Red Moon

 What do you know about rolling in the deep? 

Masked Astronaut

I'm hoping that now that I have unlocked this anger

That has wrapped its serpentine and lithe essence 

Around the fist that is my heart, it's damp and musky lair

With the tail rattling at the very thought of your name 

My tongue has become forked with the tangled lies

Growing from the roof of my mouth, pointy stalactites

Of great lengths vining their way towards a soft tongue

Recoiling into a swallow and a blocked passageway 

Torturing my taste buds with the threat of piercing 

A confession: I have half-truths stuck between my teeth

Making onlookers uncomfortable when I smile  

The two Ivorian incisors as pillars keeping reality shelved

My splitting spitting tongue red with smouldering rage 

A flare of nostrils when my betraying brain airs the carpet

And memories of you rise in the beam of the light 

Suspended brilliantly before remembering their weight

With a thud, they land on the floor of my psychology

Like the elephant in the room felled by a poacher 

Lifeless, on its side, I cover it with the clean rug

Wondering what Exupery's children would draw now

The slackening anger unfurls its fingers on my vitals

And its heat rises painting walls and windows copper red

Bloodshot eyes; as the sleep I've missed goes on a bender

Waterboarding my soul, being questioned but it doesn't talk

I've lain awake keeping the sun from setting on your name

A vigil of love, I still pray for you, and your dreams 

The blood churns and breaches strongholds and progress

All seven steps of grief are rearranged like a Picasso

Square one is a puddle of emotion, a Rorschach inkblot

Losing its edges but retaining its sharpness, a test 

But my emotions have forgotten their names, I fail

In the heterogeneity of melee, the red is freshly dyed 

This is anger's last gasp numbing my arms in pain

Does this anger not yet know who I am? It has failed

Undulating my body within my phone's range of hearing

I fish for the words with my teeth tossing them into a text

Alexa! And my digital companion delivers on its promises

The screen brightens, you always respond to a text with a call

I cough out bloody phlegm on my sheets, sthandwa sam' you say

I sob and the red moon once again adorns the shade of its summer 

The Greatest Love

Nothing exists but you and I/ And if we two be not/ Then God is no more God/ And down must fall the sky

- Angelus Silesius

The demons sought to dispose of your sorry heart

Still being precious, they put it up for auction

Brittle for being broken, it didn't transport well

Sorcerers, the world over, scrambled for the pieces

They knew I would come looking for you

Hearing rustling in the wind of our great love

Relying heavily on the degree of dispersion

As further discouragement to an aggrieved heart

It became the athletic tape holding tendons together

Keeping sternum and spine upright in purpose

Like the rod of Moses in hand, not on the ground

And the voice without words offering direction

The sweat of my brow condensated into clouds

With the downpour, a portent of an unwelcome arrival

Heard my resolute footfall on the stairs of the world

Turned to Vulcan for reinforcement to temper my will

Pieces of him found in glass cases within red rooms

Indecent displays of wealth, conquests and spoils

Ordering the sand in the glass back to the sea

The reflective surface disappeared with its allure

Then there were impenetrable cryptographic safes 

Pythagoras and Aryabhata took back their inventions 

The primes were gone and so were their music

Only sound heard is the click and creaking of the door

One occasion boasted of a three-headed guard dog

Descendant of Fluffy with bone crushing jaws

The music returned in the form of flutes playing

Lulling the dogs to sleep, putting jaws out of service

They speak of a work ethic labouring for a few pennies

This labour of love is my magnum opus in the oeuvre

The work that speaks for itself in itself against all that has

Sought and sometimes succeeded to hurt me in my heaven

Taking on a new name, inaugurated as The Greatest Love

My sermon on the mount, ministering to the hearts of all 

Men by redeeming this one as though it were the only one 

This heart precious beyond estimation broken on a rock

Imbokodo: When the strength and might of a woman 

Parallels the abject humiliation of a good man trying 

I'll stand by you, even in hand-cutting smithereens

Caloused hand not heart, I'll hold you ever so close

Reduced to the grains of dust from whence you came

With drops of water, I'll thicken and substantiate you

Offer you back a rib to refashion yourself out of and a

Loving word cleaning out the desert sands from your ears 

 

When the Lord Restores by Catherine Feeny

Life cannot be repaired, it can only be recreated through symbolic repetition of the cosmogony, for, as we have said, the cosmogony is the paradigmatic model for all creation.

