Words ain't just your everyday dialogue,
they take your character and catalogue
it. Everybody has favourites which
can chart a pattern, but knowing the
pattern demands memory retention
and recall. I'm starting again, I
didn't like my first vocabulary
that turned into a kaleidoscope.

How can you leave Joburg forever?
It’s a question that many have pondered but few have found exact answers. How can the jungle, that is this crackpot city oscillating between an adrenaline frenzy and force feeding a washed out hangover with painkillers and regmaakers, retain any semblance of a hold on any sane ex-citizen?
Personally my feelings bounce backwards and forwards between Positively 4th Street* by Dylan and the nth remake of the moth and the flame. Problem is with Jozi it’s difficult to tell for sure which is which, who is the hunter and who is the hunted.
Intensity and focus are prerequisites in maintaining any sort of composure even if it’s false, just a façade to keep the wolf away from the inner sanctuary.
It has some crucial, even wonderful moments, Mandela Bridge, jazz, sunsets, beggars with the nous of a Wall Street broker and crazy, competitive news headlines out of all proportion to the actual news they actually refer to.
As a city it can haunt, those sleepless, insomnia fuelled nights that never seem to end. The upside of this image is the slide sequence of art galleries of which Jozi has more than its fair share.
I’ve heard many people leave and swear they ain’t coming back, ever. I left for a while and stayed down the coast but the big city vibe and momentum never leaves one feeling safe. Driving back on the N3 and spotting the smoky silhouettes can be rejuvenating, depressing, mind altering and a form of relief that it’s all still there.
It’s a crazy kind of place, a place that is a myriad of different things to a myriad of different people all at once. It can swallow you whole with no digestion problems and not even miss you.
It’s a moment in time where you grab a tiger by the tail when you kid yourself that you can handle anything she’s got to throw at you.
However, there’s an old saying that warns the reckless to rather grab a tiger by the tail than shatter a woman’s illusions.
It’s a magnet, plenty people who should know better and others who probably never will believe the streets are paved with gold. There is money to be made at the epicentre of South Africa’s financial bubble but there’s also ill gotten gains, tempting the overzealous, just waiting for annexation here in Jozimental.
Visitors from overseas are in awe and abject fear but I reassure them and say that there’s things to see and people to meet just get yourself a local who knows the way the lure is tied. Locals on the make can spot an outsider at a 1000 yards and will make moves, not out of malice or anything personal, just the way it is.
Through all of this tirade of split personalities and multiple disorders Jozi shines through as not just a dysfunctional kid with insecurities and repressed anger, it’s got an edge that keeps people moving and that’s where the addiction lies carefully and cunningly, although brazenly, concealed.
Fear and Loathing in Jozimental.
* You gotta lotta nerve to say you are my friend, when I was down you just stood there grinning. You gotta lotta nerve to say you are my friend, you just want to be on the side that’s winning.

South Africa and mindless, voilent crime despite beautiful constitution.

A close friend of my family over many decades was tied up and suffocated on Tuesday night. He was living in a cottage on a small holding in Honeydew.
Immediately anybody who knows anything about the area will think squatter camps and these are a focal point and problem area for Honeydew residents, police and some politicians.
In the immediate aftermath of violent crime affecting ones close family, it is easy and once was cathartic, to screech about government inaction, bring back the death penalty and project the anger and violation into the ether and not bottle it up.
These actions brought nothing except a renewed sense of futility and expats saying things like, "we told you so", which also don't help and don't contribute anything positive.
My thoughts after a day of mulling and pondering are aimed straight at our much vaunted constitution that so values human rights and secondly at the undoubtedly fine minds that constructed it and now won't entertain any debate around it as if it is set in granite to stand as is forever.
With such a monumental contribution to human rights and democracy, why do we have not only violent crime but unnecessary and mindless violent crime. In fact, why not take the debate a step further and label this kind action as terorist.
The definition according to The Concise Oxford is, "a person who uses and favours violent and intimidating methods of coercing a government or community".
This aptly describes an action, by more than one person, of violence and intimidation against the community and it is a snub against our government and constitution.
Somewhere in our deliberations about the democracy we have created there was not enough thought about violent crime and its capacity to intimidate and coerce communities into emigrating, vigilateism and barricading of homes and offices against these terrorists and their activities.
Many have said that they would gladly hand over money and other valuables, which this individual did, but were horrified at the levels of mindless violence.
The minds that shaped and are still shaping our constitutional and political future have to apply time to the conundrum of where and when on the scale do people acting as terrorists lose their automatic right to an absolute level of human rights because they have violently abused others and taken law abiding citizens human rights away from them.
The right to life is enshrined in our contitution and yet daily this right is hijacked many times over. Forget the debates around death penalties and prisons full to burting, we have a culture of violence that permeates every sector of society and no practical recourse for law abiding citizens in our constitution.

aplomb \uh-PLOM\, noun:
Assurance of manner or of action; self-possession; confidence; coolness

This word keeps cropping up in my life whether it’s conversation, reading, incoming daily email or just wishful thinking. It’s something I wish I had more of. I remember an ex asking me where I got such self confidence from and me having to admit that I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.

