Fine Men III

South Africa, my breakfast.
My toasted land, my cup of tea,
my rotten egg
of shining loveliness.
Your pregnant past
Bloated with mourning sickness
threw up my generation.

yesterday, at the corner of Claim and Kotze
I watched a nameless ancestor shuffle
Across the intersection and dissolve
into the blind stumbling pedestrians.

who were bumping into their shadows,
struggling to remember the tune
that woke them from their numb slumber
and forced them blinking, into the sun.

we slaughter our animas
things fall apart, we grasp for centres
that recede as knowledge pours along media synapses
leaving us emptier, blind hands grasping at nothing.

but a wild man stands
outside the old Chinese trade mission
blackened by burning and smoking
and roaming and choking
on the concrete terror confining his ghosts
he holds in his hand a lightning-green mielie stalk
and balances a polystyrene fast-food container
on his head. His lips frame creation in silence
each day. Then he lopes down the street

he's keeping this all together, thank God.
Someone's got to do it.

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