Ready to Fly

Ready to Fly:

 

The poems in this collection [published 2009] date from the early 1970’s and extend through time to the year 2009. They rattle with the insecure optimism that characterises living in Afrika, a place from which so many are ‘Ready to Fly’ at a moment’s notice while remaining simultaneously transfixed in the glaring cascade of change.

 

No one could ever say that living in Africa, or in !NiK’s world, Azania, or Afrika was, or is, or will be easy; even when it looks as though it is. For those displaced though, in location and time, easy is not a word that springs to mind. And displacement is all the rage these days in Africa.

 

The initial displacement, for the poet at least, was migrating from his place of birth in a troubled northern region emerging from a period of internecine conflict, to the birth of trouble in the southern ‘lucky land’: or as it is more popularly known “The Beloved Country”. And then later he exiled himself, foolishly perhaps with love in his heart and a song in his hair, to more troubled lands, from which he later re-exiled back to a deeply troubled former lucky land. Later he finds he has reluctantly become an alien again in the beloved country: To cope he absorbed Azania.

 
The poet’s journey is a mirror for the upheaval following: the failure of the great [so-called] White-African experiment, in which he was simply a ‘buffettee” * [sic]. The journey follows the rainbow expectations in the newly liberated South Africa of the ‘90’s,as it morphed towards Mzansi, and the polarising lash-back as hybristic failures and choleric rage sought out its traditional scapegoats…. Unwanted or envied or wealthy people are history’s grey targets; and those who are unwanted, envied and poor are in an even more precarious position: living at the whim of the “mob”. So we live through the stirrings of change in the [so-called] ‘Noughties’ as we [an entire society] convulse again: the unintended outcome [one hopes] of an all-intentional series of acts.

 

For poets it is almost preordained that life shall be precarious and all the more precious as a result. The whole point of the middle class though, was to perpetuate sustainability.

 

This collection contains some pieces that may be contentious, some that may be ignored; and some that may be cherished. I can say no more than that.

 

There is no pattern or thematic structure. Each piece in the collection, excluding the piece that follows this, appears in alphabetic order according to the title given at the time it was originally written, except where it was changed and if it doesn’t seem to follow that order then those pieces that don’t are a subset of a prime piece that does. Enclosed within the brackets behind NiK’s signature, !NiK, at the end of each piece, are numbers that indicate the year when the piece was written, in some cases more or less.

 

Let the dice fall where they may.

 

Leofric House
Editor.
 

* Buffettee : one who is buffeted about.

 
 

Inkambabeyibuza:

 

You can either be a part
Of the power
Or apart
From the power.
Parcelling tradition
Or facing
Madness
Never
Believing that anyone
Could believe.
So Inkambabeyibuza –
By this scar then you shall remember me
And this.

 

From the notes of Joy.
The Jonker Memorandum.

.!NiK(05)

 

A superfluity of rights


 
The human being may be described as the
Lowest form of life on Earth
Since it is the most recent form to evolve.
It is therefore the one most likely to be capable
Of further mutation [one step two step…],
To become as much as it can be, through
Application of mind – Or
It can choose to discard the mind, as many do
In pursuit of the transient instant as
Was done in their turn by all
The other living entities on the planet.

 

What if we are here
To consume the planet?
And in some way through our growth plus
development
we achieve a critical mass that will spark off
the next phase in our
evolution…. Our revelation of transformation: the moment of our fabled
rapture.

 

Shall we ask then… come back later please?

 

Professor Oram Namgosti
10th Freedom Lecture: Witwatersrand University
Jozi:
2130 A.D. [118 A.A.]

From the podcast novel: The Jonker Memorandum… After Armageddon.
By: !NiK[08]

 

An entanglement of cords

 
I thought for a moment
of cords
and how they entwine
themselves
about each other:
languorous
longing for the entrails
of themselves
and the lascivious touch
of all that
lingered there.