- Mircea Eliade

When the Lord restores the fortunes of Zion

We are like those who dream

Our mouths are filled with laughter

Our tongues with songs of joy

It will be said among the nations

Yah has done great things for us

He has done great things for us

And we are filled with joy

Restore our fortunes Lord

Live streams in the Negev

Those who sow in tears

Will reap with songs of joy

Those who go out weeping

Carrying seeds to sow

Will return, with songs of joy

Carrying sheaths with them

 

The Hero Alive in Me

 Heroism is a word we only use at the graveside

- Mahmoud Darwish

I stare at my body in the mirror looking for signs of heroism 

Muscle tissue filled with water, and glycogen, poverty conquered

But who can say for sure? For tomorrow? Such are wars of attrition

Relying on favourable economic conditions, and the strength of the Rand

Does the adequate fulfilling of macros make me a hero? The striving?

Would kwashiorkor tremble at the sound of my name? The thriving?

Or look me up and down with a scorching disdain and in reproach

Ask me what I would know about hunger? One dollar a day, a living 

I stare at my body in the mirror looking for signs of heroism 

There are dark bite sized marks on every part of the landscape 

Of somnolent one-sided battles with ravenous mosquitoes

I sleep as though going on nightly vacation in Death Valley

Having their fill without so much as a swiping hand in disturbance

Ectoparasites that have wreaked havoc in the name of malaria 

Am I a hero for having survived the African summer nights

That the taste of my blood is umami and gorge they must 

Can a reluctant donor of blood to the ecosystem be a hero?  

Is there not a special place in hell reserved for cheerless givers

As it has been written, so with little and then with much as well

I stare at my body in the mirror looking for signs of heroism

I see a temple but there are many men sipping whiskey in the lobby

Is it heroism that none have made it into the holy of holies 

Or am I implicated for atrium like glass that men can see through

Can an intombi endala speak for heroism or are the stretch marks 

Of women who have carried another human to term the zips to shut me up

For good. Have my nipples turned to nails for having never lactated milk

Am I disqualified as a nurturing and nourishing hero although willing?

I stare at my body in the mirror looking for signs of heroism

I bear no signs of violation, an absence of a sign as a sign 

I don't have rope lines around my neck from being hung from a tree

A noose of untidy and loose ends: Tshegofatso Pule

My limbs are still intact; parts of me cannot be found in a freezer

Once torn apart and opened, please refrigerate: Tshepang Pitse

Or the clue for my disappearance has been a missing bathtub

Earthworms have no need for Palmolive: Noluvuyo Ndema- Nonkwelo

Or have four bullet holes through which you can see bathroom tiles

Every day is for the thief, and the murderer: Reeva Steenkamp

Where love can be lethal, am I a hero for loving still, in spite of

For holding out hope for a masculinity with a different qualifier?

I stare at my body in the mirror looking for signs of heroism

And feel the G-force of living in this skin wringing out my organs

Poised articulation from a wit's end, is to break the sound barrier

Exercising a freedom of expression is one giant leap for mankind

Sitting up in bed every morning in the face of a weaponized entropy 

Draining you of life, draculean in design, draconian in deployment

An ecosystem with the dermatoglyphs of the devil all over it

The draculin in the mouth that salivates at the destruction of this DNA

The drool of a dog in proportions of dams we can drown in

Genetically, the bone mineral density of black people is higher

Am I a hero for not giving into this sinister sinking feeling?

I stare at my body in the mirror looking for signs of heroism

And look beyond the flesh and into the ark of the covenant

This dwelling place of power, glory, and certain victory

Flattening the tails of scorpions, death has lost its sting

The tabernacle that cannot be allowed to touch the ground

That has a sacred protocol of how to be handled or approached

The moving cloud before me that shows me the way 

Withstanding criticism, withholding judgment, with God and is God

A golden courage with the words of Frederick Douglas inscribed on it:

One man and God is a majority, rendering a life lived abidingly, heroic 

   

From A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish

If only the young were trees.

