Shot Straight Up! Through curly cloudSuch a spectacle, such a crowd. My feet and hand expand, arms and legs lengthen

Doubling, Tripling, Growing: I strengthen. Each ligament now longer!

Each muscle much stronger.

While only my ankles show

From beneath the clouds below.

I’d definitely display incredible nudity! But it’ll all be too high up for people to see. Thrashed and trashed: whatever I wore… (I’d not be in uniform anymore)

I am the c r e a t u r e who plucked you up. Now that you’re a princess and such.

High above everything: you’ll besafe from everything because of me.You’d be tucked away near an earor somewhere else from which to steer.

You’re miles upon miles above everywhere!Far and farther from a single stare.

I’d probably hurt a lot of people. Thorn in my foot: probably the church steeple.

And we could visit the family,They’re close no matter where we’d be.Because it’s only seven steps towards the sunTo get back to where we had begun.

I am the c r e a t u r e who pulled you upNow that you’re my princess and such.

Over the seas, this gets tricky.The water’s cold and the sand’s pretty slippy.

It doesn’t matter, transatlantic or transpacific,

Your directions would always be superbly specific.

You are so high up and such! Right by the stars that you can touch. You use them to help navigate.

Everything’s so close so there’s no wait. At some time I will return you to bed,

It must be tiring right up by my head !

I’d willingly wonder where our day went, while you are totally tired and solely spent.

I am the c r e a t u r e who pried you up

And you are my princess and such.

Then I’d shrink down to standard size,

No clothes still, but it’s a compromise. Or, maybe some boxershorts I’d borrow,

Just so you don’t get such a fright tomorrow!

And I am still the c r e a t u r e who won’t let go. And you are still my princess I hope you know.

We had many mornings, or days that paraded in morning lights, to lie under blankets and sleeping bags, unwilling to touch the floor though it was wood. In all my life I didn’t know wood could get so cold. But it was not the wood that blurred our borders – usually rigid with denial – it was the gaps and spaces which let the outside in. And as the rains approached, there became less and less to indicate that we were inside.

It is freezing in this now nearsilent town. The second storey has fallen through and I can no longer search the moon-stripped skies from the upstairs window. The dwellers are all crowded into the bottom floor of this house we found months ago, with the back door off its hinges swinging us in. We light fires in the grate, and in metal bins which scar the floor. The room is empty but for mattresses, broken floor boards showing water underneath, piles of damp-smeared newspaper which are sporadically thrown into the blaze. Anything that doesn’t bleed burns. Loose boards and cupboard doors are sacrificed. Incredible balls of dust like planets of exploded particles and skin cells shed and roll across the room in their own broken-window-blown orbit. There isn’t much to show we are inside.

We share pipes painfully lit with matches. Throat muscles taught tight from the pull-pull of keeping them alight; hand creases all aglow in that little bowl of bone. Every year winter seems to get colder. We get smaller and our hearts lesson like shrunken heads, knotted with muscle eyes and ears, pumping watered-down blood to extremities that seem further and further away, to hands and feet we don’t recognise as our own.

Mango says that these houses were built to murder old people in their beds. Old colonials building character and turning that much more to stone with each winter’s night survived. I lean out over my bed and put a palm to the wood floor. It’s wet-cold. Each crack lets in a slow steady stream of ground chill up through the beckoning soil. I rub my dry dirty hands together. He says you can feel your spirit bite your body when you accidentally touch a wall. You can see your cursed breath when you sit up in bed. One of Mango’s sisters walks in wrapped in a blanket and says, “Shouldn’t we be inside?”

This week the schools go back, and businesses will reopen in the wake of movement and shouts and lives lived hurriedly. The arrival of people will bring heat like clarity crashing through this pneumatic fever-dream. We can find work at the bars and bus terminals and this winter will be subsumed in a nuclear summer. We can walk the streets arm in arm and go to the pub, the wood walls and bar tops creaking with all the people nestled close like fruit bats half-awake. We can laugh and watch our life condense on cold windows. What has been only steam for months will transform to water. We can wake up clean in the same bed. More naked and warmer than we’ve been in years.

The pervading heat seems to lessen the gaps. The humidity appears to pulse the foundations closer together, like bodies in sweat. The slow seismic shudders which raise the pavements – so impervious to plodding feet – and the indomitable roots pushing up through stone seem to now crack the ground with fire, not with frost. But the gaps, though shifted, persist.

