For an early day’s mining, I got so sloshed I could not spell Amuz backwards, the whirl of lights and neon sign benignly cooling in the spheres of my eyes. Wine came pouring, bottles marking a social territory… us feeling like runaway fires in some pristine pastures of nude souls. It was all well still this dawn when I had to plunge my thoughts towards departures. I had unburdened myself to The Common ear the evening before, an ear that held supplication with my soul… I talked about my pain, my faults and flaws, the Dionysian delicacy brewing truth in my belly. I slept peacefully, strangely, having torn my eye-sack and bosom’s privities for the glare of hurt. My sexual apparatus lunged with virile force at the zipper, and I knew the addict to copulation was looming and desire had un-clamped the stale sense of loss. But having to reach the thoroughfare in the earlier hours of the day, this notion fills me with a strange vacillating rage. Not that I am becoming exhausted by roads devouring my feet’s histories… but because, I have no place to stay and it’s becoming veracity beyond complaint.
I have become a wastrel, on the road to nowhere - succulent petals of sweat grazing my brows with piercing crystals. I reach Noord under a stupor and daze of Johannesburg’s unrepentant belly, under the common tutelage of demons abound the abodes of the homeless, feeling turpitude splayed in my chest pages – the city’s chilly heart pumping, filling me up, clouds stilted in the un-nature of my past passions… eye bleeding morgue tongues. I recall again why the run… the termagant who coined the demise I find myself handling and singing. The place is a mess of commuters and I sigh…On my first attempt to board a Taxi to Pretoria, the conductors demand green and red cards from passengers (a cacophony of perfumes and scents of endearment transuding from every female armpit)and I soon discover that things do really change.
Upon my unannounced arrival, I chase the sunny streets of a town going down a drain… infantile juveniles bursting from residence windows… wheezing calm calls to passerby tourists like myself. I decide to lounge an hour at a local pub beating African pulses with sounds of shrilling guitars and un-tuned keyboards… the clamor of Congolese sound merging with other brute noises of a rhythmic street. I meet Shaun in this clique of the infamous; second his brother who had been jailed for four years. It has truly been long since I had seen this city. I embrace the souls plundered by the toils of tar, and they call me a saint. I am offered a beer and concur, and the night begins with its hues, eye-bound and the bile innards giving way to creeks of relaxation. I loved too many… so does love bestowed me in the caves of another anomalous terrain of my adventures.
Later outside a barred doorway, I wait for a response from a buzzer device installed at most of the properties in this enclave. I meet a prostitute, I guess, wetted black hair streaming upon prim cheeks. She looks roused by an early shower after a glorious bed filled with coinage… and recall that here the highs are without limits. My brother is nowhere to be found. He’s gone home to a sickly daughter and mother. I sympathize, and watch the friends in whose care he left me with unblinking concern for the turmoil of their trials. The Eskimo Child speaks of good hours of days gone by, younglings shagged by muscle maniacs fisting penises like hell’s door knobs… and I believe there is a glitch. He blesses my visit with a charge towards the queer girls and men in automotive crazes, cars and lulling machines of their pleasures… on wide streets made for donkey-cart turns. The Arcadian prostitute hives are brimming with teasers and made women, their sane ways coaxing warmth from pockets of guardian men… the sugar daddy types of our cosmopolitan age. Watched wenches with sorry eyes of nonchalance… and I asked why am I missing the game?
Pedi accents are un-nerving at first: “My Bra, ga di’ntshe bana”, he clamors out at some sanctuary and hidden-out furnace of revelers. And while my disabled palate kept sticking to my tongue; and only for so long I could undertake chatter… inebriation calling me further to the par of my brains brim. We arrive at Mallet, a complex downtrodden my mere utility. The haven for the studious kind, men at colleges of their future toils. I love the girls here, nubile and dream eyed… and how the ploys were mounting abound their voluptuous booties… and soon a gang of cops throng the place - in seconds; to investigate suspicion of illegal activities… the place looking horded by the uniformed officer brains… their operation Vula Isandla being a kind of philanthropy they undertake… and say that Pretoria is a nightmare. Ok, we decide we have to vacate ground-zero and we return to the flat, and all that is left is to read are the quotations My Brother has jotted across his walls like stale pictures of frozen brains.
The cautioning epithets:
‘Whatever it is you are feeling is a perfect reflection of what is in the process…’
‘All that we are is the result of what we have thought…’
‘You create your own universe as you go along…’
‘The universe will correspond to the nature of your song…’
‘Most people offer the majority of their response to what they are observing…’
And I will sleep in the reverie that all that art is what ought to be… while Nommo wails other rudiments of a fractured heart…
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