.!NiK [1/6/06]

 

Whether it’s the vacuum cleaner cord or the lawn mower cord, the computer cords or a cord from here to there, or even the hosepipe, a cord of a different texture; leave it alone and the cords bond and entwine.

 

Appropriations
[21 January 2008]

“Welcome to Mbeki’s banana republic”
Thus reads the headline in the Sowetan this morning/

 

“We are rapidly joining the ranks of Nigeria and Zimbabwe” it
Continued.
 

It could as easily have read: “An inheritance ruined!”
They could have said… but didn’t because it is not
Fashionable to say such things or perhaps
The idea of an inheritance is not welcomed: certainly not
Remembered.
For who will choose to remember how
It was done: the smug sanctuary of victory
The arrogant takeover; the
Cursory words of contempt
For the loser.

 

As the newbies reached for the symbols

 

The milk is spilt the omelette awaits its end
For want of a light
The darkness returned
For want of a light for now.

 

Then the phrase was “who do you know?”
When the newly appointed toadies [who owed everything to their
Revolutionary masters]
Held schtumm when the outrageous was apparent.
And the emperor’s non-existent rags began to wither
On a malformed leg. All now say
We didn’t know
We didn’t know it was important;
That there would not be a place where we could appropriate the stock and take it over
For our own delicious ends.

 

How dare the people demand!
They cry out now.
We gave them everything they have
So they must now pay
With their aspirations and their leavened joy.

 

Spend wisely said the trustees
Who were impolitely ignored
There were guns and bombs and loot
To be adored.
The victors must have been right
It was believed; and the rules
Of the losers should be deplored.
 

Now all the best horses and all the new men
Could not put light where no facility
Began.
 

The citizens, who were enraged
Burned the trains
And are now caged
Into their neighbourhoods
Where there are no jobs
Work is scarce where imagination is
Restricted to the squares on which
We sit.
 

Thus the “mirror cracked
From side to side”: and we saw
Ourselves
Distorted

 

‘For want of a nail…’

!nik[08]
 

Ballad of a Homeless man

Not all refugees live on pavements: they are refugees nonetheless.

 
These are now the ways
we spend our days
gathering frills and garnishes.
 

Never forget: an age
of regret
at the parting when
we left.
 

Did we feel any sense of sorrow,
or was that only a moment,
to herald
a wave of emptiness:
cleansing away
that tense expectancy.
 

And now we sit apart
waiting for another journey
to begin.
A frantic time of quiet
reflection as we cali
brate
the sounds of laughter, and clinking cutlery;
listening to the feeling
with no need to join their noise
no need to empathise their brief amnesia.
 

How total is our
expectation of the actions that
we everlastingly assume
we need to make.
 

How deep the lull,
the quiet solicitude
of silence
expecting nothing of itself.
 

Thomas!
How your coffee spoons
mark out the borders
of my days, my weeks
and never ending months
of waiting, for the end
of waiting.
 

And in those wasting seconds
as we sip futility,
what was our course
and why was it
so imperative?
 

We pause in the midst of Armageddon
for spiced spare ribs
and the cleansing
fresh warmed towel.
 

Forgetting all our ignominies
in the meat lodged
firmly ‘tween our teeth.
Our own banality
far outweighs
sublime neglectful thoughts.

 

We dance a parody
of empty resolutions
and catastrophic
bold illusions.

 

The fresh scrubbed face
of youthful vigour
peers out at all
the sad decay
and senses challenges
amidst the dustbin heap
of our calamity:
and we rejoice
in their eternal anticipation.
 

Striding to the corridors
of endless crisis
a presageful intimation
of endless
bleak renewals.

 

Now, when we start again:
the bureaucratic minuet,
our jaded muscles know the stranglehold
of power corrupt
with seeking to maintain.

 

There are no players
only cut-out cardboard
shadows blown by the wind:
suspended souls
trampled in the solitary dust.

