Dead Letter

It’s in the scintillating sizzle from the grease on the griddle

And some slurps of guinness from a glass

And the sleepy snore of the local bully bore

As he slumbers soundly on the green grown grass

That the grimy glum grey of a groundhog day

With its futile fears forms a fading farce

As pungent pork chops flame fat on the fire

                        I sigh so softly, and pale peace comes to pass

The Elephant's Eye

Right under the Elephant’s Eye

Where ethics have gone all awry

Let's down some hops beer

To surround of Bronx cheer

As we pick on our next fall guy

On Fridays we set up a braai

Now who’s it this week that we'll fry?

The cent of seduction

The wreak of corruption

All rapt in a neat little lie

Aromatics

I savour that old money smell, delicately perfumed with Mum.  Aromatics by Clinique.  It is distinct and in a class of its own.  Just like Mum's handbag.  As a child I teased at the clasp, until it released an apothecary of rich and wondrous aromas, textures, colours and toys.  I'd reach for a penny, and as I raised it from it's satin bed, dusty with face powder, and glossed with a smatter of eloping lipstick, I would smell that perfect smell, laced with her smile, her scold, her far-away look and her dreams.  She'd reach for the penny in my hand, look into the distance, and assure me that money could not buy dreams.  But smells can.  When I raise that perfume to glisten my wrist, she's with me again.  I smell her smell, I see her smile, I dream her dreams, and I know, that as she was then, and is now, she'll always be with me.

The Lucky Bean Tree

It's October now.  I stand beneath your spacious wide-spread foliation, generously bedecked with barbs of flaming flowers.  Although sparse, your compound light-green leaf spades frame the glory of your saffron fire spikes.  On each spike there are colonies of elongated lozenges, cusped together to form an arrowhead.  Nestled cosily within each lozenge clings your seed, those coral-red beans that by December will lie in gay profusion at your feet. 

It is perhaps synchronicity that your lucky beans fall to the ground in late December.  We, as humans, celebrating Christmas and holidaying in the hot lazy summer under a glowing African sun, collect them eagerly, and set them into our barbola and into our dreams. 

We used to call you a Kafferboom.  I wonder what we call you now?

Is it because I wear a locket with one of your seeds cosily nestling within its heart that I vision Southern Africa, burgeoning with health, wealth and equality for all?  I see in my minds eye neat warm homes with fresh running water and indoor sanitation.  In the gardens, young children play safely whilst mothers cook wholesome meals in eclectic, electric kitchens.  These sturdy, watertight dwellings replace the squatter camps and shanty towns, which cling tentatively to the sides of railway lines and electrified fences.  There are no porta-loos with doors hanging open, flies buzzing densely, disease lingering in their menacing presence.  There are no long walks to outside taps to collect fresh water to drink, to bathe and to cook.  There are no rapists, flashers and murderers lurking to prey on the young and the old.

It is as I caress the heart of the locket in which your seed nestles, and I witness your limbs binding earth and heaven against the backdrop of a dawning sun, that possibility permeates the merge of heaven with earth, and earth with heaven.

Trog Monster

He waits in the gloomy corners of my room, as ethereal as a whisper, were there one.   His hunched back curls his horny head into every nook and cranny of every room.  His knobbly fingers slime a slippery trail around every doorway. 

When I wander in the garden, he hovers in the hungry holes of the leaves of plants, left as gifts by voracious worms, and licks lasciviously at the drooping heads of dying flowers, enveloping every hue.

When I do go out, which is not often, he lurks for me in the car, lying sleepily in the back seat.  His voice, then, is a sigh, as silent as an unspoken word.

He breeds on himself, feeding hungrily on hollows, groaning ghoulishly:  waiting, always waiting, for some small vestige of myself to sprout from some minute wraith of hope.   Smiling his sinister smile, he plucks that fragile sprout with flailing roots, squashes the tiny life form in his gnarly teeth, suckling from its tenderness.

But most of all, his rheumy eyes penetrate the deepest recesses of my heart and mind, claiming every thought, every idea, every action.

And so he grows, ever larger, over looming, ever predatory.

‘Is this it, then, God?  Is this my lover who comes to me in the dark of night, and teases toothlessly at the tears that damp my cheek?’  Must I learn to embrace him?, I whisper as the Trog Monster claims me.  The arrhythmia of my aching soul falls exhausted into the apnea of sleep, lest I breathe him in.