On Life

Is life reduced to a tidy parable about virtues of hard work, a gospel of tyrannies that will forever spawn every day’s cynical discontents and dissidents?

Or is life a haunting parody, a series of misguiding hurdles leading towards a precipice, an abyss for all ingested aims festering in garbage pails of gluttonous restaurants?

Does it all seem worth the pounding chest, this futile rebellious assault at chance and its measure of man’s value; its maladies disguised as fortunes won?

Is life an inimitable violence against ecologies and psychologies, a mere nomad’s lost trip down lanes marked for death and starvation?

Is life intent on being its own death as proof of having been aimlessly whirling among stars peopling the skies?

What befits this coy joke as a jest in kind for those suffocating us in option-less cycles of waking to pledge their hands for earth’s sacrilegious pillage?

Is it all a discordant symphony of wails and shrieks, muzzled moans of death defying experts of the art of living, during their scouts for game and final plunder?

Does life follow a formula for surviving such an apocalypse in a day, an atomic scandal the next and an avalanche of ill truths about visible lies eaten with caviar?

Could life be a maze for rats filled with syringed laxatives and energizers, invisible tubes inserted into crania of hoards linked to one central panic?

Is not this life but sleep on the bosom of deceit, warmed by child labor from cradle to graves dug for minerals worn by commanders of wealth like badges?

Would life be about livelihoods when venerated desires are sacramental to those deprived and abominable to the privileged?

Could this life be a suicide mission for time travellers lost in a sea of mistakes rewound eternally as new time for new faults with new erasures?

Is this life and endless quest for unanswerable queries unto the divine who lost the incorruptible meaning of life from the onset of all life?

Is life but death’s lists of conquests, a deranged collage of mud and blood in an obscure biology, depicting an endless tale of flickers in a colossal darkness? 

Khahliso Matela