!NiK[‘80]

 

Athlone
 
And then
I thought about
your old nostalgic
pull
msasas and chameleons;
the slender limbs
of green Flamboyant
 

Flights of circling
wheeling hawks
again
black silhouettes against
the radiance
of evening’s stormy sky.
Exorcised
intact
from perception’s rheumy eye.
Content
‘till next time
we come by.

!NiK[‘80]

 

15/10/00

Brainscanning
 
Thinking of the brain
As a piece of territory
Some parts are worked
And are in varying stages of neglect
Others
Where you encounter new information
Are like virgin forest in which the
Undergrowth, rapidly regenerating
Bush,
Extends voraciously
And tangles the feet.
 

Or else it may so simply
Tread, lightly
Over stone and sand leaving
So faint an impression
That unless walked over
Again
Quickly
It
Will
Vanish
As if never there.
 
I think I take my students on
A staggering walk about
Through the wildernesses of their minds
(And mine)
And leave them only
Better resourced:
Perhaps.

Nicholas(2000)

 

Below the line: pure thought

 
“Below the line
Thought is negative” proclaims
A notice
On the wall
Above my head.
 
Presumably above the
Line thinking
Is thus positive.
 
What is this line?
How is it contrived?
By whom?
And how are the parameters
Defined?

!NiK[00]

 

Border crossings
 
Is there a difference between my lie
And theirs.
Can my lie be so small
That it trips me up.
 
While their big lie is
So vast
That like a wall it blocks
Us
From tripping.
 
The lie has so substantial a base
That no one can budge it.
It can be so huge it becomes truth
And our position at the margins
Merely conjecture.

!NiK (08)

 

Should you have reached this point know that the rest will be available once i figure out how to package the work in kollektivised digital form and put a hyperlink here instead of this banal statement.
Regards
Nicholas
 

Rehearsing Nietzsche

Rehearsing Nietzsche:

 
During the millennium gap year: that year when we didn’t really know if we were already in the twenty first century or mopping up the back end of the twentieth, I embarked on two separate but ultimately intertwined experiences.
 
The first resulted from a decision to write a piece of poetry daily for the entire year. That was the only requirement of my plan: length one word onwards, form: whatever I felt like; and no matter how many poems I wrote in any one day the next day I had to write another. From time to time I imposed rules, like: for the next few days I would only write haiku’s, for instance. I also never made a rule to write a sonnet, and so there are no sonnets in this collection.
 

The reasons for the poem-a-day thing are not germane. The result was 826 pieces of writing most of which was garbage [in retrospect], but then my rule did not extend to judgements… I simply wrote something about whatever took my fancy and it was a challenging exercise.
 

And then secondly, a month into the year I was invited by the organisers to read the part of the late poet philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, for a centrepiece production based on his life to be performed at the Centennial International Nietzsche Convention, that took place at Pretoria University in 2000, the centenary of his death.
 

What started as a workshop play-reading involving a small group of enthusiasts became a complex production embracing Nietzsche’s key philosophic developments: from his devastating critique of western philosophy as being “founded on a conjecture”, to his devastating denouncement of the concept of ‘god’ in arguably his most powerful and ultimately influential work “Thus spake Zarathustra”. We embraced too his more romantic poetry and his catastrophic personal life. In the way of a Method-trained actor by the time we finished I had become Nietzsche and I the poet drank at a hitherto unimagined alter. The exhilaration was electric.
 

I feel him still sneaking around after me in retrospective moments and I am discovering that he is all around us. That world he described for us in which we live shorn of its falsity and illusion is all there is. Everything else is hope, blind faith, and crass stupidity overlaid with marketing hype. Each moment is the one that matters: pursue the mission, capture the vision, by all means: but it is the moment-by-moment achievements that are the only reason for doing anything. Ultimately this is his position so reminiscent of the old Zen masters.
 

Yet for all that his position is ultimately that we cannot uplift ourselves, other than over millennia and that ultimately we begin again, and again, and again… times without number as we have done over millennia past. Each generation repeats the promises of the one preceding, playing the same tunes endlessly to a constantly moving backdrop… and should we be fortunate and particularly attentive we may grasp an insight, in an unguarded moment, that reveals all the secrets of the universe.[whoops: multiverse. ed.]
 

