voorgeskrewe glimlae (prescribed smiles)

For the translation scroll down. The rhyme doesn’t switch perfectly. It’s based on a children’s song in afrikaans culture about a rag-doll who learns that even though she feels alone everything around her is wonderful and actually full of life.
I changed it.

Eendag was daar ‘n lappop, en sy was al te fraai, sy’t gesukkel met swart gedagtes van ‘n belt wat aan haar nek vas draai. Maar dis nou beter…
Net bietjie stilnox hier, was dit af met bietjie bier. Ons het wyn vir die pyn, myprodol en nog ‘n lyn. Maak jou valium fyn, spoel dit af met bietjie caine. Dorminoct is okay want dit is mos voorgeskryf, se tog net nee vir cocaine. Daar is sroquel en ritalin, concerta en gin Rivotril en grandpa en ‘n leeg gepompde maag met ‘n klein bietjie braak en ‘n hi-ste-rie-se maaaaaa.

One day there was a ragdoll, and she was just so very cute, she struggled with black thoughts of a belt tight’ning round her neck. But now it’s better…
A little stilnox here, wash it down with some beer. Wine and myprodol for the pain just don’t take another line. Crush your valium to powder, up the nose and then some caine. Dorminoct is okay, ain’t it prescribed anyway? Just as long as you stay, away from cocaine.
Seroquel and ritalin, concerta and gin, rivotril and grandpa and a tummy pumped empty with just a little vomit and a hy-ste-ri-cal mooooom.

WTF nights

 

May I make my umpteenth declaration, to “never get that drunk again… who the fuck put mayonnaise in my kettle?”

 

What’s are some of the strangest nights you’ve had? I’ve been through some really odd times myself.
Sometimes they just fallen into my lap and I just went through them, wide eyed, not thinking that they’re strange., other I’ve times gone into them myself. It’s basically like going from the static square of normality into an open space where there’s much more possibility for memorable things to come your way.

So, to the point.

First part in a nutshell: On Thursday I was in a club, hopping through clubs semi-seriously. We were looking for a friend’s boyfriend who ditched the shackles of his mild mannered sobriety and was now a strong independent skinny white guy. I met a girl that way, asking whether she’d seen him. I left after a short discussion and a caress on the cheek.

After we’d drank up our money searching through all the clubs the friend said she was going home. I decided to do the same.
Then I realized I was sick of dating my hand and it was about time for an affair with something I didn’t have to draw eyes on.

I go up to her again, buy her some shots. She physically tells me she’s hard to get. That’s fine, I can play that game. So I sit her down an-
there’s a phone call. The boyfriends officially missing. None of his friends are with him, his phone is dead, and she was his lift. So this girl and I went looking for him again. We split up and I suggested that we exchange numbers so we can find each other again (I’m smooth that way).

(Now here’s where it gets to be a weird night) Outside a McDonalds this hobo asks me for money. I’ve got ten bucks in my wallet, which I need for parking (it’s south africa after all). Being a suave motherfucker this hobo basically intimidates/coerces/charismatically persuades me into drawing some money from a secluded atm to give him. I decide screw it I’ve got like 20 bucks in the bank anyway, and I gave it to him.
Then hobo be like “could you give me a lift?”

The place he wanted to go to is called arcadia. That place is dangerous. I’m purposefully not metaphorising here. When the 2010 fifa world cup happened in south africa places like arcadia were the reason that bullet proof vests were marketed to tourists (of course that played on exaggerated fear, but still).

So this guy asks me to take him to arcadia at 2am in the morning and I’m thinking “screw it” (once again). So we wait for the girl, we get into my car and go out of parking. It’s 25 rand instead of 10, meaning I can’t pay parking and the hobo’s helping me out here. I drive, very cautious of a shanking while He tells us about his old police job and how he’s now a snitch working at homeless shelters.

