Untitled Thoughts

Since each day is a New Year’s Day, on this New Year’s Day I find myself quite sickeningly introspective and challenged to forsake my boyish sentiments; those pious admirations of morality and integrity which have thus far been my spiritual ball and chain.

Don’t know why every self I thought I saw in everyone becomes something of a ruse, safe for the evil that won’t vanish into mirrors that I stare into each day.

I still watch my will torn down in sweet flaws and marvel, for the perfect are the most at fault.

I observed with great attention the vanity of my altruism, for I have become a mute witness of the imprudence of lending a hand to fellow men.

The inevitability invisibility my blackness endows me is an indelible anathema that I carry like so many, but another added yoke is of inadequate financial reserves to please material needs of those close to me.

And this insecurity, that is followed by emotional ineptitude and fear of companionship in an age of conspicuous consumerism is ultimately what undoes all efforts at building long lasting relationships not tainted by lust and lies. 

But my question is why do love’s actions always have to be determined by a fulfillment of material lusts often disguised as needs?

And why is security always determined by inexhaustible access to financial means of satisfying those lusts?

Comfort is the quintessential human desire since time immemorial, from paleontological times when our forbearers devised methods of shelter that also served as fortresses for collective protection.

And with the impending depletion of earth’s resources through our pillaging for comfort, the present age of humanity sees us now preparing for departure from a planet that is rapidly becoming uncomfortable for habitation.

Humanity seems incapable of thinking against its own self-interest, and acting there against seems to be a flaw that evolution wants to discard in the quest for creation of individualistic persons designed to serve purposes mandated through trends disguised as norms.

Man cannot concede to discarding his most destructive of technological devices and perilous tendencies for the betterment of an irreparably damaged environment, but seems pent on continuing with his alluring empowerment attained through such devices.

We will not in any way reform our ideological preoccupation with accumulation, which is now precariously signified and embodied in the accumulation of money.

And money has been the most influential object in the dissolution of pure will among many as it continues to dictate desires, aspirations and actual endeavors geared at acquisition of such desires on our soon to be depleted planet.

The abundance of money is often purported to quantify affluent living standards, while the lack thereof is equated to an inability to fend for oneself on a uniquely fair playing field.

Lack of money becomes therefore a form of cowardly laziness that hinders one from acquiring their share of the earth’s ever exploitable reserves.

But I always recall an analogy made by a Tibetan Monk about what he termed Active Laziness, he writes:

‘…there are different species of laziness: Eastern and Western. The Eastern style is like the one practiced to perfection in India. It consists of hanging out all day in the sun, doing nothing, avoiding any kind of work or useful activity, drinking cups of tea, listening to Hindi film music blaring on the radio, and gossiping with friends. Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues. If we look into our lives, we will see clearly how many unimportant tasks; so-called "responsibilities" accumulate to fill them up. One master compares them to "housekeeping in a dream." We tell ourselves we want to spend time on the important things of life, but there never is any time. Even simply to get up in the morning, there is so much to do: open the window, make the bed, take a shower, brush your teeth, feed the dog or cat, do last night's washing up, discover you are out of sugar or coffee, go and buy them, make breakfast—the list is endless. Then there are clothes to sort out, choose, iron, and fold up again. And what about your hair, or your makeup? Helpless, we watch our days fill up with telephone calls and petty projects, with so many responsibilities—or shouldn't we call them "irresponsibilities"?’ (From The Tibetan Book of Living And Dying – Sogyal Rinpoche)

The modern world has derived much of it traditional codes of behavior more specifically from divine injunctions, and today’s irrational search for credible sources of guidance suggest parallels with that addiction to imported religions.

And people only need a slight or occasional encouragement to persist in their religious beliefs in which they are brought up, and more often than not, mental calibers of most people would therefore crash bewildered at finding recourse in personal interaction instead of interventionist miracles.

Averting any progressive loss of faith in any agency external to man himself which man might look towards for determination is another of man’s own retardations.

And the deepening shadows of life’s struggles seldom unite persons with values higher than the immediacy of survival, and this selfish self-preservational rational is what is taking human towards the precipice of oblivion.

While proven less pleasant being the myth of impossibilities that intellect breeds, more often than not, personal stories of human victims always draws man towards superstition’s disingenuous ends, and the uneasiness of superstition does always survive intellect.

Restrictions of civilized life have become profitless and cumbersome, a simplicity in life that by-passes all errors of my rational self is what I need. Not days spent besieged by demands of affluence, where life is the sole origin of a million crimes.