Playing Nietzsche was for me a continuous dejavu as, piece-by-piece, we slowly and with painstaking intensity ‘unpacked’ the scenes we had chosen. We’d started with hundreds of scenes from everything he’d ever written, and we read everything the Internet could deliver written about everything he wrote: taking scenes and playing them, reading the most erudite interpretations and some less erudite too. Interpretations: what did he mean here when he said that. Eventually it became all consuming, eating up fifteen to twenty hours a day and ultimately finding and confirming that chink in his super rationalist amour… the fantastical and terrifying idea of eternal recurrence. And through all this each day I had set myself the task to write at least one piece of completed work.
 

Part of the joy of being a performing poet is the process of becoming that which one plays.
 

I eventually had a sense of why Nietzsche [N] went mad. [If indeed he did go mad] such honesty was not made for our world. A particularly profound statement [for me] by N was his assertion to his friend and collaborator [and my co performer, Gäst , played by Sam Sleiman, philosopher and storyteller.] “I want to say in a paragraph what others say in a chapter.” That is a certain formula for insanity in my view.
 

And then of course the years raced on. 9/11 and all that: Afghanistan and Iraq, a world suddenly at war again denying Fukayama’s “end of history” theory and loading us down with liberation language of an unaccustomed kind, as the resurgent forces of conservatism outweighed the degenerating forces of progression.
 

It has also been a time of financial scandals and public trials. And then mention too, the generally cool and absorbing razz-ma-tazz, in the form of gladiatorial sports events and major movie releases all part of the super globalising endless marketing exercise cycles that constitute modern living. Suddenly it was five years after Nietzsche and a gap appeared and this collection said it was time for an airing.
 

Some of the pieces in here are what my family like to call “weird” and I don’t profess to understand some of what’s in them. I’m not even certain that I wrote them other than in the technical sense of being scribe to some remote intelligence or perhaps, experience… they were pieces that came from somewhere in the depths of whatever it is that we do when we sleep: go on adventures, travel in other dimensions of that multiverse predicted by quantum science: have nightmares. Sometimes they arrive from nowhere in the midst of wakefulness and demand to be recorded. Yet they are there in counterpoint to the Nihilistic world predicted and so accurately described by Friedrich N on the very threshold of the post-modern era.
 

Other pieces were of a routine “okay its poem writing time of day” because I had set myself something to do as one of that year’s “things” to do. These seem more prosaic and in some senses historical. In a similar way other selected pieces from outside of that millennium gap year were more compulsive: such as the surreal effect of watching the Second Gulf War on television, or the more realistically prosaic, trivial and often-random violent events of a stereotypical day around town n country.
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And then of course there were those pieces that were written by the Nietzsche I became during rehearsals for Nietzsche during that same epochal year that has become buried in post 9/11 rhetoric.
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Poetry is a strange literary form that appeals to fewer and fewer people which means that as a reader of this poetry you are amongst a tiny elite at the cutting edge of thought.
 

It is not essential that you like or love my work it is enough that I wrote it…the rest is outside of my control.
 

.NiK[05]

 
 

About the Poet.
 

Nicholas Jakari-Williamson [subsequently known as Nicholas Jakari]. has been writing and publishing poetry for the past three decades. His first published collection, Maze appeared in 1978 and his second collection “Random notes of a marginalised man” was published on his [now terminated] weblog www.Williamsonreport.co.za. He does also write other things but his business card describes him as a poet, which as he says makes his business card an oxymoron.
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This third collection includes some seventy-five pieces, with the oldest dating to 1979 [Winter], and the most recent in 2005 [Never kick a man until he’s down] and [ a dualist issue]. As you will find each piece carries the designation [b] .!NiK [year written][/b]

 