There once existed warriors who used to paint eyes on their eyelids so that even in death they could win fear from their enemies. It is the spaces the lost leave that haunt us. We are afraid to walk on ground that remembers them. Like the gulfs between floorboards, letting the outside in, so the atoms in and around us gape with space. Our minds wind up and then down, repeating over and over again that a paving stone, like this house, is not solid, is not impenetrable. Matter moves like a wind-broken wave. We move like a wave. This is more obvious when looking at and living in our borrowed house, dominated by what is gone, what has broken, shed and split: what was never really there to begin with. Like the painted lids of dead warriors and the spaces between stitches in a thick knit jersey, there is infinite meaning in absence, in nothingness. This is why the air can speak breath, why the winds can whisper our names and press our structures to the ground. Why, when alone in deserts scattered with fever trees which scrape at drought reflecting skies, space impresses upon us so. We speak the boundaries of inside, outside, solid, impenetrable, into more static being. But if we held the attitude of cold or heat, or bustling bacteria, we could walk through these walls like we walk over graves. We could walk through these walls and straight out of this town, like we walk over graves.

Blow drying your hair and eating yoghurt

If you have an afro like mine, you will know that blow drying is really a euphemism for dislodging huge hair-balls and then hurling them across the room at the speed of light.When you have an exposed bowl of yoghurt in said room, things could get, erm…hairy. Your Low Fat Peach Lite with sprinkles of muesli and nuts could suddenly taste like a cat took a bath in it.Or, if you’re really pushed for time and are avidly shoveling yoghurt into your mouth, while your other hand waves the blow-dryer around your head, which is centimeters away from the bowl so that you don’t spill – you could land up dipping your bangs into said Peach Lite mix, which will then spray across your table as a mighty gust of air comes out of your hair-dryer. The muesli and nuts will also get tangled in the curls of hair, creating that dreadlocked effect… Except muesli eventually rots and no one likes a rotten rasta ‘do.

Driving and scratching the eczema rash situated on your right pinkie toe

When forced to choose between two modes of existence: “Scratch” or “Push the Brake”, always, always, always go for the brake option.Scratching that toe just won’t be as satisfactory when you’re doing it over the still-warm corpse of a donkey you’ve just crashed into.And, if you were really a pro at multi-tasking, you would have learnt how to place your foot at just the right angle on the pedal, so that you can brake and scratch your foot at the same time.

Note: this does not work with the accelerator pedal, unless you’re the kind of driver who likes jerking spasmodically forward like a slug having an epileptic fit.

Writing an email to your mom while Googling images of Zac Efron

This is a bad life choice, because people often write down what they are thinking or speaking about. So if you’re sitting at your computer DOLing (Drooling Out Loud) like OMG ZAC EFRON TOUCH ME A LOT, you don’t want to be simultaneously writing an email to your mama. It could turn out like this:Hi MomI hope you are well.I cut my toenails today and OMFG SEXY eat NIPPLES over-age is LEGAL SEX!!!!And the turnips turned out lovely, thanks.Pouring bleach down the toilet while stirring a cup of teaI’m not too sure about this one though, because maybe it’s a really clever way to kill someone and avoid the ‘culpable homicide’ tag. It’s more just a ‘oh whoops-shit-homicide’.And plus, have you ever drunk Cherry Tea? That shit’s just bleach with red colouring.

Driving a car in a swimming costume and eating ice-cream from a tub

Disclaimer: this works very well in B-Grade porn films. Results may vary.

Your accelerator may be revarnished with a sticky coat of Mango Glue-cose Cream. Your exposed thighs may turn blue after you drop a spoonful of Very Berry Frozen Piece of Death Ice on them.- Pedestrians will whistle for you upon seeing not your grief and cold, but rather a half-naked lady driving a car with liquid Vanilla Creamilicious spattered all over herself.

Now go forth and worship my wisdom. Summarise it on Post-It notes. It’s not like any of this stuff has ever happened to me. That thing in my hair is actually a bead shaped like muesli. I don’t like, actuallyhave muesli in my hair.

We find a shared tide, turn onto our backs, wrap ourselves snugly in the common undertow; pause together in the moving stillness of floating. The sea is dimpled with rain, each globule a galaxy, wet stars soaking into our fur, planets landing around us, histories coming home.

The Universe is raining Time.