Three Haiku

A price is paid in lives lost

Gone without a whisper

As nothing left where the felon has roamed

***

A rocky storm in the belly of night

Hails distracted dreamers from lost gardens

White as bone laid wilted on life’s fallen foliage

***

Last strides upon these arid streets

Marked by pecuniary remorse

Bear testaments of my muted soul’s final toil

Shapes Of Clouds

At dawn, a fibrous bulb shreds under invisible fingers of rasping drafts leaving an amputated calve of a woman, stilettoed and alone, dissipating from the heel into a sea of crimson and orange.

Scoops of varnished clouds wobble in a bowl like heaps of immaculate foam sliding and being charred black underneath by burning sins of earth’s cruel stares.

Cupped in a blue-grey dome are scatterings of young but hard-boiled walls of dreadfully enslaving clouds, wet as dirty sponges.

Then swoops into this bath of turbulences a cluster shaped like ferocious faces of sand storms, going to join some throng black as tar, drooping menacingly in wait for heat convulsing from ransacked rain forests and raging oceans afar.

Creamy rays slip through mouths of caves, a temperamental glow and godly light whistled through a storm brewing.

Streams then flow as though carved by a blind brush stroking viscous glues suspended, blinking sheets that bellow with deft rumbles marching.

Above aligns symbols of more secret rooms made of arteries of lightning flashes infected with each other’s paranoia, yet bearing promises of a downpour to waste fields ploughed by calves that perished during droughts and famine.

A chanting navel in the sky roaring towards far off lands, heralded by whales swimming in black expanses groaning yet nursing their fading infancy.

Unrestrained by time and never retracing their histories, they morph into an infant’s legs surrounded by sheets of white powder rippling with wind-kissed dunes, a heave of wetness drifting away to give way to phosphorescence.

And as dusk sheds its ochre, gloomy clumps of cotton hover over earth’s dusty eyed children on final rounds of hop scotch, a black and silver chest of a giant is floating with a hole where a heart ought to have been wrenched.

Unfailing slivers of lightning course over crevices and through creases, a wolf suckling random puffs of maps of fluffy lands under a holy moonlight.

The moribund canopy seals over leaky tin roofs and raving dust smothering smoke plumes stealing the color of night, yet at play is a cacophony of sprinting whips of glowing threads snaking through mountains in the sky.

With the sun’s final strut gone without notice of soaked feet running amok muddy pools, heaviness falls on timid thoughts of those lulled by pattering droplets on window panes or wooden boards.

Then there's a gleam that shatters this vast, black dome, the starry host that renews its fictitious luster holding its illusions, oblong, if not mushroom-shaped.

***

Teenagers

Lizards wrestle on hot earth, and chicks wonder through knotholes in stingy fences in search of worms and other delicacies frightened out of wet soils by claps of last night’s thunder.

Stray dogs drag each other by their asses straining genitals at this season of rampant canine orgies, chased by rascals throwing stones and empty tin cans while winding their day with other curious games.

Phekilitye feels a surge of excitement run through him as he glances at a painted sign that denotes his home stretch, trying not to remember just how many dust snorting dogs he saw in peculiar copulative positions.

He however, could not reconcile his disgust at the disconcerting number of tiny poodles hanging from rears of big dogs, paws clawing about in frantic infernal breeding.

He was back to the madness, arriving in time for sunset games and couples’ strolls, and he could not wait to see her after three month.

He hadn’t been in love since his baby’s mother joined the fun brigades led by big spending mine workers four years ago, so the strange tingle in his chest is sweetly crushing his walled in heart, a serenely placid calm seething through his tired body.

After throwing his schoolbag on the single bed in shack he hires in the back yard of Matlokotsi’s RDP house, he slides a rusty steel chair to sit, loosening laces and casting off his muddy boots.

Tomorrow he is turning twenty-three, and all he can imagine as a gift is her presence, her soft gaze that bears hard edges of thoughtful contemplation, a stressed and glum look on a face that forgot its beauty.

She is seventeen, this he recalls as he slips his hand into the satchel he carries to work each day, dragging out a packet of RG’s and box of matches.

Her name escapes his lips as a whisper, smoke rising from his cigarette in a steady stream, filling the entire shack.

And the thought of statutory rape crosses his dozing mind, but is soon cast out my images of her nude body.