A considerable part of the collection is dated [00] indicating that it was written during 2000 when the poet set out on an objective to record the millennium year day by day in poetic form. This was a prolific period and resulted in more than 800 pieces of work. As is well known however “good poetry” is seldom made ”to order”. And so maybe 40 of the pieces are worth a second read, of which 33 were chosen for this collection, including the title piece for “Rehearsing Nietzsche” [Rehearsing lines from N….] Because the work of Frederick Nietzsche [N…] comes to centre stage in the poets theatrical life during 2000 some extracts from N…’s work are included where they seemed appropriate, with due apologies to any copyright holder from who’s property the poet may have made his selection… He doesn’t remember where any of it came from, since, he said, he didn’t select the vast cornucopia of words for academic purposes: he simply ingested them; and then presented them to an audience of aficionados who roared approval and called for more.

 
Some of this work may well also be called trauma poetry, for some pieces: Song of Victory, Reading some earnest undergraduate poetry, twelve September, were written following a horrific and tragic incident during the second half of 1994, which changed the poet and sent him off in a completely different direction.

 
Jakari-Williamson says his philosophy as a writer is founded on Derrida’s premise that ‘all the words have been written’ and the best we can do is to rearrange them in different forms and guises according to the rhetoric of the time, and then ”they have to be aimed somewhere”. He has no philosophy as a poet, he says, “the things keep happening and then plague me, smashing at the door ‘till I write them down and dispose of them.”

 

This collection is what he says anyway and who am I to gainsay this.
 
Editor.
 
This excerpt that follows are the opening set of some 70 pieces: of many varied themes and lengths.
 

 

A dualist issue

 
When you seek outside yourself
For exuberance and joy
You miss the moment
When it visits you
And you are not at home.
 

.NiK[05]
 

A Statement solicited from the Poet
on surviving a stereotypical
suburban street shoot-out

For an instant
I escaped our
post-modern,
oversaturated,
image-loaded simulations
of day to day uncertainty
for a dose of the real thing:
and was
for that brief moment
alive….
 

NiK (1995)

 

Slipping on the road to Shangri la: making movies
 

There was a man
who ran a business
selling time from out of clocks:
 

sold it by
the minute
and the hour.

 

If you had an
ancient
moment
that you’d
treasured
for some time,

 

you could pawn it
by the minute
for an hour.
 

.NiK[1991]

 

Never kick a man until he’s down
 

It’s amazing how a cliché can come to life
In front of your eyes and instantly
You
Have both validation
And confirmation
That a horror you
Had previously always
Anticipated;
Or believed to be true, and forgotten,
Its meaning sandwiched between lunch and dinner:
Remains true and active: not
Misbegotten.

 
So the cliché…the forgotten noun
Always kick a man when he’s down.

 
The venue was an open air
Public drinking
Bash
Of note
With “more than 20,000 people”, who all could vote,
In a park in our city.

 

The party was held by
The local
Operating division
Of an offshore intellectual enhancement movement
Dedicated to advance the
Cogitative
Skills
Of local young humans: drilled without pity.
 
Once a year they party in a beer drenched ‘fest’
Joyous and hearty; a ritual mime
That few decline
To bask
And debauch and “do their best”
In monogrammed vests under
Glorious scorching vaults
Of azure May sky.
 
It’s a party “to die for”. Slavering hordes
part with a buck, run
amuck guzzling
eisbein and bursting on
Bratwurst
Washed down with flagons of
A fond foaming brew.

 

The thrash runs all day
Then ends
Sharp by the way
At eighteen hundred hours: when the uniformed
Constabulary
Glowers, and orders
The taps all be closed
The moment
The licence expires.
 
By then the party is rowdy with noise ebullient
Some of the crowd
Spoiling with effluent, searching for
Action as drunk tempers fraction:
Guess why the “day” ends at nightfall;
When the temperature plunges like a fast falling wall
Degrees by
The minutes
And revellers dressed thoughtless for the heat
Of a high autumn day.
Feel the onset of winter as they suddenly
Freeze.
 
