Small Town Streets

Small Town Streets

Ominous clouds of pedestrian insanity

Hedged about burning heads,

Mind a ruin that was imminent;

All fleeting testaments of civility and instructions

Colliding with other bored intentions at bravery.

Intimate scents of mined earth and leaves,

Gnarled branches of trees dead on their root 

Carrying rags and torn plastic bags; 

And standing drenched by thin streaks of raindrops misting his eyes

The poet calls for his mirror souls to merge with dying light.

***

In these street, incensed perorations are thundering through raging speakers - rapt believers postulating themselves before masked oddities posing as gods’s brokers that spoke of death as currency. 

A girl with tousled hair sits with her palm open, face down in the immensity of the street where other urchins grip luxurious coats of passerby women begging for coins, anxiety glazed in their eyes.

In this suburban camp, churches are founded on fear of death; for them the dead are demons of their most vile memories. 

The streets are narrow cathedrals where faces are cast low in shame and agonies brimming on sweaty brows of enraged maids and madams disappointed by their men.

White-washed balconies of revered dreams stand tall, still erect towards supine skies and inside, fevered prayers led by blasphemers are heard amidst a raucous of shocking music chorused with wails of unfed infants.

In the distance, the muffled rattling of trains on tracks and wheels on tarmac hissing and slithering through the night towards days, past shacks and sleeping herds, in wild spaces where seeds are buried in poisoned dust.

Caught unawares by a strange recognition of how the girl was later found dead and dismembered - dark memories, those guttered by his failures in a diabolical society that respected no life; he finds himself wishing to forget.

And that compulsion to understand her premature death in a mind dishevelled by anguish as his own, was something monumental - distraught recollections of how or why; no reason ceded nor intentions.

Those subtle obstacles appearing when emotions unfurl, such as guilt charging eyes with rage, condemned to dissolution, those unholy urges still draw one nearer to a precipice.  

In forgetting her, perhaps a precipice he would approach with a patient resolve of a man who was once a specimen of modesty, its heaving walls of bones whispering some silly validations unearned; and that way his monsters might feel vindicated to hurt others.

He wonders if in others’ deaths we see our own, and instinctively look away with tears boiling in our eyes yet not for the deceased, but ourselves who will in certainty recline in a posture of resolve without breath or warmth.

***

Restaurants stocked once with displays of ostentatious luxuries 

Spill onto floral avenues bottles and left-overs 

Trampled into tar by vain automobiles.

Discreetly mingling with prostitutes are poets 

And knights of rogue dynasties, 

Some priestly vagabonds that speak gospels of pleasure and hell.

And surely these are dark ages in these sanctuaries

Of thieves that suck blood from impressionable virgins 

Through straws and cathode eyes of butchers of trends.

Surely these are final feasts before a great dying

With costumes of birth dropping from wounded delinquents

When tables turn against lost thoughts and gods unwittingly feeding on bones.

***

For these valued communities enabled by privilege to wrest power from the downtrodden - this arid land is thundering with unheeded rage.

Fortunes usurped and roots unceremoniously grabbed and tossed, are dangling for earth and soot of mud drenched with blood.

The dead are breathing again, surveying taverns and orphanage townships growing vengeful and impatient for repose.

Yet there is no rest for those dead, their war chars fields feeding livestock and man; servitude compensated with blistered skins of emaciated gold diggers.

In this town, a sham of wealthy orders are disobeyed by smiling lunatics, as uneven earth shifts to swallow bandits into spoiled soil.

***

Shabbily curtained windows glint in the winter sun and a pensive melancholy broods over his complexion. With reality fraying his senses; fragrant wit passes through eyes that digested every sight, yet often excitable to tears.

There’s a secret daily thrift behind locked doors and unseen eyes at windows, working at a scatter of gardeners prowling deserted yards and sidewalks. These job-seekers stimulate inquiries from concerned neighbours taught to fear blacks.

And more lessons in human cruelty he observes, from an excluded soul, braving rot and malice directed at housemaids of this small town.

It is in these small town streets that he feels excluded from everything he once knew, even the mundane material scenes colliding onto his mental canvas in a hauntingly perpetual presence of memory like a cruel baptism.

The potholed decay of white architecture handed down reluctantly and grudgingly to hordes of discarded farm-hands, rots underfoot and they in turn become sidewalk chefs of scanty meals and muti dreams for lovelorn wage workers.

Suddenly unnerved, a thought of his mother in the chilled breath of night rattles in him, her bed’s side table of bibles and pills; how she slaved to build temples that housed thankless masters and their dogs.

Tasting smoke from  fried meat-stalls, loiter files of homeless migrants, other inelegant crowds of overall clad garbage collectors celebrating wages on dingy basement strip shows and cheap wines - as he stares at butchered car-wrecks and rusting tractors.

***

Nodding ghosts of apartheid stare down with pigeons perched on broken streetlights and tenaciously cling to bones of shredded affluence ransacked by cults built on adulations from slaves and altered personages. 

Lost masters sweat profusely on seats of bakkies, hurling curses at black trolley-pushers chasing sterile dreams, arthritic grannies bejewelled with golds and pearls limping behind electric crutches towards wall-paper shopping malls for empty errands.

High-walled nurseries for the elderly echo with coughing fits, fumigated lounges decorated with antique nostalgia draped in botanical absurdities and electronics surveilling their approach towards death.

As insolent floods of red blazers swarm the streets with adolescent buzzing and rushing with agility of mice, fast-food laboratories gape to milk their fuss over savoury junk diets.

And drowning in a pool of fatal-errors are many such youths, seeing life through panes of rackety taxis or gleaming SUV’s - drugged to the constant discomforts of degradation and dilapidation abound.

This town, is but an ambivalent vacuum of memories, bearing an apocalyptic air of playful depression disguised in ill-omens and hints of promiscuities - in its trenches magnified corpses of rockfall victims and suicides that plunged from hospital rooftops.

White faced degenerates still parade their tattoos and needle scars around blacked out street, speaking in laughable dialects with drug paddlers who work on credit. 

And as the sun falls behind the earth’s line towards pain healing oblivion, children of this ghost town gather in secret, sacred districts for orgies and near-fatal car-rides.