to ensure
the survival of the fittest language
its screams and its stifled whispering
Even when all the people have disappeared
the loud speakers of English
the grammar remains
It is a machine which speaks
a language which nobody ever spoke
an entirely foreign language
Winston Powell
RED SPRINGTIME
there is not a single leave
on this red hot poker tree
when the purple-crested loerie
alights on the branch
and screeches like a banshee
then every branch shakes
and erupts in red feathers.
Roy Robins
Places where I write
I write in different places
In a bathroom once, hot against the dust-slick tiles
Feeling like a junkie, shooting up with the sharp head
of my pen; a secret kind of longing, like incest, or something.
We all have our first times - scribbling
away in the backseat of a car, or after work, in a train,
darkly considering the bodies of strangers
I know stranger passions; writing in a library,
my poems folding and closing like books of
their own
In the night - always - forgetting what it is to write
Then learning, slowly, one word at a time.
Roy Robins
My imaginary children
I am looking for my children
Are they hidden in these pictures?
Are they all named after doctors?
Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor
Do they have the dark orange skin
of their mothers?
Do they have second-hand fathers?
Garage mechanics, science majors?
Do they live in a house like mine.
Or in town. Or in a caravan.
Or on streetcorners, noses running
half-bare feet out from under:
Give us some money, we have no father.
Are they buttoned-up, like call girls on pipe-dreams.
Are they holding cards they did not write:
Our father writes letters, sometimes
How many are there, these imaginary
children,
with their orange skin and open mouths?
They get this from their father:
My imagination - an exquisite disorder.
Catharina Scheepers
My bru Peter Kantey once wrote a continuous poem (now lost)
on a huge roll
of bus ticket (he was a part-time bus conductor at the time -
like Albert
Finney in "A Man of No Importance".
Mike Kantey
so the brother wrote a poem on a ticket-reel in a spiral going on
and on
from a station to a station to the busdepot, noting every body
that gets on;
then he lost it, it just left him, it just slipped away, quietly
and keen to
be alone... the poem perform an act, a most poetic deed - by
getting lost,
declining to be known
(of so iets, only playing!)
Chantal Stewart
WORKING DAY
First the tie comes off
Then the shoes.
Slowly sinking into the chair
You step outside the day
And unwrap your life.
Chantal Stewart
Karen van den Bergh
Amok
Africa on my brain
running amok
through the streets of Wynberg
my soft brain
this sun
naked of any meaning.
I join a procession
of bergies
we empty
the bottles.
One of these whores
strokes the legs
of her wooden chair
until it gets an erection.
Africa on my brain
I collapse in front of Dion's
My nose bleeding.
The doctor is looking
into my eyes
as if he wants to make love.
He takes the cigarette out of my mouth
and orders me to say: "Aah!"
Aah!
Karen van den Bergh
A dead man
A dead mean
who was old enough
to be dead quietly
with a nose
which wants to be right
every time
a dead man lies here
between the candles
there he lies
on the shroud
and has a fat belly
this guy
who is dead now
and they carry him
along Main Street
so that all can see him
and I see him too
he is beautifully dead
Karen van den Bergh
remembering my missus
i live in my body
milk and sweat in my nose
i know, how whores smell
in the morning
and madonnas
when awakening
to the tides of their blood
my brain is poaching
other peoples’ stories
i know
my missus thinks,
she has been fertilized
by his seed
as it entered soundlessly
into her womb
the night before
but one day
the blond nape
of a white missus
lies on pillows of dark blood
her skull smells
of past stupidity
the sun rages in my hair
as i drill two toes of my dirty left foot
into the ear of her unlikely story
where she lies
and sleeps on the edges
of happiness and first love
Karen van den Bergh
Telephone
Here you are
with your fucking white face
I look after you
and I clean you every day
and you shine and twinkle
right in the centre of the room
I have placed you
on top of my writing desk
and I pay the dues
every month
so that you are not deprived
of anything
and you
with your fucking white face
what do you do
you white sphinx
you have been silent now
for years and years
Leandre' Warren
JOY
I wonder what
lies,
behind your beautiful eyes
eyes seemingly untouched by tears
perhaps these dried out over the years
I peer further past,
into the very last,
and gaze into a future.
This future...
our future,
A future as of yet undecided,
minutes fom now...
days weeks years..
What will it hold for us? I see us enjoying,
looking into each others eyes,
It's a joy...
having someone's shoulder to depend on,
knowing.....
the simple joy of a kiss thats true...
the satisfaction of knowing....
you have someone to share,
lifes agonies and joy with.
Leandre' Warren
Brick by Brick
I add brick to brick
the wall goes
higher and higher
My heart gets buried
deep within my soul
Thats what happens
to unimportant things
I look in the mirror
And see myself
I see a person
that I hardly know
and I do not like this person
This person is a stranger
The person I do not like.
I was not always like this
I used to be soft and warm
I used to enjoy life
Not just pretend to
I used to be able to love
All i have now is my dreams of love
Hopes and possibilities.
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