Johnmichael's Poetry

Last night Herr B. again confounded us with his dissonances.  I cannot understand his unruly rhythms and ramblings, his preoccupation with complexity, disorder, his unexpected clashes of tone and timbre are to my ear cacophonic and unpleasant – the very opposite of mellifluousness exhibited in the dulcet cultured forms of H and S.  The man is not only deaf, he is completely mad.  All quartets with opus numbers above 100 are roadmaps to hell itself – a tortured distillation of his affliction.  Notes, prisoners from his dark unhearing world, clash against each other in an attempt to climb the walls of delirium, escape somehow to harmony.  But they do not, I assure you.  These mutants, these monstrosities are destined for quick extinction.  After the first few hearings they will be forgotten mercifully, I am certain, destined for the garbage heap of musical history.  Never to be played again.

 

INSPIRATION

Thank you Obscura for your albums and meanderings. Thank you Zeus for your daughters, their midnight crabbing for a phrase, a biro, a crumpled exercise book, quiet as a nibbling mouse. Thinking I was asleep. Thank all you inspirational fiends chuckling unquiet on bookshelves, piled on staircases, stacked in libraries, filed in dusty cobwebbed corners of ever expanding universes. Thank you William — all the Williams, back to that first tousled, mud-splattered schoolboy. Thank you Rosetta, charcoal, sulfate and carbonate, sharp-stone and bark. Thank you cerebellum, optic nerve, frontal lobe. Thank you my dear Neanderthal grunting at the scraping of a stick as dawn streams into the entrance of your cave. Thank you dream for bequeathing me this teaspoon with which to dig down into swathes of garden sod looking for a worm that may have wriggled from the light. Blind. Covered in crumbling, rearranged lumps of soil and rock. Thank you for this legacy, for the periodic table of letters — the twenty six disciples. Thank you Gutenberg.

 

MEMORY

He was a man with a photographic memory. Prisoner of his unwinding past; a cat chasing a ball of wool.  An ant caught inside a mountain of unrolling maroon carpet spinning, trapped in its pile, up a hundred steps to where the emperor and the empress wait to begin descent. Or towards a private aircraft waiting on the runway to take off over a thousand tomorrows.  Pencil in hand, condemned for life to write his history, each page, before completion, sucked from him into yesteryear’s vacuum cleaner bag.

No rest, no sleep.  Images chasing each other tormenting through his nights.  Somehow he manages to hang on to a few handfuls of paper, bundle them under his overcoat, race down to production.  There, actors, prompters, screen writers, camera men, directors toil to produce a single celluloid strip encapsulating some moments from his life. Condemned to watch this movie loop after loop, he sits alone in an empty cinema observing himself age, grow young again, unravel and rewind, reliving his transgressions, mistakes, missed cues, lapses of protocol and etiquette. Around and around again. They didn’t even leave him a pencil to jot down editing suggestions.

 

RAIN FOREST

Milford sound is not heard from this darkness, so dense that arms become tentacles in the night, dumbfeeling for the bathroom door. Blinking into this empty screen. I rewind yesterday’s road ribboning past primeval rainforest, winking into sudden mirror lakes, reappearing through jagged mountain peaks that edge this towering stage.  All these giants are dressed in mist clouds of lace and whipped cream. A wandering creek tangles through centuries old matressed leaf and moss green forest sinkings. Up, up hopscotching over fallen branches and trunks from forgotten millenniums I pick my way onto another and another foothold.  Round the last bend it appears rushing endless from between rocks that hide the sky into the arms of a pool. A robin, yellow breasted, his claws clamped with tiny red and blue conservationist bands sits on a branch a foot from my face unblinking, pointing the way back to thy lodge. Arms outstretched I grope my way back to bed. darkness cloaks the trail. I sink back into dreamlessness. My last thoughts about death and paradise are swallowed up into it. Tomorrow we will sail across Milford soundlessly into dancing rain.

 

OUR CATS

we started out with nine cats, princess was the oldest she might even still be living today because mrs fisher who lived upstairs and who always dumped her stone floor washing water into our garden took her, goliath and chinchi were russian blue brothers but chinchi got lost when we moved and someone left the door open on the first day, fistook got hit by a car he died on the way to the hospital then the neighbour’s cat had kittens and we took in two of them and afterwards found them homes, except that one went to two men who were living together and they held her too tight but they said it was only until she got used to the new place, clucky came up to the bedroom one night vomiting but we gave him some warm drink and he seemed alright but in the morning we found his body under a bush, the neighbor said he’d probably been bitten by a snake, phoenix who I called tigger got knocked down by a car, we fixed all the holes in the fence but somehow he got out he was a whole week in the hospital and on the very day we brought him home he started coughing blood in the bedroom and died after a few minutes someone dumped honey and damka in a garbage can as kittens, so we took them in they were full of fungus infections and one of the kids caught ringworm we gave both the kittens months of pills and injections to fix the fungus, honey seems ok now but damka got out over the wall and one morning we looked out of the bedroom window and saw his body in the road, dusky lives in the garden she only comes in at midnight to eat, often our dog angel barks at her but she still comes to eat we only actually see her once every few weeks but she looks good anyway now we’re down to three cats in the house honey, chippy who looks like the lion king and is maybe fifteen years old and moults so much we could make ten carpets from all the fur he leaves all over, and goliath who is so shy if you look at him when he’s eating he runs away, oh yes I almost forgot pie who was the oldest and at sixteen could hardly walk or eat and she got so thin and weak that the vet had to put her down so I buried her under a tree on the hill where she could get a good view the therapist we went to said that was a good thing to dothe other day we were driving about fifty miles from home and we stopped to look at the view and this very thin orange cat came up to us and started mewing so mom gave him a chicken sandwich and said please lets take him home but I said absolutely not so when we got home she phoned the animal rescue people and they sent someone out to pick him up now they’re finding him a home and they wrote to mom about it and she cried and cried, I really got annoyed with them when they said in the letter that whoever was driving the car should have been someone with more compassion as I reckon that where he was out there on a hilltop living off chicken sandwiches that people bring him is better than eating fancy cat food and getting run over by a bus

 

EPICURANT

It is true what they say about the cataclysm or it is not true, smacking his lips, a trifle overcooked but the honey and frankincense has created a devilish end-of-millennium hors d’oeuvre and the strawberries in crème de menthe with whipped triple sec clotting are decadent, pig eyes looking around for a flask of mead beady as Vesuvius, Chernobyl, carbon monoxide poisoning.