Like the rest of the teenagers here, Noverse is quite a self-confessed sex addict, a nymphomaniac well versed in copulative styles and crafty carnal positions.

Phekilitye lays motionless with roasted lungs on his bed in a vain attempt at numbing his erection, contemplating events of the previous night, a nervous twitch coursing through his spine.

Through a plastic covered small window he notices darkness covering the rowdy neighborhood, and he decides to light a candle and prepare some beans and rice for supper, before trotting towards his den of gin and gossip.

A flying cockroach leaps about casting moving shadows on steel walls as the glow of the candle illuminates it, and Phekilitye finds it hard not to find a parable in its feat at conquering light.

The teenagers here, like any annual crop of chance babies reared by grandmothers, like these cockroaches mimicking their personae that respect neither pity nor weakness, rack an absolute sureness that youth is eternal.

They leave neither stone nor wood unmarked with vulgar sex games graffiti and sweet crosses, repressed vixens that have burst their bonds, whose horny urges have exploded into huge tits and pendulous buttocks.

Libidos are released on pavements and back alleys here, and in their sundered child-headed households, yet there is not a trace of anybody's endeavors to find fault with their sensual moves.

Young people are dancing topless and bottomless, and other nuns have thrown off their pious vigil for a heavenly bride, exposed their legs, and danced the ‘kwasakwasa’ up and down church streets as a prank.

With the same inattention to fairly acceptable norms, they walk nights among knives and guns oppressed by a tyranny of false dreams deferred.

At midnight, slogans from taverns roam ghostly streets giving cover to knife wielding loafers looking for entertaining horrors or fantasies.

Pleasures of the flesh are to be played out, discarded and then transcended on bare floors and the frenzy produced dissipating with the mist of soggy cigarettes.

The girls here, spit phlegm like dexterous old pipe smokers with lungs charred by cheap tobacco, and on some evenings they sleep peacefully, their painted claws clasping erect breasts under tattered rags and aging blankets.

Noverse has two children of her own already, a two year old boy and six month old girl all fathered by runaway men.

And that was nothing to scurry away from, Phekilitye tells himself in secret defense of his unfruitful mission of birthing a child before he was thirty.

But he never ceases to remember that steamy night in Tlokotsi’s car, when he felt like a man with his youth restored, her menstrual fountain whose waters rejuvenate the old making him scream like a lawless circus freak.

It was mad sex in a mad township, parched lands reserved for the rebellious - a kind of folk obsessed with all types of euphoric obscenities.

‘I love you’ are three damned words never to be said lightly or rashly, he remembers; but everyone is addicted here and others have something to extol as marvel in these wanton virtues of inebriation and narcotics.

After larding on his vacuum cuisine and feeling belly full of beans and fart, he cannot help but meticulously plan his attire for swag missions on this hump day.

In a town where every day is someone’s payday, white Caterpillar boots, a pair of Bermuda slacks and a baggy Nike t-shirt should make for a perfect wall flower mannequin for drooling gazes of squatter camp sex idols and fashion poachers.

***

He leaves his shack smelling of fruity cologne, stifled by languid stenches of cooling puddles populated with fungi and mosquitoes.

Through menacing streets he waltzes the shadows with a smug attitude of one who knows his bearings in this vile place; he feels protected by the envy others voiced at his in-look.

Perhaps his clothes were not so outrageous by the cool world’s standards, but he felt worth the semblance of affluence whispered to him by trending ghosts of celebrities, and felt certain she would fall for him again.

He soon finds her, in the whirling mess of regulars at Spikiring, her common hideout from her infant’s nagging wails and her grandmother’s incessant prayers welded with spikes of rerun gospel hits.

She always found the nebulous atmosphere of this tavern contagious, leaving one battling with interludes of rage and extreme pleasure.

But the intoxicating flood of resolve that would often bend her knees after a wearied dance, when in reminiscence, she would view her life in fading mirages of forgotten lovers and promises.

And she was with her new lover as anticipated, but Phekilitye was unfazed, feeling glorious under the deflated light from fluorescent bulbs.

Gushing girls with arched lashes were salivating at his rear, and he was winning at a game of jealousy roused by unsatisfied women in insecure men.

Noverse was beginning to notice the funfair around him at the sales booth and dared approach, but her lover had been watching the magnetic pull of money from a distance and opted to intervene by offering her a drink.

