kagablog

Twenty five years went by.
It was still the same music in
the jukebox. Van Morrison. Bob
Marley. John Lee Hooker. The world
begins and ends when you’re a teenager.
All the shit that comes after is just the run
down to the end. Endless decay. The same scene
night after night. Stroh rum. Tequila. Eternally recurring
headaches. Doubles. Tots. Time’s running out. Death’s creeping
in. Have you ever seen the rain? Marina from Russia on her second
night in this hellish bar. The world is closing in. Inch by inch. Death
crawling in. Into the joints. The cracks between the joints. Poetry in the
decay. Dirty poetry. Rotten poetry. Poetry of slime and filth. The world
crawling by. Life retching. Vomit covered streets. Puke sounds from
the cess pits of heaven. You mean so much more to me. Maybe I
fucked it up. Twenty five minutes went by. A life time in a juke
box. My rising sign is in in Libra. Have something to just sip
on. The till doesn’t close. The till doesn’t open. Can I have
another Jagermeister? The music changes. Artists whose
names he doesn’t recognize. Beats from synthetic
wastelands. The eternally recurring now. Always
nowness. Draining the soul. Teenagers grow
old overnight. Even older than their
parents ever were. Older than
death. Formless and unin-
formed. Death sprinting
in now. In a glass of
Jameson’s. Neat.
No ice. Double
it. Double it.
Most of the
time I
want
to
be
a teen-
ager again.
No acne. No
complexes. Just
dancing and being.
No tomorrow. Marina
sips her rum and lemonade.
There is no Southern Comfort.
I’ve got something for your mind,
your body, and your soul. Twenty five
seconds went by. He gulped down his Jamesons.
Neat. No ice. Stumbled into the night. Bracing winter
air. Joburg. His city. His death. His problem was he couldn’t
be bothered to stay sober long enough to pick up women. Instead
of getting them drunk he would stagger out legless. Disgusted with
women. Disgusted with himself. Last night’s diseased hangover barely
ended, tonight’s already on its way. He sat down in the gallery. Noticed
he was dying. Could smell himself. A shield deodorant commercial. To cover
up the stench of decay. Incesticide. His melancholy mood deepened as the
now surfaced again and again, invading his private domain, his solitude.
The now, always new, squeaky clean. In a café on Jan Smuts Avenue.
Traffic bursting past. Edith Piaf imposing European sensibilities on
his beloved Joburg hubbub. Around him at the café tables all
the talk is about property prices, the strength of the rand,
holiday homes at the sea. The Jewish discourse. Another
day ebbs itself into twilight’s ghostly sulking. Then it’s
Melville. The Unplugged. The jukebox luring tired
regulars into the familiar cobweb of rhythm
and vocals. Country-tinged inflections in
the eighties rock. White trash lang-
arming persistently. Memories
are a curse. The now is a
curse. All accursed. And
what of the future?
Curse the future.
The future has
been delayed
indefinitely.
It’s not
Godot
he’s
waiting
for. Waiting.
Waiting. All his
life waiting for destiny
to shake her tail at him.
To catch up with his dreams.
Dreams of freedom. Of a curse-free
existence. He sips on his double Jameson’s.
Catches a glimpse of himself in the fast lane to
inebriation. More of the same. It’s always and only
more of the same. Everything slows down. The night
slows down into death. Death slows down into another Jameson’s.
Thousands of hours of waiting in shabby bars. Waiting for himself to
emerge from the cocoon of himself that he’s taken shelter in. Always
watching the scenes unfold. Never pitching in. Never daring to share in
the splendour of the now. To participate. Bars and drunks. Drunks and bars.
It wasn’t just a foetus that died when we had the abortion, it was the
relationship itself. We killed it. Everything afterwards has been
good manners; a strangled attempt to keep face. I don’t
want to fuck her anymore. Her pussy is a grave site.
I have to close my eyes and fantasize about other,
younger women, in order to get an erection
when she’s lying naked next to me. I feel
so much pain in her pussy my dick
shrivels up. We lie next to each
other for hours. Cuddling.
Cuddling. Like asexual
preteens. Horrified
by our genitals,
that have,
overnight,
become instruments
of murder. We are both
outraged by the cruel potential
that sexuality has exposed itself as
having. A dead baby hangs in our bedroom
like smoke from a once passionately blazing fire.
Our love has been cremated. We are in our ashes.
Unlike other sorrowful passages in our lives, this baby
refuses to transform itself into a poem or a carefully staged
composition. This abortion manifests itself as a block, a chronic
depression. We don’t even know whether it was a girl or a boy. A piece
of mucous-like membrane that was scraped out of her with a vacuum
cleaner, savagely. A few day’s bleeding. A month later the
contraceptive injection. But we’re both still bleeding.
We sinned. We fucked heedlessly; with no regard
or respect for the sanctity of life. A soul was
given material form and we chose to
destroy that matter. We murdered
our baby.