This Carting Life. Rustum Kozain

talk: Che Guevara, the IMF

      how my modernism limits love.

      Now I eat from your plate

      hold its blue to shore up my day

      and rummage for my particulars –

      budget, salary, tax form –

      in a bin filled with plastic,

      ash, mango skin and condoms.

      2.

      My land’s an expanse of rubble

      and slogans, charters, accords.

      Handshakes commit chattering guns

      to obscenity and soap operas.

      Every day, violence kitsches itself

      onto front pages while, caught

      in the sublime, the stars twinkle

      and our minds race to countless edges.

      The radicals drive limousines,

      are driven in them, and host dinners

      to court capital, promising restitution.

      But we’ve seen the sharkskin suit

      and the flashing smile, as we become

      more and yet more, still, a people

      of squatters, building zinc

      and cardboard hopes over the words

      that scratch at our reformed lives:

      heroes bought by your country’s dollars,

      by gold and dumdum; heroes leaving

      our shacks to rickety revolutions.

      3.

      We all stumble on favourite poets,

      by chance come across their books

      scattered in someone’s wake

      on worn carpets, or hung from eyehooks.

      And within a week, we make them our own.

      4.

      I dream in poems,

      small, short quatrains.

      I dream of waking

      and writing them down.

      I wake and lose them

      like leaving and suicide

      like wiping dry

      the blade of the knife.

      5.

      At night, bougainvillaea leap at me.

      Moon waning fast, there’s no colour.

      But I know, by feel and voice, that flower

      slashing through a hoped-for night out

      and caging me between the buck and warp

      of language and the real: how yesterday

      the moon hung, in a word, hard-boiled

      above phone lines taut as an egg-slicer

      6.

      We lose again, dusk purling

      clouds over Table Mountain;

      lose again, though Venus is

      twice brighter than ten years ago.

      Bam bam bam. LKJ’s bass

      pounds anger into the gloom,

      clutches the gut. Martin mulls

      the cannabis, rolls the bone.

      Willie smiles and twitches

      to the reggae. Amanda fires

      tangerine rind

      and Martin lights the joint

      inhales, and lifts his thumbs:

      Okay. But I, I dissolve outwards,

      wander the sky. And wait for you

      to come to my ever-hungry land.

      Reliving

      Winter breaches the vents, pushes

      him back into the bath water:

      a child crawling back to warmth

      still brooding in last night’s bed.

      He thinks of her blood, her hot

      baths to soothe those aches,

      blood thinning in the water.

      Or, under the shower, running

      red down her legs at times,

      other times brown. Or when

      she first shows him in the toilet

      red wisps expanding in pale urine

      and her blood caught like a starfish

      in folds of tissue paper.

      How they teeter the first time

      drunk or resolved,

      or both. And after sex lie and think

      of nothing. Then

      she sits up, reaches between her legs

      to confess her early, unexpected blood.

      And lifts away from the bedding

      to show him the red butterfly:

      her blood spread beneath their weight.

      But there’s no blood now,

      only the thud of calendars.

      Curled in the bath, I wish

      he’d bleed, colour

      this pale, indifferent water.

      This carting life

      We were moving northwards

      We were moving northwards, out

      into a sprawl of black rock

      while other epics lay crumpled.

      Things down south were bad,

      all talking, belching refugees,

      and songs of prowess drawn from wells

      dug from rock. So we lost our grip

      time and again, saw our pleasures

      fade in a cold, northern dawn.

      Our worlds crumbled. Flowers

      shivered in the gaze of reptiles,

      and we pushed on.

      Our clothes clung, our skins taut,

      and the further north we moved,

      the lighter we became.

      The smell of angels and rock,

      dust and aloe, moonlight,

      these were the smells we now knew.

      Free from the questions of our past,

      we could move faster, shaking

      dust into another dawn,

      brushing hats and coats.

      Free from dust, we moved

      always northwards, always,

      our hands down, swinging to a new rhythm,

      our hair flames to gods,

      those who would stay with us.

      In a gully we came upon a scene

      borne through the ages