 

wikimedia commons

“You’re lucky I didn’t ice you with the shiv I stashed in the Mickey D’s you bought me.“

So then it was her and I. She wanted more chatting up, and I was having a good time so we decided to head on out.

Most clubs here close at 2:30. If you’re out past then, you basically have 3 viable options dropzone, not a bad time if you don’t mind dudes in shorts, popped pink collars and faux hawks. It’s not the crowd I roll with.
Also the place sucks.

There’s presleys, which is where people “sokkie” (literally means sock-y, actually means a mix of classic and squaredancing). That can be fun too, but I’ve been propositioned by two mid fifties women in all leopard print stockings.
I avoid that place.

And then there’s Shcivas. Place holds hard “night before the morning after” stories, but it’s where everybody goes when they want to party but they don’t like dropzone or presleys. Pool tables, all demographics of people not many fights, place is aight.

Nothing good happens after 2am. This place gets busy at 3.

Her and I play some foozbal,l drink some more, go outside, smoke some pot, she falls on the floor and can’t mo-

Yeah, she fell down in the middle of the road and couldn’t get up. I immediately freak out and think that she got spiked, nearly forgetting her on the road to go take it up with the bartender. She asks me to take her to the hospital, we leave her car there, some dude who beat me at foosball kicks my car and we get to the emergency ward.

I’m still really stoned at this point (good weed) I have to talk to the nurses, explain the situation, get her a cup of water, which took me 2 minutes to find with the guy behind the desk telling me “behind you, in front of you, the cups are behind you now.. Turn around”

Best part was having to phone her parents to tell them “hey you don’t know me but I’m with your daughter in the hospital”. They come along, I say I think she’s spiked, but I’m pretty much obligated to tell the doctor she smoked pot with me, while the parents are around.

I left at five AM. She’s in Mozambique right now, we still talk. She’s a cool girl. And she’s bringing me back this really awesome beer that you can’t get anywhere else. It tastes like iced tea and it gets you trashed.

So yeah, all of those potentials I was speaking of are out there if you put yourself out there. You might meet the wo/man of your dreams (or a psychopath).

But in all seriousness. Moral of the story: if the bitch aint putting out, put her in the hospital. Also get her to get you some beer.

terug getrokke geheues. (+ translation)

Ons het geloop deur die donker, in twee en dertigste laan.
Nakend gegly op die planke, dronk op papsak, en die maanlig wat ons almal tot silhouete wou maak.
Ons het verdwaal in ‘n toekoms, blind van die lig wat dit sou straal.
En aand na aand het die duister ons ‘n bietjie ingehaal, en ons onthou nou, net ‘n bittere traan.
Tussen vriendskap, fucked up huise, ouers oorlede en die dagga en veilige strate.
Vyftien was ‘n goeie jaar, ons was ‘n broederbond, ons was elke naweek saam in ons wendy huis fort.
stoned saam met jou pa en dronk saam met jou ma, dit was die mooie tye in die riete in die vleie

En ek’s herhinner aan jou gesig, rooi van die blaker, van die lag.
Maar die die kat het jou gegryp by die gees en die neus, en die suur moes mos deug op jou tong. Jou tong. Jou tong. Jou tong.
‘n skouspel van are wat oor die grond groei soos die mure asem haal en jou neus begin bloei. Dis wat jy sal onthou as die mooie tye, met die mense wat saakmaak vir aand aleen. Ons het jou verloor, maar ons sien jou keer op keer en dit maak nogsteeds seer.
Ek soek jou terug. Maar dis te laat.
En nou…
En nou…
Ek pluk jou gees deur jou oe. Ek tap die swart uit jou longe en smeer dit deur die skemer hemelruim.’N skouspel tot sterwenis die son volg.

Dis al wat ons het
Dis al wat ons het

We walked through the darkness, in thirty second avenue, nakedly slid down slides, drunk on bagged wine in the moonlight that would turn us all to silhouettes.
We stumbled, lost in a future, blinded by the light it was supposed to shine.
And night by night, bit by bit, the darkness gained on us and now we only remember a bitter tear.