Lean men were walking about numbed by booze and smoke, other tilting and wobbling on stacks of crates meant for seats, while gorgeous belly buttons peeked from under tight vests cupping pert nipples of blossoming sex toys.

The night air smelt of stale whisky and menstrual discharges in a stuffy shack sprawling with squalid faces, glum and resigned in the delicious haze of dagga smoke and tobacco.

Scheming ways to make it through to sunrise was always her aim, but tonight, she could feel her eyes sway with heaviness of a haunted woman.

And by some wild chance she finds herself looking into his stare, calm and cunning, and flirting.

He then just stands up from his crate and walks towards her, among hardened eyes of pained youths snatched from mirrors and dreams, among glossy lips smirking.

With lungful of acrid smells of gin and smoke, with a somewhat a rapid prattle of indiscernible words, he screamed into her cold ear: “I LOVE YOU!”

Three Last Borns

Orion wheels through stardust on a windy night tailing reluctant virgins, and a bitch gives birth to a litter at the back of our silent shack filled with snores of children dreaming of large hounds howling menacingly at the slow feet.

Rattling shack-roofs and screeching fences fend stray dogs from a hideout chosen for fresh nuisances on four legs, to be fed and stoned by cherished palms of never-minding caregivers.

And on this night, a man is being raped by two boys at the back of a tavern, clubbed with sticks and beer crates, wounds gushing motley grease and blood backed by heaving breath and dusts of his struggle.

Scanning sordid skies that bore cold witness to his desecration with bleak and worn gazes, he vowed revenge beyond the brutality of prison as the police would only ridicule his castration.

The tale begins with an unwise young man binging until the wee hour of dawn at a cesspool named Crocodile Inn, an infamous splatter of excremental smudge on the tapestry of a serene extension in a turbulent township.

Spending his fortnight’s wages in a stupor of first time worker sugar-rush, swinging about town in search of promiscuous loves of teenagers, he became prey for picking in bloodshot eyes of blanketed men concealing oaken sticks and Okapi blades.

He apparently stared at the wrong girl among the many morose faces dancing in clear view of eyes stripping their half clad thighs looking for nearby shacks to spend the remnants of a stormy night.

His fate was sealed when he decided to leave the mayhem, and without questioning the shadows following his wrangling steps through puddles of muddy water – he was soon spitting turgid blobs waggling in puddles lit by a million lightning strikes.

No covert surveillance was ever necessary for these rookie boys bound to fall short of their saving graces, as they just lunged in attack of a man who was condemned to a night without stars.

Once the beating had reached a frenzy and the victim stiffened and grunting while titters of laughter behind poking sticks rang lowly, Smanga moaned muffled screams that went to the marrow of any humane ribcage.

While he writhed in a pulp of broken bones and mangled sinews, one biy maniacally ripped his trousers down belt buckle and all, and had his sordid rounds on limp buttocks of a man who came to grip shrubs crawling on rusty wires.

Time to peddle excuses for this display of brutal bestiality could not be his concern, as he eventually raised his bruised body from silent mud, with a resolute aim to eternally rein apostolic anathema on this duet of last borns.

Codenamed Skhova, he was first of the sordid offspring bred of initiation clans intoxicated by their taste for human blood, a slight young man, nondescript but as murderous as a serpent that you could cradle for a pet.

Untrusting and arrogant, his small round eyes always on the roundabout, glancing over beer bottles and stuffy ashtrays, he was one who always managed to smuggle any weapon into a place of revelers who wished for no pain but mere muscle strains from dance moves.

A stout and ridiculously short man; potbellied from acid concoction from backyard grannies with recipes for fast acting beverages, lips always dried, painfully cracked with nobody ever daring to stare at them – let alone women.

In their muddled thoughts, akin any crude demeanor of dogs, they are said to have returned to the same tavern to finish last sips of warm beer left untouched even by aloof girlfriends waiting smugly in their shabby bed of rosy death.

A disturbed family was waking up to the moans of their last born son who lost his first money earned as man, a cherished beacon of a fading bloodline wrestling locked braces of poverty.

His secret was to be their own and never be spoken again, as he was to continue life seeing his nemeses waltzing to dreary rhythms of a shameless people paralyzed by disconcerting circumstances.

The name Smanga ripened on his shoulders to be yoke that crucified him in a disgustingly traumatic exhibit, because even though his mother believed the tragedy’s viscid scars, she still was dumbfounded by this brand of cruelty dished unto her womb’s skin.

