A Series Of Letters To Poets.

To Lesego Rampolokeng

Bavino, heard you are ailing alone among scholars and excavators of your mind.  Not certain if speech is still pinning murals on chests of many who want hole to breath through. At times one finds windows in other minds, through you’re a billion slovenly sights I have witnessed. At times a mirror with a thousand deformities peering back at me; I still bear anguish at darkest heart that seems to fold into time’s brave brace.

Remember that journey up and down the word-tracks, when you introduced me to Ingoapele Madingoane’s stranded methods of feeling pain of a million, many memories leave my mind embroiled in esoteric conversations with spirits of Mafika Gwala and Sandile Dikeni.

I was a filmmaker then, not certain what I have become now, since those days slithered along muddy trails to meet Vonani Bila, mazes on the foothills of KZN, what urgent circumstances we chanced to render the voices of poet to record.

And finding babMafika Gwala, twitching with excited exasperation at the late youths willing to kneel at his lap.

Tattooed to my brain are contorted lisps of scathing words, those peppered rebukes to a nation stuffed with swine fat, readied for the stake.

Those days are skeletal remains of a distressed nostalgic, faced with another form of travel in the face of uncertain skies.

And what a mad team of explorers of storyland you gathered around your oratory, milking time with humble hands in the company of souls meant to herd memory into future wastelands.

And today, pondering the dystopic, serial misconducts of the mind ensue and an unspeakable dread sledges through my cranium, slow and ominous like shadow figures in a flame lit hut.

Ungovernable times have overstepped the gates of hell, and humanity is boiling in furnaces of its making, leprous and gurgling prayers to absent heavens.

Medical charlatans have devised yet another evil, a world cornered by a slovenly agenda concocted by schizophrenic asylum administrators with sachets of more potent sedatives than religion.

Kgafela’s satirical discourse about the honorable origins of indigenous vulgarity, that guffaw shared among kindred wordsmiths – I stood dazed by lens flairs and bright shards of breaking gems from your minds in a dance.

When you and Makhafula reminisced about Ntate Wally Serote and Ntate Sipho Sepamla, how time folded as though biblical commandment were being rewritten in kasie lingo.

That excursion through poetics of a nation in tatters still haunt us all, those who face the daunting task of un-forgetting. I wonder how many will get off that ride unfazed, because the nauseating climate of a new decade is on a ghost train.

But these ghosts are my reflection blurred by a famine of resistance, silhouettes strung to an uncanny puppeteer pent of trampling civility to barbarity.

Are you awakening again for a final bow with those left in the winds of a literary bazaar? Who would you collapse first among these self-flagellating, peacekeeping proselytes of palatable parables?

Or have we all become our own worst enemy, awaiting an opportune disaster to allow us to eat ourselves by ourselves?

From Khahliso Matela

01/04/2020

Kokosi