Painting of Celia on cardboard

 

Then to Spring

Fists furled 
Sweep up the shrapnel 
of dereliction 

as blossom bombs 
carpet cold stone 
and flowers explode
from the earth

Limp into spring
with winter 
raking at our backs 
snarling as we flee 

Palms to the sky 
wet with tears 

Gerhard Something

An early tormentor,

Gerhard Something:

scalped on a Friday

by the unbuckling 

early eighties’ bonnet of

his mother’s white Corolla.

The news on Monday drifts over

the assembly- draws 

gasps, sobs, palms to young mouths,  

before the bloody, 

eagerly embellished details 

reliably seep through the school veins. 

His eyes were open.

Still holding his Coke.

Alive…Still Gerhard Something.

Alive, but dead, you understand? 

I had no doubt that 

the early eighties’ Dutch Reformed Jesus 

I knew and feared then,

would have sent him, 

Coke in hand, 

swiftly  to hell…

Yet.

He’s an angel now,

Headmaster,

Van Der Walt eulogises. 

Here among us, eyes open.

Dead…Still Gerhard Something.

Dead, but alive, you understand?

Untitled #1 Vaka

So that’s where it’s been:

locked away in this track.

Once overplayed, 

then forgotten. 

See our young faces 

as they were: 

spectres amidst reeds of

the instantly familiar piano.

I had so much to learn 

about hurting you.

I see you scar-free, playfully

peeking through the mournful violin. 

I’d be dead to the man I see

adoring you in the ethereal vocals.

Meandering through our early days,

lost in songs.

First Light

Dawn spills renewed promise

somehow spun from vapour  

though sleep 

Something seems different 

though nothing has changed 

Your ear on my chest 

We lie fresh in our stale air

Our limbs comfortably 

intertwined

My heart beats like pop 

A jukebox of hits 

thought lost 

Then

the sheets yet again

shaken out and laid straight 

Corner finding corner

Two Cuts

My English pleas:

dead butterflies on an Afrikaans desk.

Van Der Walt gestured for me to select a cane.

 

Or should we make it three? 

His dastardly crew of hitmen, 

clipped into a glass-doored cabinet:

mean and thin through to thuggish and thick.

Spoiled for choice, hey? 

These men are gone;

their accurate arms and wrists, 

dust, bones and ash.

Swish! Swish! 

Their canes are just sticks,

preserved by lacquer 

and a sadist’s dead love. 

Don’t let me see you here again! 

Refractions

On this beach of smashed shells,

and sunning pebbles,

for you I dig

a Sisyphean pit, that trickily floods

with buried sea and tiny darts of life.

Then, while the walls inevitably

collapse over my burrowing hands,

I naively dwell on nurturing journeys 

 and the illusion of destinations.

***

I sometimes take long ocean swims, 

almost sightless save 

for the opal opacity below

and the dizzying rush of light, 

as I drink in a breath 

on every three stokes. 

There are inexplicable pockets of cold,

and the currents play games with 

time and space.

The sea is more volatile than it

looks from the beach.

***

Lying next to my grandparents’ pool, 

circa early eighties:

filter humming and every now and then,

the Aquanaut would climb the walls

to slurp in air like a lungfish before 

slipping below the surface.

Breathing into the crook of

my folded arms as my head rested on my hands;

my hips pressed sharply into the hot slate, 

while water striders once again jigged their way 

over the calming water.