Between friendship, fucked up homes, parents deceased, and the weed and the safe slums.

Fifteen was a good year, we had a brotherbond
We were together every weekend in our wendyhouse fort.
Stoned with your dad and drunk with your mom, they were the beautiful times in the reeds and the rivers.
And I’m reminded of your face, red from the gales of laughter.
But the cat grabbed you, by the nose and the soul, and the acid had to be okay on your tongue, your tongue, your tongue, your tongue.
A tapestry of veins that grew over the ground while the walls breathed in, and out and your nose bled. It’s what you’ll remember as the beautiful times with the people that mattered, at least for that night.
We lost you, though we saw you again and again. It still hurts.
I want you back. But it’s too late
And now…
And now…
I pluck the soul from your eyes. I tap the black from your lungs and smear it across the twilight heavens
‘N skouspel tot sterwenis die son volg. A symphony that chases the sun unto death.
It’s all that we have.
It’s all that we have.

some days

The ash grows longer in your limp wrist while you watch its vapour trail rise toward the moon. You’re lonely. just a thought.

Two weeks ago I couldn’t sleep. I was up for around 50 hours I think. When it gets to be that long, every surface you look at turns liquid, as though you’ve dropped a pebble into a pond. Everything that needs depth perception becomes vivified, it begins expanding and contracting. It all starts breathing irregularly.
I dunno, maybe that’s just me not drinking medicine for a while.

But in the pre-dawn light I began looking at my hands. Their silhouettes turned into black rose petals that just fell away. I blinked. They were back, this time ash from cigarettes that had burnt out without being tipped for a long time. They fell off, disintegrated. I was interested, so I began focusing. I held them together at the tips of the fingers with palms held apart. Inside of them came a small sphere of pure ebony, spinning like a gyro with neon sparks dancing around it.
Then it turned bad. Images came up that wouldn’t leave. Vines in the shape of some canine, with transparent veins filled with black ichor, two vines instead of a head, feeling around with insectile madness.
The other images were demonic. The cat that came into the room frightened me. With my eyes open I saw things I didn’t want to see, with them closed the sounds of the cat’s movement terrified me. I prayed in earnest for the first time in what must be years. Eventually I surrendered and asked God “if You’re out there, use whatever this is as a sign so I’ll know.” I didn’t find the sign, I didn’t get possessed which I’d be able to use as a catalyst into renewed spiritualism. I just passed out in time.
I slept for 16 hours that day.

Tonight’s not like that night. I’m not terrified, I’m not experiencing a real sense of something that can be expressed in terms that would leave me with some catharsis. Tonight’s just a lonely grey.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened today. I woke up really happy, I realized I’d misplaced 250 bucks, I found it in my car. I received an essay mark back. 69% in the direction I want to do my honours in. I made an appointment with a barber I discussed a journalism project with my team and I came home.
At the end of this ordinary day I wonder where I’m going and what I’m doing. What the adult calls possibility in the adolescents future, the adolescent thinks of as uncertainty.
They say that the only difference between fear and excitement is your attitude. I guess that’s true, your glands just shove adrenal red bull into your veins before you decide how to act.

I’ve been afraid a lot in my life. I grew up in a home where my mother had some bad men as boyfriends. I couldn’t say anything to them when I was seven. All I could do was console my mother after an episode calmed down.
The fear of making waves and the empathy to a troubled girl stuck.
It leaves me feeling like I’m there to pick up pieces of something that’s already been broken. Every time I help a girl open up again, every time I help someone patch up her self esteem I fade into the background, or (if she wants to be there) I become bored. I never really thought about it. It had always just been a natural reaction and attraction, and now it’s become a jaded routine of something I’m conscious of.
I don’t know how to deal with it. With this medicated limbo or the sine graph emotions. The one seems functional yet empty. The other seems raw, real and passionate with the persistent danger of a meltdown in the back of my mind.