When I was your age Rome was freshly built and rightly so not in one day, there they all were; Socrates, Pegasus, Alexander of Macedonia all struggling in swampy mud, down Scrotum down, give him a bone somebody but not chicken – they splinter into legends, yes I could change the planet’s spin, lead armies into shining conquest, rewrite Homer, Freud – they say that Oedipus slew his father, for what – he was a drunkard – nonsense it’s all a fable perpetrated by charlatans and century benders, he couldn’t get an erection his mother told me in a midnight tryst, water rising Rome, Carthage, Atlantis, all of them sunk beneath the waves.

Nostradamus wrote about it in his seventh journal which was or was never published, destroyed in fire, burnt at the stake or crucified – nobody in those days paid any attention to it – a few earthquakes, locusts, black plague, they were all too busy carrying the bodies off the streets, nothing has changed since then, the writing was on the wall and no-one could read it, in the end it doesn’t really matter, nothing matters – do you know how many of them are out there?  four hundred trillion parsecs and boatloads more of them, yea more fish than you could fry in all your amplitudes, so what’s the difference, a pig’s knuckle, a boar’s head stuffed with artichoke hearts and truffles, what does it matter one more, one less, nobody listening to the warnings, princes, presidents, popes not a one of them in their conferences, their demonstrations of solidarity, of benevolence, pompous noggin beaters all of them, flesh and blood like the rest of us; Nero, Herod, Benedictus ad infinitum, like flesh after a feast, the water’s rising you say, nuclear fallout, polar caps melting, planet out of orbit?

Stop mumbling young man I say, go fetch more food from the kitchen, bring on the piece de resistance – a roasted phoenix - perfect down to his pomegranate eye sockets, fill up the glasses, drink up, drink up, a toast to Elysium or hellfire, drink up now, there’s more to tomorrow than regret or old men's hallucinations.

 

FANNING A DYING LOVE AFFAIR TWENTY YEARS AFTER SHARPEVILLE

It was like quince preserve, this honeyed astringency on revisiting the byways of my youth with their sweet summersand sporadic droughts, bare-footed children whipping tops with strings and spittle, yellow mine dumps everywhere looking down, flat topped with lust and greed, on sweat and pay envelopes with their promise of sour mash beer andback yard bedmates.

I’d paid my dues to Suid-Afrika more than once; this time to Livingstone Laka by twice in a row advancing him fifty Rand,which he had every intention of paying off, until drunk on cane liquor from a paper bag he cut two fingers off his left hand with the workshop bandsaw, wrapped them in toilet paper before passing out in the ambulance.

“Of course I wrote his debt off”, I told her, a nightgowned private investigator as she parted the curtains to view the servant’s quarters. “He’s back again”, she hissed, “after I explicitly told her no more visitors – and with a paper bag again.In the morning they both must leave.

“But she’s pregnant”, I said, “please let her stay, her sister will look after the baby”.

This sweet astringency as the aircraft lifted one last time over the trees, the golf courses - overfed snakes, sequin blue rectangles of the private swimming pools, the tended gardens, the red buses for whites, green buses for non-whites and the polished Jaguars, all fading behind into gold dust, the three of us not really attempting to revive our flagging love affairs with each other.

We never really hit it off, Johannesburg, my tarnished lady and I, but then relationships are at the best of times mouth puckering in their quince-sweet compromises.

 

DEATHBED BURLESQUE

The rear of the bus was round and blimpy like a colorful inverted U. Its body was shaped like a caterpillar on wheels; each wheel was a chocolate digestive biscuit and inside the bus were rooms, thumbnails of his life, moving compartments where actors and actresses cavorted and swung on trapezes like a vaudeville theatre full of surprises and happenings.  Here was Uncle George, there Aunt Ethel, Mr. and Mrs. Fotheringham, his own three children, doctor dentist and bank manager and over them all, across the squares the Letters, the Words, headlines made of smoke rings drifting across the cubicles like neon signs squeezed from giant toothpaste tubes.

The inside of the bus had porthole windows brocaded with rainbow snakes spread out like confetti rolls of every hue, they changed color and style of gyration according to the costumes of the participants, at times playful like carousel ballerinas but sometimes sad like slow turning Ferris wheels platformed and rickety with loose floorboard planks turning slowly in crescendos and diminuendos of slow motions. The children in the bucket seats were overfed and bloated, they cried crocodile tears to the accompaniment of a waltz-making concertina.

It was quite funny really, funny but sad, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as his life wriggled backwards towards an underwater circular glass window shaped like a woman pulling a face, fingers tugging lips apart to make a mouth, a cave, a tunnel of a throat, calm sweet milk-like waters and beyond that wriggling fields of hydroponic crocuses or mushrooms shaped like question marks waving in the tunnel, hello goodbye, hello goodbye as the waters lapped against the shores of an underground sea, warm comfortable and endless.