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Home

I live in a shoe box
which unhousels me
at wake, and squeezes me at sleep.

In dreams the seams
of the enclave push
further, each time,
to rise droopy eyed
to a reality more distant
than my coffee cup
in its unseated resting
place beside the computer.

My shoe box swells
with Shakespeare, vitamin C,
politics of some Russian, Libyan,
or Banana Replican.
Hair brush meets Pavarotti,
tooth paste leans against Mtukudzi
Air freshener on top of Dunhill
as faded blazers sport old boy ties
of a bigger legacy, I now have no part of.
Thank God for that.

Four diaries, half finished plays,
and dozens of chess books,
make Pandora blush
from this box.

At times, in this bookwormed
eighth of an octagonal whole,
I, like the wriggling leg of a
chess Knight, check the window
sill.

I am still by the window. Standing.

My bed takes up a third of the eighth,
the main feature of the shoe. Here
life lies flat, the sole flatterer
of a flatter/deflated poet who fattens
on the feet of words,
a tick with an ideas fetish
that paws at a four walled
prism from the kennel
of a prison
that corrugates green trees
outside,
interrogates lean ears
on the wayside-
a half baked asylum
where multiple voices
whisper and shout split
hemispheres of crashed
stock exchanges, rigged elections,
and of a coconut with the middle name
Hussein who will lead the US
past the Klan into the Barrack
of Luther's kingdom
without Martin or Thabo,
even though they all secretly
attend the same church
that blame
whites for inventing HIV.


Derranged dangled outside my window
like Damocles did yesterday.
Sometimes the fleyed carcas
of the Observatorian underbelly
comes drifting passed,
a hangman that speaks German
to collect his rent, along with his confidant
the American Pitbull
that bellows in Scrumpies its belligerent advice
to the drinks-sponsored East African
from Long Street
who still has the patience
to listen before bonking
in the back kitchen's staple feed of
drunken visa-exchange;
the requiste (coming-of-age)
exorcism of the African Myth.

Today, I will send a postcard to
the new president, reminding him
of the distant beauty of
a crying beloved country.
The letter will go :
“Dear you,
with love,
Home.”