Our quick eyes and spare paws trace a million images – rapid and precious –as molecular mirrors fall through an instant’s clarity before joining the heaving amoeba beneath us. I catch a gas planet in my padded palm, revolving between two extended claws,an ancient maroon marble, murmuring from within its glass case. She squeezes my paw as a crystal meteor lands in the tiny space between us, stretching for amoment into a liquid timeline that tickles our furry tummies with fluid notes of evolution,her agile feet making a sounding board of the surface, moving us in a swift circle, The Waltz of Creation.

Though infinities patter on my eyelids, it’s her breathing that invents my dreams.We float on the magnetism of new solar systems, buoyed by glowing worlds, moved alongby the turning of huge, unhurried wheels. Tethered by her strength, I let myself go into orbit

Our joined paws are a water gaugefor Eternity.

We’ll take a reading when we wake.

It was hot as a factory
or a sordid city
in the centre of a crowd
that banged their heads
and thrashed their hair
and stank of sweat,
and cigarettes.

Yet that song (that voice!)
rippled my skin with goosebumps
and lifted me up on wings
made of notes and harmony,
beating with the thump, thump
of the drums as they pumped.

I came home last night
dreaming, despite the stench
of cities and money;
dreaming of rain in Africa.

I pressed the button. Seconds later, the nurse on duty, my favourite nurse, came in with a solicitous look on her face.

“Anything the matter, sir?” she enquired with raised eyebrows and a voice that could best be described as angelically choral. She checked the machine to which I was connected for any worrying changes in my vital signs.

“No, nothing’s wrong dear, I just need you to take a look at something for me. I think these drugs you’re pumping into me are taking on hallucinogenic qualities.” As I said this, I handed her the big and small papers. “Look at page four in the newspaper, and compare it to what I’ve written on the other paper.”

“You are definitely seeing what you think you’re seeing,” she said after comparing the two. “Mr Ntjebe, YOU HAVE WON THE LOTTERY! Where is the ticket? I hope you have the ticket.”

“It’s among my things in the wardrobe.”

I couldn’t be as elated as the nurse was. If I weren’t bed-ridden, rendered totally incapacitated by that wretched cancer, I might have broken into song and dance. I might have proposed to her on the spot. Instead, I was overcome by a heightened sense of irony. I spent my whole life slaving away at any number of drudgeries, all of them thankless because I never earned much. And then when I was already over the hill, moribund and with my best days behind me, I had won twenty-four million useless rands. Useless because I no longer had the capacity to enjoy them. Instead of seeing my win as a boon, I wished I believed in a god, so I could curse it for meting out such a cruel and unusual punishment to me.

To be fair, I had been a cruel and unusual man. I had sired several children with several women, and been a father to none of them. I had sowed more wild oats than the land could handle. The level of my drinking surpassed that of my closest rival by a distance. After years of abuse and oppression, victims inevitably reach a breaking point, where they hit back and resolutely say “never again”. This is what my liver did. And that is why I was lying in “God’s waiting room”, where there were not enough magazines for everyone.

“Well, aren’t you going to say something?” the nurse enquired, interrupting my reverie.

I gave a weak, wry smile. “I’m not exactly in a position to leap for joy, or pick you up and spin you around. But I can marry you if you want.”

“Oh Mr Ntjebe, you are such a bag of laughs,” she retorted playfully. “The first time you asked for my hand in marriage, I wasn’t sure. But for some funny reason, now I do want to marry you.”

“Of course you do. And I know it’s because of my winning personality.”

We carried on like that for while, after which the nurse left the room to attend to a real emergency elsewhere in the hospital, but not before issuing me with a stern warning not to get too excited, not in my condition.

I lay there pondering. What to do? I was an instant multi-millionaire. Dressed up with nowhere to go. My thoughts became inundated with where my money should end up. Not a church, because I didn’t feel like giving some minister the chance to buy another humble limousine. Not a charity, because I didn’t feel like having sixty percent or more of my donation going towards “administration” or “miscellaneous expenses”. As I hopped from idea to idea, I quickly realised that there were many things I didn’t feel like. I eventually settled on what should have been my very first idea: my bastards.

I would find a good attorney, one who would track down all my children and distribute my winnings between them. For those who were not yet of age, he could probably arrange for the money to be held in trust. I estimated that after legal expenses and estate taxes, there would be something in the order of eighteen million left. If I didn’t have more than eighteen offspring (and I’d already accepted that this was not likely the case), they would each inherit at least a million.