At that moment when the sun begins to slip behind
The distant edge and the hard chill
Of winter
Rushes to replace the joy and the fun,
The blistering heat,
The blazing sun
The festive joy starts to run.
Blooding the urge to stay
And perform
Desperate now to regain the warm
Taste
It is losing.
It is then: that’s the way…
 
The fight exploded
Abruptly: a spontaneous expulsion of
Loud shouting: voices loaded
With rage: a beating of fists: an instant onstage.
 
A prime aggressor raised his hands
A toreador, to the rhythm of the bands
Facing off across the ‘floor’ on a shorter, squared off fellow,
Stripped to the waist no longer mellow
With a flourishing score
Not waiting for gore:
A bull pawing the ground, head muscle-bound.
The tattooed
Fighter trembled,
Anticipating, glistening; flexing, his
Creatine steroid loaded,
Laced, muscle, definition, display.
His proclamation
In finale to the bold matinee.
 
The bull rushed in
And a blow was flung and the bull went to ground as the crowd
Surged around in an exhaled bound
Some in panic sensing doom leapt about seeking room across
The tables
Where the beer was served all unnerved. Picadors grabbed Matador
held him back from taking the floor: held him hard while
He roared
Defiance to the mob…lifting his head to the universe:
Fuck you all! … He was heard to curse.
 
In the gap where the crowd was thin…
Lay a figure and within
An instant as they all swept back toward
That struggle vortex
A hail of feet filled boots and running shoes
And high-heeled spikes held tight with screws
And hiking shoes hard laced with booze rained down on
That recumbent lump
Thump, thump,
Crash: fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck You!
Fuck!
Fuck!
Fuck!
FUCK!
They answered back and formed a ruck
For the rough hard taste of flesh:
Attack
The mesh of an upturned back;
Allowed the surge to rent and hack and hack….
 
When the crowd settled
The bull was gone; the toreador too
Lost his mettle:
Vanished before Security came
Trooping their colours threading through
To the place hunting for blame.
 
Waiters poured beer from portable barrels
Carted here
All day on their banner shrouded backs
Rushed in to replenish the thirsty hacks
Filled the upturned glasses
Lest the grand thirst passes… by.
.NiK[05]

 

Of rubicons and rubrics
 
I pledge to
Remain
Like the hooligan
On the bus
Waiting for the sixes
To stand.
 
I shall repeat the oath of
Allegiance
To the time of
Waiting
For a chance to chant
Together:
Striving to live
Up to the values
Of a disrespectful crowd.
 

.NiK[1998]

 
 

Winter
 

A break of light
Against the wall
Reveals the bar
‘tween me and you.
 
And here to keep me from you
A cross to bar the night
To share the quiet solemnity;
Our unimagined hope, held tight.
 

Beyond the squares
The bare fleshed veins
Etch out nature’s child
Stark with naked pain
And stroked with evening’s chill.
 

A howl across the darkness
Of a moment
Echoes off the
Barren seeds
Marked out by season’s change.
 

Now is the time
When warmth has gone
Our peace is held restricted
To the square yard of our mind.
 

.NiK[1979]

Random Notes: a promo

.NiK
is an Anglo Afrikan poet. He was born in the United Kingdom of Anglo Welsh parentage in 1946, and migrated to South Africa with his parents in 1947. There he grew up in a gold mining town as a member of a despised, newly side-lined, Anglo-Celtic minority community, in a society controlled by fanatical, god-subsumed zealots who sought out every opportunity possible to beat the hell out of everyone who wasn’t in their club.

 

To give his life some kind of balance .NiK began giving poetry readings from Gilgamesh when he was four, continuing from then on. He grew up to the sound of TS Eliot, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, Euripides, Shakespeare and almost every other poet of significance. By seven he was roaring out both Gilgamesh and Beowulf and at the age of fifty-four, in 2000, he performed the work of Friederich Nietzsche for that poet’s centenary, and as his own fiftieth anniversary performance as a performing and secular poet. He started to write down his own poetry in 1973.

