Poems (Cape Town)

For Fathers That Do Not Speak

How time has left its mark on you father.
Your splotched skin tells of truths left untold,
Awakening you in the early morning against your will,
Your skin has taken control of your biological clock
And has left you silencing the very thing which wakes you.
An upbringing of overbearing not-tolds
Leaves you with everything to tell,
But no way to voice it.

Your skin one day will pass
And the rest of you will
Unabidingly follow.
The many things left unsaid will seep from your pores
Into the loamy soil about you
And flowers will burst forth color and delight never before seen
On the very energies which you never released.

And slowly, ever so gradually,
These too will pass
And your stony grave will be inscribed
With the skins of so many things left

Unsaid.

Water Drips, Timely Tolls

Water drips, timely tolls
Bring the weather of a rainy stole
To ask upon my breath
What never speaks
And laughs of loving
Wrap the sheath.

Say not what you think
For it is marked upon your lips, your brow, your very face
And you are upon the brink—
Of a coddled and lasting stink.

Sense

Everything a blur at the moment.

Somehow all, in it senselessness,

Makes sense.

The light turns to obscurity and moons sprout from Aurora’s mouth.

Jackals cry ‘kaw-kaw’ from the branches of the rawboned trees

And I swim through stone in the rugged mountains.

I am free

And what it means to be free

Bursts from my pores in colored fancy.

I glide-paint my rainbows in drag-star fashion

Down the phosphorescent runways

Of these things we call life.

And those that speak of reality

Idly sit by

As the currents of wish-wash babble

Rule their lives

And I long to paddle up

Rolling hills of lubricious sand

To hazard the hope that anything is

Possible.

Pompous

Sir Edny Reed uplifts his nose as he passes Tuesday’s garbage,
A pitiful pile of stubborn alcoholics and druggies,
His wingtip shoes glide over their rotting corpses
And gold glitters in his eyes as he approaches a comfortable eternity.

His position gives him credence to be better than these slobs
And he need not ever pretend they are people.

His Rolls, his wallet, his suit and his Russian-import wife
Will forever cause him to forget that a nose upturned
Is a nose in danger of reaching backwards
Till it smells the shit in the broad-ass behind of its owner.