Spogo and Tleketleke

On this dark and moonless night, I sit with friends talking about Spogo and Tleketleke, two mundane drugs with sinisterly diabolical after-effects that have gained precarious notoriety among vagabonds of Kokosi.

They say cheap as this pill is, Spogo can knock you out for well over 48 hours, that is after a trip that leaves mouths drooping sooty saliva and brown mucus.

You aught keep an empty bucket nearby for constant deposits of piss, spit and drool, because one’s dreamy motor-reflexes tend to be sedated and uncontrollable, leaving fluids drib drab out like urine coagulated with stale sperm.

Faint heart beats, an excruciating hunger from a stomach that does not allow food, or maybe only bites of soggy potato chips bought with ten cent coins.

And avoid water by any means they say, even though dehydration would be taking its toll, because it will biliously catalyze chemical reactions on your chaffed tripe.

This concoction is disastrously infamous for its physio-transformative traits, like skin color changes which render habitual users coal black and skeletal, protruding eyes and bulging joints, a forty year old man looking like a kwashiorkor sufferer.

Most are stone-cold killers of this cursed place, since after the blackout, a brutal resurgence of wakefulness deepens the impact of withdrawals.

They would prowl the streets, buzzing for a fix and blood with which their sanity is purchased.

Undeniably, a majority of users are teens, aimlessly initiated into a virile life of prison terms and nightmares inflicted by wailing souls of those killed in the line of duty.

Tleketleke on the other hand, though malicious as Spogo, is characterized by contrasting euphoric dispositions for those who inhale its purplish smoke.

Numbness assails one from the first dozy sniff of this sordid air coiling from tin foils burned with ever grumpy lighters, and then soon after, most would opt for sleep, peaceful and stupefied.

But when you hear recitals of horrid dreams they find themselves incapacitated to awake from, one knows that this drug creates a perfect purgatory where comatose participants feel sour razor pains without willing their bodies to wretch out of the mire.

In a township surrounded by eleven mines and incredible poverty and desolation, no dream should be peaceful, I guess.

So, most dream of death, others of suicides and disgusting overdoses, all these experiments undertaken unrepentantly on these eternal stone roads of life’s perilous terrain.

Not all are murderers of course. Some are herd boys who live with cattle in ramshackle kraals on the outskirts of this bestial township, ones who are mid-men to calves during their staggering first steps.

Others opt to take long walks to unknowable destinations, pounding heads drenched in dog piss and vomit.

One is said to have walked all the way to Losberg mountain; that cursed scab on the edge of a meteor crater near Vredefort and saw unicorns and large snakes while bathing in a pond.

He is said to have returned convinced that this mountain was among the first stations of terra-formation by whatever crashed.

He believed there were still creatures living in and on the mountain, some unseen and others seen but disbelieved.

Fleeting imaginings of fragments of extraterrestrial rocks, micro-organisms, and organic matter that still linger in caves unopened in those peaks should have an effect on any population.

This place could an experimental site emitting psychically disturing effects on dreamers of a necromantic chapter of this ground’s soul, and many are haunted I still believe.

And all I witness in wonder are these downtrodden people of a rundown place of a million year old death, on a world heritage site dying of crude claims.

The Tleketleke gangs, clad in their ferociously unique fashion trends are a mark of savagery.

Pants cut way above the ankles, outgrown shirts hanging for dear life.

Canopies of woolen hats folded on tips of scarred clean cut scalps; they do look like rascals from a fifties film gone ghetto in the new millennium.

And they do score, known among peddlers as the most trusted customers, young and eager, with blood fresh for the picking.  

This is a generation of discontent, raging at pillars of power and vending machines filled with passing aspirations of their concocted lusts, bulldozing libraries with matchstick cannons and plastic machetes, clearing clinics of experimental pharmaceuticals and statistical journals of hordes unwittingly dying.

And it has to be admitted that this vicious cycle of drug binges and death is undoubtedly affecting young women as well, vulnerable descendents of brothel types and victims to rape when in euphoric comas.

A ninety’s brand of shebeen queens, skimpy vixens looking like a cast of soft-porn films, these are defiled children escaping nightly from their newborns.

They gather among loafers and other junk personalities to quench a drought of dreams, even with nightmares lived with morosely in the dark hours of solitude.

Rank smell of sleep in their armpits and odors of wet dreams and cum from forgotten intercourses; they live a story frozen in a loop and with Spogo or Tleketleke by their bedside – all is well in hell.