 

He read Political Science and Economics at the University of the Witwatersrand during the turbulent end of the sixties and later trained as an economics schoolteacher: then ‘dropped out’: ‘Sixties’ style. He travelled in Europe, at first alone, then later with his wife, Diane, with whom he has also worked in various parts of Afrika, in a variety of occupations. Amongst these they spent some years working in the former Rhodesia where he was part owner of the Sundown Theatre Company, and where two of his three children were born. He returned to South Africa in the early eighties to generate family sustaining revenue via a variety of opportunities in the field of direct marketing, writing Marketing ‘stuff’, selling, debt collecting, more writing and, doing whatever else went with urban survival in an unwelcoming country being assiduously raped by International sanctions.

 

In the ‘Year of the Revolution’ in 1994, on a fateful 11th of September .NiK was ‘reborn’ in Afrika, when he survived an assault by armed murderers, killing at least one of his attackers, and wounding two others in a wild and frenzied close quarter unprovoked gunfight. He learned later that he was the 37th person to be shot by the same group over the preceding six weeks.
 
The injuries he sustained though, changed his life; returned him to the classroom, as a substitute teacher in a variety of State high schools, presenting various subjects; mostly 9th Grade economics and senior business and experimenting with methods of accelerating awareness and insight amongst young humans.

 

Eventually, in about 1998, he was declared permanently redundant in the State sector, as part of a process that favours the appointment, to State teaching posts, of citizens who were, in pre-revolution days, disadvantaged by discriminatory hiring policies. He now teaches part time in the private sector; and writes full time, when he is not busy doing something else entirely: living in the only time we know… now.

 

Random Notes is literally that: a kollektion of random pieces written over decades simply because they ‘happened’ when they did and were kollekted.

 
Editor.

 

 

Satori
 
‘Truth knocks upon the door
and you say
go away I am looking for
the truth.

zen koan
 
I was an
old fragile man
it seemed to them then.
They were young
fragile men when
the business began
and I felt a gathering
of angels
swirling through the dust
of our berserk
denouement:
to fetch us
to our destiny,
amongst the anthills
of urban renewal?
 
There were we
and
those three, who
threw
their lead
at me; striving
through such
imprecation
to burn
their way to
the centre
of my station;
convinced I
should fall
to their
sanctified
call.
 
Unannounced.
They came;
unheralded they left,
the way stoned men
cry
for mitigation.
 
The circle closed
the loop was done:
sanitised
in blood:
bonded
to links of lead.
 
In the dark soul of that instant,
the moment of
karma,
at the place
of convergence,
where
I slipped into
no
ness
I slew one of them
then.
 
And he was not even my enemy,
was never
the one in the swirling mass
of our
ancestors
who have howled for
the bullets
of our darkest desires:
 
I have made life
and I
have taken it
away.
And yet do
I know
I am not
some deity
awaiting frantic offerings
upon the essence
of our darker rhetoric.
 
It is simply this:
I have killed
a man
and now
know the
passage of life;
breathed first
upon my arm,
and last as well.
.NiK(1995)
 

 

Performance Poetry
 
Sitting in the park
one blustery day
I noticed the distant
figure
of a man
jumping
from the roof
of a building.
 

At first I thought it
was a
leaf
tossed
by the wind,
then heard his
voice crying out;
a primal song of joy:
rapturous
to seek eternity.
.!NiK(1993)

 

Election Manifesto.

It is a one step two step
slanging match again
I run you down
You do the same
One step, two step,
Throw a bad word
Never think of telling
Where the whole thing will go.
Never think, or never dare
mention how to do it.

 

No it’s
One step, two step,
Ignore the pointed question
Hover on the edges, until
They’ve all forgotten
Then promise something
No one thought to mention.
One step, two step,
Shifting from
The centre…………….
 

