kagablog

Here in the dark
In this house of language
I build windows
Called poems
In order to look out
And celebrate the trees

Welcome to this
House of Language
If you knock
On the word Door
I will let you in.

Let us drink the
Intoxicating word Wine
Together
Flowing sensually,
as it does,
From the word Muse’s lips.

On the word Beach
I bathe
Sunning myself
In the word Rays
Listening to the word
Waves’ symphony of
Eternal change

In the shiver between
The word Sea and
The word Shore
I saw you

I called upon Thoth and Hermes
To grant me Words to describe
Your eyes and the sun

Both gods warned me:
“Stare and be blinded!”

Am I the Word?
And if so, what’s my name?
The word Question was left
by the word
Unanswered.

the word Passé fell out of fashion
what could I do? it was a party on 120th Street and Amsterdam Avenue
the grad students were feeling good about themselves because they could collectively remember who was currently hip
it had taken them four years to get this far
but the drinks had run out by 10pm
and everyone’s trying too hard to be jocular
on the top of NY city
Presley is dancing with Amy
(to Helen Reddy)
then Alaskan Susan carries me home but her roommate gets in early and I have to walk 89 blocks back to the KY Hotel on 31st Street where
the word Sleep
overcomes me

no more song to sing
mourning wind must fade away
the night has no voice

her memory does not age
it is only to fade away

14 Sep ‘05-01:59

Aah, Sea Point. Maybe it’s just the ho pheromones, or the exhaust
fumes, or the soupy mist of oil from cheap takeaways, or the blinking
lights, relentless through the fishy smog… Maybe it’s the
conglomeration of them all… The whole place reeks of overtiredness.

Know how the Durban beachfront feels at night? All sodium glare and
humid candyfloss and hooting and “rayban” pushers, stumbling over
sprawling elephantiasis limbs; cabbagey piss and rotten elephantiasis
limbs underfoot at every turn, elephantiasis limbs EVERYWHERE?

Or the water slides in Muizenberg? Icecream sticks and rusty fishguts
and cocoabutter thick in your nostrils? Shrivelled bikini grans and
stubbed toes and burnt children scrambling back up, over and over,
getting their money’s worth, with fresh snot to add to the circulated
stream? Kinda like that.

Like a casino, or a circus, or the school parking lot half an hour
before the last night of the end of year play. Just like that. The
cement, the tar etched with residues of action, the erratic paths of
people hopscotching between the pavement’s wet patches of unknown
origin, beat-up cabs snaking through the gutters, cruising for someone
going somewhere, doing something… you never can be certain what.

There’s a interminable vacancy in all the hyperactivity, a loneliness.
A sense that whatever’s done is probably being done mainly to keep up
appearances, because it’s in the script. In bar toilets, in sighing
lifts and entrance lobbies of peeling flats, people wait,
unexpectantly, for something undisclosed… The sour gaggles of Jewish
crones… The fags in the coin-op laundrette… The makwerekwere…
The goosefleshed trannie under the stop sign.

It’s a frustrating place, a titillating place for anyone with even a
pinch of the voyeur in them… You never know if today’s gonna be your
chance to be privy to that something, to overhear the deal… Well,
it’s hardly likely to be above board, is it? You daren’t blink in case
you miss it, yet you virtually never get to see the loops close,
experience the denouement. And your imagination goes crazy.

Oy vey, it’s a schande. Happeningness rubs your nose in it, but, from
a distance, it’s too pungent, too slippery to pry open cleanly… You
know your conjecture’s amusing but empty.

Romanticism breeds covetousness, even of the sordid. So, you’ve read
Burroughs, Bukowski, Genet, Sade. Ballard, Palahniuk, Sartre… Your
own illicit missions never feel as archetypal.

It’s like being hopelessly in love, but not being in 40s Casablanca,
y’know? Like rainbow soap bubbles popping on your tongue… The bath
gets cold before you stop being too distracted by the froth to immerse
yourself fully.

