Tea is for Thabo

I invited our president to tea. I said:
"I have issues with your take on identity
so bring your kneepads, it's going to be a bumpy ride."

He arrived in a shiny 2002 Rhetoric with
those tyres man, the ones white on the side.
His breath smelt of entitlemints.

He's been walking freedom's highway since before he had legs.
He watched capital race past him,
And now, goddamit! He's got a car.

it's not a left hand drive
though it was a hard-earned gift
from Europe's cold caches of rotting cash treasures.

I said: "Pride lazes in acacia shade,
flicking flies off its wild yellow body,
pride won't eat dead meat.

You pretend to be blind
as you sing on the street
with your fatty old hat catching coins from the master.

You've sold us a license to cream
our fongkong jeans with the endless dream
of money. Then you smack little boys for hi-jack bedwetting."

He says: "I offer something for people to hold on to,"
Thinking about money helps you forget
That recently you were just another Bantu."

"Oooh…I feel the labour coming on:
Breathe into the squuueeeeze.
Reeeeeeeeleasing
a! a! a!
new! Movement!
Whoo!
You!
You anaesthetize contradictions with ideological blight
And caesar the day of the real renaissance."

He smiles and responds:
"I show them a movie in which they are ancient
And undefeated. I undam their blood river.
It's thicker than water you know."

"But what about me!
I can't look back to a time when everything was perfect.
I am a stranger to antiquity and I…
I have no roots, I…
Ek is die weggooiding van three centuries of cross-border…shopping
Horse trading, cattle thieving, dipping into gene pools,
My ancestors, the fools,
Doing the highland fling while several elders
Sit around some eternal tree, deliberating mortality.
You can shut the stable door,
but colonialism's horses are nothing but dust
we sit in the ashes of our settlements,
smouldering, ready to rise

I can't look back to a time when everything was perfect.
I can only look forward to a time when everything will be
Perfect.

We are damaged goods.
Fell off a lorry and were sold cheap cheap under some flyover
in some cold metropolis
Two tigers for the boere and no questions asked.
No questions answered.

Take out the roots and what have you got?
Batho ba modimo, children of heaven,
Bathed in love and
Racing out to greet the day with arms outstretched
to embrace
The nothingness that hope is!
This is faith."

"Oh, you feel marginalized," he says
"Well you coloureds are doing just fine.
Not everyone, mind you, but look at Geraldine."

A silence becomes uncomfortable after the third beat:
unbearable child of the long, endless fuckings around
miniscule meaningless points. Still born dead alive dialogue.

I look out of the window at the sunset.
Jo'burg hospital, the black line of the incinerator chimney
Exhaling burnt blood and dressings into the smouldering sky.

He clears his throat and departs.
You can't end a conversation that never really starts.
I drink the tea alone, and read the leaves.

Perfect.

Perfect is the endless puzzle,
The piece that never fits.
Peace is in the search for scraps of a story
A book without binding
Love stories never finding
Never winding down.

Peace.


E-mail the Poet   Expression Warehouse  Home