Khahliso Matela - A Poem

He met himself at a bar,

Seated next to an empty man

Who told his sorrows like truth.

Wine was shaking hands in exchange for his mother’s secrets,

And when he looked back

He was a broken man twisting a guffaw at his own pain.

He found a map in his soggy pocket

Crimson paint – a map for a place to come

Immaculate,

With no remorse nor judgment.

He found himself out of skin

Glaring at a neon-sunset reeking of slum relics -

He was a broken monument

Contemplating electric storms cell-bound,

Cigarette mist tracing the threshold

Toward nipple-black night, as he finally slipped out.

He was worn – leaning over to pick up his crown

After larding on machine-food and stale drink…

The exit looking like a crowded navel,

Repose gravely yawning at a lost god’s bleeding asshole.

Anti-christ was in the radar – indifferent,

The skies shutting their eyes;

He saw blackness beyond any device

In that self-same vomit of time.

He was flossing dogs at this dying hour

In the bleak flesh portrait he was paddled with.

Electric wrath terminating all he struck his wits upon;

Distance looming between the morning’s eye

And the hungry day’s impieties assailing his tongue-slits…

Whose body was he renting?

Crucified for an omen by death’s sustenance –

In these erogenous terrains of mind’s dusk letting butchers amok

On harnessed gravel-boned youths?

Who was doping on heart-beats’ senilities –

Disharmony flailing hinges rusted, shelled,

Hysterical?

He descended from birth

Putrid yet ripe;

When he looked back – something got torn there,

Somewhere…

The billboards were too loud,

Tumultuous.

He descended through death

Punched holes in his well, and

Death-attacks spewing dust-senses

Blood-struck and crushing.

Canon clamor and rifle-serenades hijacked the bitch routes

Oily stars staring.

From the back of his head – he could hear his mother crying,

Her – looking in his eyes – empty…

Waiting for flesh to retire to soul-carriers lusty for torn flesh.

He was touching himself outside of himself,

The person-cell…

His leash of sweat

Pulsating rage rhythms acidic on his chest plate…

A crystal wail denied resolution beckoned,

As throat squirted razor-tears with a human face.

He met his Black Mary in that cathedral of shame;

He had not sinned before he crucified jesus.

He met himself in 1928,

Dug a space in the road -

A skull circle where he could tame the rains alone.

He cut himself up –

Dipped into a sea full of other phantom predators,

The sea drew back the breath from his humid vehicle…

And something was torn there…

As truth went empty –

Shadows building bond-fires in his tripe.