My rudimentary estate planning was interrupted by the nurse. She came in to shift me around a little, so as to avoid my getting bedsores. She also wiped down my forehead with a cool, wet towel. It felt good.

“So…Have you shared the good news with anyone? Anyone at all?” she asked casually.

“Not really. No one even knew I played this blasted thing.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. I’m sure it would be fun to experience the joy with someone.”

“Someone like you?” I asked mockingly.

“No, don’t be silly Mr Ntjebe”, she giggled coyly. “I just meant it’s a pity you don’t have any friends or even family to share this moment with.”

“Ja hey. Pity.”

“Anyway, I’ll be back at five to change your drip, and I hope you’re hungry because there’s a nice potato mash with sausages for supper.”

“Yum.”

With that she left me to revisit my planning. I thought to myself that the next day, if I had a bit of strength in me, I would browse the yellow pages and find a reliable attorney, who would do everything that needed to be done: cash my ticket; draw up a will; find my bastards. Even if he were able to do the latter, I doubt any of them would want to meet with me. That was fine by me. My final cathartic act of bequeathing to them this windfall, I was certain, would more than make up for my absence in their lives.

For the first time in a while, I smiled. At the eleventh hour, I had found a way of ensuring that I’d be remembered for more than my uncanny ability to sink beers and procreate. I would leave behind a meaningful legacy, which hopefully wouldn’t be squandered too quickly.

I drifted into a long reverie, moving in a desultory fashion from one thought to another. I thought of how meaningless my life had been. How I’d failed as a father, as a man. I thought of how rich I’d made my old haunt, the local tavern, and how I’d impoverished myself in the process. My aimless daydreaming finally landed on one final thought: the permutations of how one’s life can be lived are infinite, but there’s only one possible way for life to end, and that is death. Even if I had been an upstanding family-man and not a hopeless, blundering drunkard, I couldn’t escape death. It was this final thought which gave me a small measure of comfort.

Five o’clock. Time for the drip change. The nurse was right in time. She injected the usual concoction into the drip, and also something else I’d never seen before.

“What does that new one do?”

“Well, the cancer is now in its final, most aggressive stage, so your medication will be changing gradually. Most of it will be to numb the pain.” I could tell she said this with the most sympathetic and sensitive tone she could muster. I was going to miss her bedside manner.

“Oh,” came my almost inaudible reply. “Well, I’ve decided what to do with the money. I’m going to make sure it’s put to good use.” I told her this in an effort to lighten the mood. I didn’t, however, wish to divulge too much. She didn’t know about my colourful past.

“That’s wonderful, Mr Ntjebe! I’m sure your money will end up in the most deserving hands. You are such a kind, generous man.”

“Ja well, I guess it’s never too late to do something noble. It’s going to be the first and last thing I ever do which I can be proud of.”

“That can’t be true, Mr Ntjebe, you must have done many wonderful things in your life.”

That would explain the hordes of loving people bombarding me with visits, I thought to myself sardonically. It’s her job to be nice to me, to compliment me even when it’s unwarranted. One of the perks of being in my condition.

“Now let me tidy up a little before you have your supper.” She straightened my linen and removed a magazine which I hadn’t gotten around to perusing.

There was a barely perceptible change in me, which soon became very much perceptible. The machine even beeped slightly differently, and that was definitely not my ears playing tricks on me with some auditory illusion. My blinking became heavy, and each breath took a concerted, frantic effort. My chest felt as if it were under a vice, which was slowly but relentlessly tightening. I mouthed a call for help, which came out as less than a whisper. My efforts to catch the nurse’s eye were just as futile. While all this was happening, she didn’t seem too bothered at all. On the contrary, she was wearing a smug smile, and reaching into the wardrobe for my ticket. As my last breaths issued from my mouth, she tucked the ticket safely into her breast pocket and screamed for the doctor. She put on the most convincing look of horror and panic I had ever seen.

show it’s significant.

use signs to transform

transient to permanent

art forms. speak storms.

dance meaning into void devoid of

human language.

don’t use the word ‘just’ around me.

i’m busy painting the big bang speaking to itself.

informally worn

commercially torn t-shirts

forlorn converts

materialist ideology

imperialist chronology

crowds in the high street

fleetingly emulating elite

cheap trappings of success

defined possess

social regress

flaunting uninformed uniform

dress sense

public spaces

expensive normalised

iconic faces

haunting

generation ideas wanting

status quo stasis

Grahamstown, http://www.plush.us/