44

The spectacle is a permanent opium war which aims to make people identify goods with commodities and satisfaction with survival that increases according to its own laws. But if consumable survival is something which must always increase, this is because it continues to contain privation. If there is nothing beyond increasing survival, if there is no point where it might stop growing, this is not because it is beyond privation, but because it is enriched privation.

two billion zillion
plus an eighty
forty
two

muses

knocking on my
door
with a mistletoe

your poetry is pure
passionate
physical

every stitch in your paper screams sincere
your ink a mix of sweat, tears, vomit, and blood

trouble is, you’ve been using my blood

THE ENGLISH

England, the English, had a way of incorporating change into the system seemingly seamlessly. In spite of inevitable resistance, obstinance. A tide that could not be held in abeyance. This change seeped into the English psyche long before most of the population were aware that it was already there. Incorporating change was the fabric that made English society so vibrant. The English could take and deal with any sort of criticism. They may not like you for criticising them, but they could deal with it - you were allowed the right to express it. And that royal family! How strange they were! In their youth they were almost good looking. In their old age they were positively ugly. Many of the population hated them vehemently. Yet, the entire nation stood waving and applauding as the queen drove past. Without the Queen what would England be? Just an island? Ampleby could not work out whether the queen was stupid, laughing all the way to the bank, or kept ignorantly genteel, a figure-head giving status to chaos. She, a personification of the many strange contradictions that permeated English life. The rich were very rich! The poor had the dole. On television, there were long and informative programs giving equal attention to completely opposing opinions on every topic imaginable. One was thus kept alert, informed. And in spite of the fact that the education system was such a mess, England still produced the most fascinating top rated leaders in fashion, design, science, art, sport, pop. They must be doing something right.

BREAKDOWN

Within a year, Ampleby had a complete nervous break down. He had been unable to sleep soundly for quite a few weeks. At about midnight, he rose and had a hot bath. His mind could not settle on anything. He was incredibly tense. A violin about to snap. He towelled himself down and lay on the bed. Suddenly he went rigormortic. His limbs, his spine, locked. He was gasping for breath. A fish suddenly out of water. An eternity. Then convulsions. He had visions. He was fighting for his life. A demon. A demon was bearing down on him. He became embroiled in a life and death struggle. A coil within him, within his abdomen, began to get tighter and tighter, congealing, solidifying. His blood. His blood. The demon at the centre, pulling, pulling, dancing in delight, tightening. Winding the clock spring to snapping point. He fought, fought. Dug down deep and resisted. With every fibre that he had. Super human resistance. To loosen. To loosen it. To release it. To uncongeal. The sheets, the bed, were soaking wet.
Frynwyd appeared calm and unperturbed. That ability to glide over authority came to her aid. By the time the doctor arrived in the early hours of the morning it was all over. The doctor said nothing. He gave Ampleby two sleeping tablets. Prescribed Valium. That was it. He slept for two days.

“Frynwyd, Frynwyd, I’m bisexual.”

“I know,” said Frynwyd.

But this was something Frynwyd was not ready for. It was the actual fact that did it. Like when a person with a terminal illness, whom you have been watching die, suddenly dies.
As much as they had had conversations regarding the value of experiencing broader aspects of life, emotionally Frynwyd was out of her depth. As long as sexuality remained buried, under cover, it was containable and thus acceptable. A conspiracy about a lie. Now the lid was off. Frynwyd became suspicious. And she tried, yes she did try. They both tried. But what were they to do? What was he to do? As much as he adored her, as much as he reasoned himself through her, his inner stirrings were stronger than he, her, them. His breakthroughs had created new dictates. He was no longer what he once was. All he wanted to do, all he had to do, was live connected to his life.

Lying next to a woman in the heat of her heat and not fucking her. A sense of cheating life. But what else could he do? How else was he to resist this incessant pull towards her, discover if there was anything more to they, them, their? If they had sex, suddenly all the tension disappeared. The pull subsided. Until the next time. He refused to go from fuck to fuck. The pull that magnetised into sexual intercourse. He could no longer submit to this inevitability. He did not want to wake up at the age of forty five and discover that his life had gone from fuck to fuck. The grounds for a mid-life crisis.