The tree is sister to the tree, or its good neighbour. 

The big one is kind to the little one, giving it the shade it needs. 

The tall one is kind to the short one, sending it a bird to keep it company at night. 

No tree attacks the fruit of another tree, and if one tree is barren the other does not make fun of it.

 A tree does not attack another tree and does not imitate a woodcutter. 

When a tree becomes a boat, it learns to swim. 

When it becomes a door, it continues to keep secrets. 

When it becomes a chair, it does not forget the sky that was once above it. 

When it becomes a table, it teaches the poet not to be a woodcutter. 

The tree is forgiveness and vigilance. 

It neither sleeps nor dreams, but is entrusted with the secrets of dreamers, 

standing guard night and day, showing respect to passers-by and to the heavens. 

The tree is a standing prayer, directing its devotions upwards. 

When it bends a little in the storm, it bends majestically, like a nun, looking upwards all the time. 

In the past the poet said: 'If only the young were stones.' He should have said: 'If only the young were trees!

Praying with Our Feet

These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had- but not more of humanity itself. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates

That first morning of the first work week of the restored and hopeful New Year

With heart inflated with gladness, and buoyed with communion and community

I was swept by a black tide making its ways to the shores of gainful employment

And I was complicit, a freshwater dancer myself, I was affected, I was drenched 

There we were, humanity itself, washing over the rolling tarmac of Jan Smuts Avenue

Stern faces taking work seriously in a country with a knee-buckling unemployment rate

There can be no buckling knees when the mode of transportation is one's own legs

A resolve momentarily broken to buy magwinya and scones from the local vendor

The rigidity of faces and bags clutched tightly under arms from economic opportunists

Betrayed by their bodies swaying to an inculcated cultural cadence like the ripple of a wave

But have you seen a black person walk? Oh, what a song of skating on invisible ice that is

We are Miriam Makeba's Pata Pata people, and we playfully surf the turf, a walk, a two-step

A symphony of a gait, nayi le walk yom'hlaba, a commute turned into a mighty perambulation

Thank you, Moonchild, and you too Unk for a response to trying moon cycles, we walk it out 

We are terrestial people, of the soil, rest assured Adam was black and blue for being cast out

Beyond all attempts to cast us out to the edges of existence, we belong to the land and it to us

Although we have to wax and wane our physical bodies into and out of the sight of whites

Although we hold inequality in our hearts like the sheer face of a slippery escarpment

We've turned our blues into songs that keep the spirits buoyant, giving hue to skies and seas 

Our humanity is fathoms deep, si no buntu, thina abantu. We, the people traipsing over tightropes

Unlike Johnny of new, our elegance is in the rhythm we bring to daily human tasks

Like Johnny of old, our beginnings have been humble, a fishing rod in hand, he walked

And God has made us, the people of the very beginnings, fisher of the men of yesterday 

To cast our nets of hope wide for humanity to breathe again, we walk still, a testimony

We are the metronome which times the rising and the setting of the sun on long days

The shadows that stalk the hearts of men fall a few shades lighter for me, I recognize

The case of employment has been a light mist and not heavy droplets of sweaty labour

My shorelines are littered with shells of autonomy, air-conditioning and AeroPress coffee

In the ways that matter most and ultimate, the soul ways, I am surrounded by MY people 

I've climbed into this skin with pride, this pigment of humanity, melanin of metanoia

Breaking psychologies of death with the resilience that terraforms the soulless, occupy stars

Solzhenitsyn's line runs through our hearts as well, our palms are white from drowning our own

But herein lies the difference: We, with all our flaws and missteps, we are the people with faces

Out my mind, just in time by Erykah Badu

 A universe in which a caterpillar becomes a butterfly might itself one day spin a cocoon, leaving us having to think again about our dogmas, religious and scientific.

- John Moriarty 

Guess it's time to grab my coat

Evolution's time to grow

Ego tryin' to block the door

Might not have nowhere to go

I finally got a leading role

Introducing Super Dope

Starring in her episode

Hello, new world, out, my mind