Maybe it’s all about pretence, something like the old stuck record, “Fake it till you make it”. Well I got a certain dose of it last week. Driving through the Transkei in a bakkie with an assortment of backpackers and renegades on the back sharing quarts and marveling at the Transkei greenery. I resist the Kerouac urge with a great and enduring difficulty.

The dose came quick and easy courtesy of one Bobby Dylan. “People are crazy and times are strange. I’m locked in tight, I’m out of range. I used to care but things have changed.”

In a flash I felt like some road cowboy ditching the past into the Time out of Mind file. The one that contains everything that happened before memory began.

That I received it second hand did not matter one iota, in fact I felt a bit like people who’ve just seen the light. How he would feel about a phrase like, “I found Bobby”, is anyone’s guess but it tightened up my life and the rearview mirror was no longer my primary concern as I became focused on the road ahead, full of bends and cows, minibus taxis and goats with wide open spaces interspersed with dotted villages and people watching time go by.

Nothing lasts forever but I don’t tire of reminding myself about that moment when I feel rutted and stuck in 1st gear. Onlookers and innocent bystanders must think I’m a little nuts when they see this curious grin slowly light up my face and then deep in the recesses of my eyes a small flame ignites.

It’s all about the small things, ain’t it?

Quoted lyrics played a crucial role in Wonderboys.

A bit of strange stuff this 6 word poetry but here goes: "The fat lady sang it again".

Details
Mini
Minimal
Minimalist
Minimalism
Minutiae

Stillness

incomparably satisfying
as without trying
I reach double my
usual daily distance
not ending my
writing upon sighting
forbidden heights
and futile fights
with damaging debate
are flung aside
as I resuscitate
appreciation of
beauty in stillness.

Cigarette smoke

Blue cigarette
smoke amidst
oak wooden odour.

Someone lights a cigar
then a pipe smoking
patron walks in.

Both disturb
the equilibrium.

The Dreaded Outsider.

The Dreaded Outsider evolved over a number of years, emerging from a lab project that combined an unfinished movie script, reams and reams of meticulous poetry often edited before pen even hit paper allied with an omnivorous and relentless capacity for introspection and analysis.

Having read some poetry and short stories at the Grahamstown Festival of 1999, Dreaded dropped out of circulation for a while with only a couple of readings and photographic exhibitions.

The scene is set for a return gig in Grahamstown 2008 complete with photos, performance art as well as readings from his novel manuscript.

Born and raised in Joburg he is still affected by flashbacks of the remorseless and unforgiving pace of the city that forces it’s participants into ever faster races against the clock and each other.

He is currently unromantically involved with completing a book and contemplating life without her keeps him awake both day and night, despairing of finding another mistress muse.

The influences in his work are sketchy but there are definitive moments of existentialist angst and the debt owed to Jorge Luis Borges is blatantly apparent.

Poetry is his ultimate weapon, as he favours brevity and economy, with the art of the short story filling in the gaps left by poetic miscalculation. Where the novel will actually fit in, is a mystery compounded by the fact that he generally refuses to talk about it except in general terms of a “peoples’ narrative” or a “factional novel”.

Concept art is another topic that he will debate endlessly and he has started to believe that there might be life after the epic Pink Floyd moment, ‘Dark Side of the Moon’.

Politics he is skeptical of and people amaze him and cause him to continuously reassess his optimistic confidence in their ability to learn from intentional mistakes.

He has been known to ruin a tune or two with the rasp that has been honed and perfected over many hours of inhalation laced with nicotinely, blue cigarette smoke.

His most humbling experience is being befriended and than adopted by a feral cat.

Joburg.

Looms forever painted,
just above a receding, framed
horizon that never quite disappears.
In fact, in dreams, I can almost
reach out and touch the space
it occupies but my fist clenches,
grasping madly at a vacuum.
The images I have, reside
only in my mind. They fit in with neither
history nor reality. And visiting
the city suffocates them, making me
distinctly uneasy. Dislocated as I
sometimes feel, the distance I inhabit,
sharing it grudgingly with the city,
consoles my soul.