It was to follow that a very unrelenting sangoma was ruefully consulted by the family, to return the morbid favor to their son’s assailants and those whose blood coursed through their veins.

What followed the avaricious bargain made with a witchdoctor are explicitly wondrous tortures which were to be borne to the grave by the two defilers; faith shattering testaments of the heavy hand of enraged ancestors coupled by an infernal wrath of spellbinders.

***

Privy to this abominable secret was Phonyoka, another derelict vagabond born with an incurable skin condition that left his entire skin seeming covered in flakes resembling dried mud.

Incessantly scratching, sandpaper wearer who spent his school days hiding from mirrors and mocking bullies, he could never make friends, hence his strange camaraderie shared with Skhova. 

Pressed against skin were puss-filled growths the size of marbles, vile even for the most religious hearts; rousing such disgust that it was always decided he would occupy the rear desks at school, and over time growing a habit of loving the backseat of a taxi.

Having spent his childhood mocked and terrorized by others, he grew harboring a simmered vengeance creamed upon his crustily black skin; and it became his resolve to inflict unforgettable wounds on others.

And now incredibly haunted by the ever glowing smile of their victim sometimes seen at tuckshops, taverns and taxi ranks, dribbles of sweat often unashamedly creep down their sour armpits wilting in the heat of castrated rage.

Smanga never went to the police, that they guilefully comprehended; and only the thought of their transgression being wanton gossip among township loafers and former jail-birds was what made their hair stand on end.

Entitlements of their violent natures that sparkled in their eyes were fading with each meeting of these infamous friends, as they were now seldom seen together among habitual binge masters and shebeen guards.

Memory vilified their cruelty and recalling the screams which were loud enough to wake a child intoxicated by cough mixtures, to which no-one woke; those sounds shrieked in their guts as they gulped many their final beers over the following weeks.

The uncomforting bulgy stomach is said to have started growing like a tumor, and Skhova began to be terrified of open spaces, and over a period of nine days he was not seen outside his shack behind his mother’s RDP house.

A faded old coat huddled behind the door bolted with a chain and a lock, the key slipped therein, was the first he set aflame after dousing his property with common household accelerants.

Harnessed against a bed post and more paraffin doused over his person made his attempts at escape futile, and what unimaginable slippery moves that drained strength from a body choking on curtain and mat smoke.

When the fire was finally extinguished in the late hours of yet another day of fierce gales of winds, puss riddled blisters under Phonyoka’s skin were becoming miniature explosives detonated by an unknowable trigger.

A leper and charcoal skeleton, polluted youngsters who refused to accept the inevitable; that a fierce penance was to be paid for their evil, was sanctioned in sorcery.

Blisters became like flames bouncing against Phonyoka’s skull, and he became demented with volcanic migraines which required him to keep his eyes shut tightly with a towel and belt.

And over some weeks, these bilious crowd of sores groping through his scalp left a bumpy terrain of filthy skin strung with flimsy hair strands, his dreams drenched in sweat as he was always tried to disentangle his friend’s corpse from the ruins of the fatal fire.

Being an alcoholic and independent of charity was no shame any longer, and headaches mattered the least when nights were nigh and the tedium of growing shadows relented to giving him cover from prying eyes.

To acknowledge his failures, fragility and catastrophes, he had to drink uncontrollably, and with each day’s tension, fear gripped him and aloneness in any crowd was a safe bet.

And on the seventh week after Skhova’s death, the perversity of chance events had him there at the tavern grappling with small mercies of a passersby, having noticed Smanga throw a kerchief at his feet to wipe his oozing face. 

Eyes misted and narrowed, he sat on the edge of a crate in a dark corner of his favorite place on earth, sipping slowly his only beer as dark purples were smearing the afternoon sky.

Jostled between terror and fantasy, he thought he was imagining the aberration of a man who haunted his waking hours.

But an obstinate puzzle was only sliding into place; his death was riding on the magnificence of time’s fast drift, dejected and sour, a heinous frown cutting its forehead.

Haunted by his mortality, it seemed easier to quicken his own death through drink and infamous drugs; a soul stealing the last snores of sleep in stupor and cold black dreams.

And one night after weeks of storms and growing shrubs when cockroaches were stretching wings in flight to new colonies, he hung himself with copper wires his uncle had stolen from power stations.

Around the eleven mines of Fochville, everyone knew without word having gone around town for many a good soul that depart each day, and his was left not mourned nor cursed, for cursing the dead is anathema for those willing a life.