Day Thirteen

What is real to me now? How eternal…


The quintessential anomaly about human existence is that it feels linear even though we know it to be cyclic a phenomenon. The idea of chronometry as it is a manifest interpretation of this anomalous perspective gives rise to the question…. Is this linearity also an element resultant from this linearity we imposed on memory? During this cataclysmic motion through time, we have evolved and thus meaningfully attributed time to what we have collated as memory. What then was this memory complex we had to develop for survival as a species on a harsh and brutal planet? Do all the days matter? Implying, does a human access the vaults of a millennia of memory in a single lifetime? Does the idea of life-time also impose a limit to the access to those vaults? Would immortality mean having unstoppable interface with the divine memory of our evolutionary path? Ok, basically I ask is the memory I am creating an element that would eventually drain into the fountain of the species’ collective unconscious? To be Jungian a little. And when faces are itching with death-trance symptoms…. During the chore of the living… would existence be a dream we all traverse from this evolutionary incarnation called humanoid unto the next and eternal? Do the contents of this life mean a mechanical design for my forth coming resurrection? What is life if not a florid mystery? Am I living or merely alive as eyes of a divine nomad through space-time…the god creature?

Day Eleven

Day Ten - Reality is just a point of view.

Day Nine

Nothing...
No thing...
No Thing... I can't come with you.

Day Eight...

Video Dream

Day Seven

Another raw summer’s day in this harrowing journey. People sweltering like convicts in a blaze that torments heads. Disheartenment and utter despair assailing me, the image of eternity I was born with being spoiled by morbid reflections. What have I become? Embezzled lover and exiguous father… But I am elsewhere now – where memory ends with conversations with the skies. Styes are blistered by constant tears and my bones need a walk. I eventually muster courage to take a walk among slouched drunkards on sidewalks, faces glued to arses and other museum relics of a boding terrain. It was actually the heat that woke me up - a Pretorian commonality I suppose.
I had intended to sit alone in the vacant flat after everyone had gone to work and perhaps finish a script. But I rather opted to list places to visit during my planned excursion, and motley list emerged indeed, from those vaults of memories distant with my past stay in this city.
Option 1
The Gallery
The gallery is situated too close to a brothel; and I wonder if prostitutes do appreciate art. Movements of commoners mingle with mine towards an eminent failure of explorations. Museums are too far apart; with kilometer long blocks to cross from one to another.
Option 2
Second Hand Bookshops – if they haven’t shutdown to make way for salons and internet cafes.

A bout of dementia settles as I realize that I have not written prosody in months… I think, and the twitch is unbearable. Trundle of cars up sloppy alleys, and the intermittent silences charge me with guilty thoughts. Taverns are filled with young lost men, women thronging salons for nail-biting efforts at beautification – whimsical debauchery swimming in their eyes. Pimps lounge along park benches and drug peddlers lie comatose under weird shadows at noon. The reek of marijuana filtered through heated drafts, and it is when I decide the walk was a bad idea and I had to escape the scotching sun. A visit around the block sees me in a company of old friends, further fueling militant debates with some eclectic music blurring though tattered audio speakers. We sit the day to blots on floors, no furnishings necessary here. For now, I hope.

Minor Observation

I discovered that here, a packet of cigarettes is called LAPTOP…
It is rather boring day in the story that could get senile. I sleep in the afternoon, only to be roused late at night by my hosts returning.

Day Six... In Pretoria.

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…