It’s the catch 22 of being able to really love, or being able to support the person I would love, financially. The catch 22 in seeing things that scare me witless or removing those very same things that make me feel alive in the purity of the good or bad things they bring on me. Life’s diametrically opposed that way isn’t it.

Even as I write this I don’t know whether I should write it off as self indulgent whining, or something real.
I don’t know if this is a feeling at all.

hallucidnations

The hooded reaver came in the night. It lifted a single shadow-dripping finger and all manner of terrors beset me.

These last few days I was at a friend’s home to make a weekend out of watching the dota2 international 3 tournament. Our sleeping routines were guillotined in the first night. I’m pretty used to little sleep, it suites me fine, and when I hit 40 hours awake the one morning it wasn’t really anything worth mentioning. A lot of people have those bouts now and then.

If you’re one of those people you might know the mild hallucinations you can get from sleep deprivation. It’s nothing major: solid surfaces become slightly liquid in texture and depth perception makes objects expand and retract sporadically like a windows-screensaver cube.

I like to have fun with these, just staring at stuff. And by that morning I’d gone a couple of days without medication.
So once my head hit the pillow I suddenly felt a fresh wave of energy. It happens.
To pass the time I figured I’d look at things. It’s always darkest before dawn and witching hour is three hours before that, so there must be trippy shit floating around right?

So here’s where it started.

Pale pre-dawn sunlight floated into the room onto a small part of the bed. I stared at my hands in that semi-darkness. The texture became a little more erratic than normal, my hands began bouncing around in size. I held them apart, touching only at each fingertip, with thumbs seperated from the other fingers.
My hands began disintegrating, they fell away into blackness, my fingers visibly turning to large black petals that came apart and floated away like ash. My eyes were drying out from being open for so long, but I was really interested. I could literally feel a certain change at the sides of my head, a sort of clenched light headedness.
Inside of the blackness where my hands couldn’t quite hold shape anymore there came a little sphere, a deeper shade of darkness than its surroundings. It was spinning like a gyro with small strips of lumo colour dancing through it like static charges.
I closed my eyes for a while and all manner of weird creatures forced themselves into my brain. Transparent veins filled with black ichor spreading out dendritically along the extremities of an insectile creature made of vines, some kind of one-and-a-half headed animal, and then the spirits. These were shapeless flux very much like lovecroft’s yog-sothoth. It didn’t take long for them to scare the hell out of me. When I opened my eyes again things went slightly out of control. I couldn’t enjoy those mind tricks my eyes played, they were everywhere now, without me being able to get a grip by just not staring. Everything was water and everything took on anthropomorphic shapes. The friends’ cat jumped through the window and lay next to me.
I’ve never been especially spiritually sensitive, and I’m not an advocate of opening oneself up to wyrd influence by way of symbols and thoughts, but in the dark there, with only myself and the purring cat, I became scared. I became worried at the strange sensation in my head. I became worried that I’d opened some spiritual door I’m not even sure I believe in through the shape I held my hands in when I concentrated. I became worried that I couldn’t distinguish between a bad trip (if that’s what this was) and a spiritual attack.

The cat jumped off the bed and and I closed my eyes to get the image of the walls breathing away from me. I opened my eyes because the sound of the cats movement was almost more scary than that view. Clawing at the bed, scrabbling fast across the sheets like some slavering imp…

I survived that bad trip with prayer and by falling asleep. I still can’t get some parts of it out of my head.

Expression: getting it out

Feel free to completely disagree with me about this, it’s simply my subjective point of view.

art is only expression. It’s only you putting yourself on canvas, movement, or the lines of a page or any other medium really.

Art (real art) not really so much of a desire as it is a need. It’s not so much something you want other people to take in as it is a need to get something out of yourself.

