double-dollop hybrid

biracial bones, and picking them precisely. prickly business. a double-dollop hybrid of the neither-here-nor-there: at best, complexity (black hair on my collar bones, eyebrowns, golden moustache, ginger pubes, white booty fluff). at worst: incorporeality (can i even attend this plenary?). the helices unravel into houses and hellholes; freckle me with footnotes to the two thems that make the us. race boxes: to tick or not to tick? that is the question. (also: which? also: what would one put in “other”, and may i? i probably should, just to be safe. also: safe from who?) a mengsel of wrecking ball histories blended in twine. centrifugal forces on the merry-go-round of liberal platitudes. everyone is spinning on the same giggling fulcrum, and no one can let the fuck go. a present tense, more tense, and loads of pretense. auburn curls that gobble up all this rainbow-rich air, a furnace fuming for a future i face with fat fists. the implacable quandary in the discourse of alien invaders, checkerboard urban planning, and siphoning labour like that sweet tik nectar to those creamy dik lips: you love the toast buttered on every thick side, you filthy parasite. oh poor dear, it’s not your fault. you were born into this. now do something about it. what? everything. i can’t. try harder. “we missed you at the lunch.”/”don’t remind me.” a bed on bricks piled like white minority wealth accumulation, bedazzled in potpourri privilege peppering me with zip-those-commie-lips, your forefathers tamed the wildlands – genocide? they were killing each other anyway. slavery? look at all the infrastructure though! land theft? well we gave them all those townships; you must concede. cultural erasure? go on back to the stone age then. coloured economic exclusion, the dwindling mixed minor notes at the collision of the san, the malaysian, the indian, brit and dutchman, kombuis afrikaans and stevie wonder. “hope you survive the N2.” property rights bring prosperity. (to my better/brighter/bitter half.) white centrality in global affairs, cultural production, humxn history and cosmic science, disneyland and nasa, universities and record labels, the printing press and brain-scans, microbiology and Shakespeare, airports and libraries, teatime at four and bedtime after television, metropolitan mall-milling and back-to-basics b&bs beside the gabled winelands estates. two world wars, nuclear proliferation, ecocide. “the arab spring achieved nothing.” coloured invisibility on the world stage, the eternal local is lekker in the shabbier suburbs of masons, mechanics and ma se kokery, teachers, nurses and civil servants, the listenership of heart radio dzezz, the neighbours of working-class immigrants, drug-dealers and jailbirds, the cotton-curtained and green-lawned, the crucifix-kissing and christmas-dinner-is-for-jesus-fucking-christ nothing-in-particular. a jewish lawyer’s middle-class enclaves in rustic muizenberg, the hippies are less antisemitic and they brew some fine chai. is this brie or earwax? and are coloured people allowed to care about the crimes of the dairy industry? the gated sub-polities of rondebosch and kenilworth in the woody crook beneath the mountain, sparkling pearly stubble on the chin of the coastline’s sea point bourgeoisie. along the mogul’s california beach-front double-storey, even the dog’s anus has employees, and the castles of the zionist shuls in sandton, johannesburg, annex the sky with their own rogue stars. apolitical brown people decrying daakies. bekskoot ‘cos i don’t play rugby, kap tol or vry with kinders. ears filled by the trough with paranoia from the proclaimers of patriotism, those applauding rhodes’s vision, hitler’s charisma and western civilisation, western civilisation, western civilisation. an alcoholic artisan’s abandoned daughters in the single-room flatlet, raised by the first coloured womxn to solo at the ArtsCape, the trio lodging modestly in an aunt’s bokaap family house. all this, none. none of this. hold on. i’m busy figuring this out. hold on: they’re at the door. all of them. all of us.

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This poem was published in New Contrast 187, Vol 47, Spring 2019. My utmost gratitude to guest editor Prof. Sally-Anne Murray, and all the staff and writers who made the Spring edition.