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ISOJE CHOU
The Precision of Living
If we fear owls, it is because they eat those
in their own image. Killer birds however small are natural
enemies of other birds, big and small. I look at
the furniture in my apartment to see instead
the elementary particles. They swirl their intrinsic spin, conspire
my human comforts plotting my ultimate demise
and I who exists congregate mountain of their image is
prey of the gods. I see the gods atomic flee sideways as knife plows
through orange, teeth sink into apple, the congealed leg of a table indifferent to
the constrictions of human heart, the quarrels of human time,
these killer birds, these makers of me, the gods molecular;
the ecstasia of illustrious photons simmer around a bulb
to cause momentary blindness and I lose after all what it means to be
accepted or rejected, tribe or country or not, to have or not have
the absurdities of these fears in the face of the precision of
a crueler joke! With headphones on, I have
walked to your non-sense beauty, I have heard
the terror of fizzing particles the
nonbodies floating in aural waves; I,
who submits this single will
called my body
called my being,
which you shall crush soon enough
as you transform
into new forms,
walking in this borrowed body,
I begin to hear your impatience:
In the middle of a war, the failing warrior heard the following:
With a single fragment of myself I pervade and support the universe.
Life or death,
Antimatter, that brutal article, destroys matter destroys mirrors of itself
Killer atoms perform the origins of an end. The end of problems.
The end of dying. And I reach this place of mind
Matter devoured antimatter lives on in the insides
Of my head and I dream the night skies electrons
I dream the nearness and the distance
These precisions of living.
___________
TPB's notes: published in Contemporary Africa Poetshttp://www.centreforafricanpoetry.org
DAMBUDZO MARECHERA
I Used To Like Tomatoes
I get tired of the blood
And the coughing
and more blood
I get out of that flat real fast
to some cool quarrelling bar
and talk big to bigger comrades
washing down the blood with Castle an’ Label
shaking hands about Tsitsi bombed to heaven
trying to forget I don’t like cooking in dead people’s
pots and pans
I don’t like wearing and looking smart-arse in dead
people’s shirts an’ pants
(They said yoh mama an’ bra been for you
said these are your inheritance)
I’m soon tight as a drum can’t drink no more
It’s back at the flat on my back
swallowing it all red back hard down
I woke up too tired to break out so bright red a bubble.
__________
TPB's notes: Dambudzo Marechera, Cemetery of Mind, Which of you Bastards is Death?
ISOJE CHOU
Hell, or A short survey of comments read wide-awake at 3:45am
i.
Hunger,
Said one commenter to another
Is always a way to prolong life
I take the subway whenever I can
Came the original wall poster
LMAO replies another
Lolling in five exclamations
So I think my fb friends, said another
At 3:04, can do simple additions
You’re trying too hard to be
Attractive here, came the response
At 3:05. All my modest life I’ve been
Looking for reaches of time to know
Who I am said a non-sequitor
Maybe I’m trying to manage
Your expectations, came original poster
Lolling in seven exclamation marks
ii.
Little twists inserted here and there
Hell is a place allowed its own hounds
From ogun’s unheeding dogs of vexations
Right through trolls of europa’s tribes
A good balance between IQ-EQ-SQ
But the directions are never really clear.
Once death goddess of old norse tribes
Hell sits today mistress of the lighted
Screen, chthonic daughter of Looking
___________
TPB's notes:published in CounterPunch Online 2013-02-15Replaced an earlier poem at request of the poet.
DAMBUDZO MARECHERA
Smash, Grab, Run
Let the minutes unleash
The bullets Brixton wishes
Barbed wire is the ivy on my walls
Acrid cordite like mist in autumn
Dissolves the harsh street into pellucid cameos
Think how the striking truncheon outpaces thought
How the burgeoning Molotov cancels discussion
And for just this once in my black British life
Exploded the atoms in me into atoms of power
Let each viewfinder’s instant exorcise
The pictorial myths complacency devises
Each hurtling brick aimed to smash this enchanter’s glass
Aimed to loot the truths for so long packaged in lies
I am the hundreds of putrid meat in English prisons
In derelict houses, in borstals, the millions of condemned meat
Who let the grim minutes unleash their canned grime.
___________
TPB's notes: first published in Dambudzo Marechera, Cemetery of Mind.
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