.!NiK(1980)

Publ…Sting Mag, Former Rhodesia 1980. (Now Zimbabwe)
Banned by the British Interim Administration…1980:
A faceless flunky fellow told me it was “bad form”.
Refers to the election that brought Robert ( Bob the Roz)
Mugabe to power in Zimbabwe.
Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s “ Lobster Quadrille.”

 

Some lines spoken by a long distance
shooter about:
the Man who never shot Mugabe

 
Doping the wind
Depends on the
Angles.
Like Pool you know
Or Billiards even.
 
You know when you play
Pool you have to think at once
Of angles;
Subjectively nominating
Places on the cushions:
Angles to strike
A glancing blow to fetch up at a given point
Over there at the right edge of some other target
Which heads off to the pocket.

 

Feel the wind.
Feel the wind inside your head.
Stand in the weather:
Stand in the weather.
Standintheweatherletthebullets
Flowaccordingtothewindripplinginsideyourhead.
Rippling through your last remaining years;
Swirling around the backstretch of your ears,
Rippling tangentially, across the back stretch of your ears.

 

Lining up the barrel
On a heap of reckless sandbags.
Lining up your energy,
Between your finger and the wind.
 

.NiK(00)

 

 

To Wilfred Owen,
On the death of
Fourteen civilians,
May,1976.

 
We saw your pity of war
Wilfred Owen
distilled in the mine
blasted corpse.
 

Where laughter had been
there was now only death;
the horror of love
on a quiet afternoon
torn apart for
no reason at all.
 
No dignity here;
no graceful repose:
an arm
or a leg
are all that return
a vague
personal form,
stamped by the arbitrary bomb.
 
This charred human meat;
remnants of life,
converted to something obscene.
A shadow of hate
links us with you,
and that implacable darkness,
born in the vile
savage
slaughtering
time.

 

Freedom, enriched
with a harvest of blood;
and maniac
slanderous metal,
tears the smile from the eyes
of a child who survives:
and grows
old
in a gurgle of tears….
 

.!NiK(1976)
Publ. Maze…1978.

 

 

Gingindluvu….
A vision at Easter
While rehearsing Marc Anthony

 

Across the veld
the horsemen rode,
they rode behind the light.
they rode from far
to rendezvous,
and end a ceaseless fight.
 

Never trust the horsemen
howled the man
with the bones,
never trust their solemn
hymns of praise.

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The horsemen come from far
he called
and lust to take the land.
Never trust the words
they call,
or scribble
with the hand.
 

All hours long
the vultures hovered;
swooping as the sunlight softened,
settling
as the daylight died.

 

Never meet the savage
warned the man
with the book,
Never trust the savage
warned the one
with the word.

 

But the feasting group
of horsemen sat bemused
beyond the fire;
they never heard the
intonation
heeded not
the warning:
never saw the shadow
in the flames…

 

And as they sat
and gorged themselves
the old temptations flew
the assegais were sharpened
and the battlelines formed true.

 

Then when the pounding
reached the top and
the whirling dancers flared:
lightning flashed
across the gap
the waiting vultures reared.

 

Never trust the savage
warned the one with the book
Never trust the horsemen
warned the ones with the bones,
never trust their solemn hymns
of praise.

 

Then the Man screamed out instructions
‘Bulala abathakathi!’
And then they looked,
and heard the warning:
called upon the word…

 
All hours long
the vultures hovered;
swooping as the sunlight softened,
settling as the daylight died….

 

.!NiK…(1978)

· Bulala abathakathi…kill the wizards. (IsiZulu)
· Gingingdlovu. HQ of Dingaan, Zulu king who succeeded Shaka. Vision: refers to the murder of a Settler party in 1838, an event that has bedevilled race relations in South Afrika/Msanzi right into the present day. Editor.

 

WHat you have read so far are the first group of poems at the beginning of the Kollektion: the rest of the 50 odd pieces will appear in the digital kollektion soon [ish]… Hope you found them accessible… editor.

Episode 38 JM

Episode 38 JM

Marak’s team goes for the Brinkmanite ‘hit’ while Heksi puts their odds of success at a low point

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