So the most beautiful instances of art come from something real, something organic, rather than a mundane “pop” piece. That kind of art debases its creator. That kind of art is forced for whatever reason, whether it’s profit, or an uneasiness that can’t be expressed easily. The true form comes from emotional extremes, euphoria, elation, hatred, depression, despondency and so on.

What I wonder about is whether it’s even possible to express something if it’s all you’ve known your whole life.

If abuse, love, comfort, suffering, neuroses, co-dependency, wealth or poverty are your only frame of reference, would you even know that it’s something that needs to be discussed? Would you realize that it’s not normal to live within that context and that there are other ways your life could have gone? Would your art have any depth beyond aesthetic beauty if it cannot express something that you don’t realize is unique?

Who knows. It just frustrates me that there might be a lingering problem in the recesses of my head that I don’t even realize should be adressed or expressed. Maybe I have problems or priveledges that I’m too ignorant to know about.

Maybe it’s the same for you. Maybe we’d all know ourselves better by observing and (really) getting to know each other.

embers

I’ve fostered all of you, singed by a father figure’s flame

ignorant of Beelzebub’s furnace forging flashes and lashes searing scars on my back

leashed by that lash, by those smoking scars on my back,

the Father’s of flies’ footsteps burn on my trail

coals in his eyes and a mouth filled with despicable blasphemies repeating, repeating, repeating

beating and screaming and leaving me weeping with borrowed blasphemies echoing on a tongue that still echos your Narcissism.

With my woos and affections I’ve knitted stitches onto your infected wounds, leaving you gangrenous, trying to emulate the father figure my life forbade

But what can be given to your molten shard of self esteem but love?

What can be given when your perception of your reflection in that shard shows nothing but another ember dying in the breeze?

I’ve scorched my bones, bleached to black, as sweet apocalypse sings its song on my summer’s breeze.

 

 

Life’s winter is done. (draft)

All those days of childhood laughter passed, you sat in a dark room, as your wings molted much too fast.

Life may never have been perfect, with a daddy missing while your mother wept. and her pills, within reach.
You bled your tears on an open page like the walls you used to cover in scribbles and paint.
You’ve found your art, it was your release. When with a page full of thoughts, you drifted to sleep.
As an elderly boy of fourteen.

Life gets harder while you grow up. You miss heaven’s beauty while you’re looking at the ground, can’t think of tomorrow when you’re stuck in the now, then you escape in bottles and riz, you find a tiny little moment of forget bliss. And things aren’t so bad.

Life seems to lose all simplicity when your body’s in your twenties but your mind’s nineteen, with sudden dreams you get memories of your mother hiding from your stepdaddy,
And her telling you, that it’s okay. Tomorrow
we’ll be on our way.

And through it all, the sleeplessness would stay, you’d still lie awake until the moon would fade. And the grey of day you’d find that another twenty pages bled from your mind.
Your stories got you to sleep.
Your stories delved your dreams.

In time one or two more broken hearts drove you to just seeking some memory loss.
And you know there’s a shortcut.
with one cup of water and one or four pills, you reached the heaven of oblivion.
Where you found what you wanted: Nothing.

And perscription and addiction took your body and your soul, and you found yourself in that darkened hole, that nothing you wanted was now all you had, you lost your way on such a very numb path.

And it took three years and a major break down and a mother nearly cracking to bring you around,
and you knew times had changed. Coming down from blackness brought the passion again, the heart of your mind was bleeding again.

All along the pills were you’re enemy, while you couldn’t sleep you were creating beauty.
Your art and your pain were one and the same, brought on by the blood that was your heritage.
And your pages were all full of red, your fingers sticky, where you bled
On a mother and a lover
and everyone that had to take your shit while you lost your mind trying to save it.

The coping mechanism has always been the cure.
Three days awake gave you your best literature.
Twenty four, will be better.

proseform of sigur ros’ “baba”

It’s been a long day, building frankenstein words out of blocks in front of a television filled with animal suits. Mother’s lullaby fills your world with love as you’re drowned in the daze of exhaustion. On the edge of blackness there’s only a faint smell of alcohol on breath. And then you’re asleep. The moon grows and where darkness falls, imagination fills the void with fantastical beauties, in fact the mystic beings of the eve slide from the ethereal to the material.

Luminous orbs in iridescent lights keep shifting chakra-shades, indigo to yellow. These prestigidations swirl around your swaddled body with a sense of contained urgency. The magic does not sprout from fey godmothers or celestial benefactors, it is an autonomous faceless design that keeps you safe for the gifts that have yet to birth on your breath. The wisps crowd and dance in a bizarre eddy of liquid colour. They nearly swarm, and where they do, they leave ember-trails of tiny phantasmal pictures: possible futures, which rise in their wake, before you wake.

And in the morning you remember dreams that could only be imagined by an ayahuasca-mad shaman, and you’ll try to express them with building blocks with letters on them.

The Worthless Truth

Racism, sexism, ageism, any kind of prejudice really, is justified by the people you see in their lives. You see them on the streets (where you don’t talk to them) you see them at work where nobody is really themselves (we put on another face and call it professionalism.)
So why do people expect those people whom they apply generalizations to, to actually be the person they think they are at all?
Have you ever gone home with one of them into a township? Have you ever seen their private life of bliss or spousal abuse?
By weird happenstance I’ve known the dangerous kind of drug dealers. I’ve shared cigarettes with overall wearing day-labourers and asked them about where they come from and what they see every day. I’ve shared A KFC twister with a homeless man in Cape Town and apart from teaching English to Arabs and a couple of subjects to African grade school kids with some very, very messed up households I’ve interviewed refugees from central Africa and I’ve studied three kinds of social sciences.
And through these kinds of experiences I’ve given up on making assumptions about someone I don’t know. There are too many unknown variables. We make assumptions because it makes it easier to understand something at a basic level before we can interact with it. It’s just sad that, that thing can be a human being. So I speak to the racist. I don’t argue with an uncle who tells me that “black peoples’ heads just don’t work right”. I don’t allow myself to scream at a cousin and slap them upside the head when they tell me that this country was better before apartheid ended.

It would be pointless.

All I’d do is invoke the ire of someone I don’t know or even someone I may love. We have a popular novel about long ago South-Africa called “Kringe in die bos” (Rings in the forest), where one of the plot devices surrounds the then-held belief that the blue-buck’s gallbladder sits in its head. Nobody ever checks, everybody just knows it. The main character, Saul Barnard becomes disillusioned with the way his society believes that everything has its place. He cleaves the head of a buck open and the gall bladder’s not there. The question remains: “What other lies did we believe?”. The book’s especially important for my parents’ and grand parents’ beliefs around race. (Almost all of the ones I know have changed.)

We all believe lies, we don’t even know how many we don’t even know about. In the event that any religion is false in actuality. If every word from its scripture is a lie it wouldn’t matter.

The reality of our beliefs are much less important than the way those (potential lies) affect our lives. The Romans believed their emperor to be god. He (probably) wasn’t, but it does not make one lick of difference to all of the countries who were slaughtered in his name. The same can be said of Egyptian sacrifice to animal gods. Here in Africa there’s still a lot of female circumcision, where the clitoris and both labia are removed with a knife and no anesthetic so that a woman will not cheat on her man. Sometimes the Vagina is sown up after.

So the reality of the situation becomes irrelevant when the effects of the lie define society. When someone willfully keeps they’re frame of reference small they can’t understand the truth through a retelling.

And that’s the problem with humanity isn’t it? We’re doomed to repeat history’s mistakes because we’re completely incapable of understanding second hand lessons from it.

I’d like to add some photos of the townships here in South-Africa to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, but I can’t find any that wouldn’t infringe on copyright. Google the images. That’s real poverty.