Science of Being

i.
Consequence has left me
to splash in its puddles—
like a child in the remains
of a storm.

All I recognise
of the face I once knew
are teeth that refuse to stay
behind my smile.

ii.
The view from upstairs recalls
the taste of lips pressed
to a window, summer legs
laced together like a bow.
How I wished to soar
over lampposts and freeways
into Joburg's jigsaw skyline.

Eyes like sunflowers even then
sought Ponte: tall
and circular— and fatal
to a boy who fell to his death
in a long-ago headline
that read: Playing Chicken.

Innocence cried to concrete
angels who hid within those city lights
that floated in the blackness
like bubbles in glasses
of sadness.

iii.
Some dreams scratch rust
from coins of what is lost—
yet here identity lies,
covered in the sands
of what cannot be changed,
its nature stained by leaking
years and curling incense
in yesterday's bedroom.

I still can see her back
to the door, slate cardigan,
thick like grief's shroud: mother
turning slowly to stone
in the wake of his suicide.

Water has fallen and risen
and fallen again. Grass has grown
deep and flowers have shed
petals like flakes of skin
around his fountain.

iv.
Were hands to clasp and head
to hang,
my prayer would be for oblivion,

or for words to form patterns
on pages with no thought
since logic
bears no resemblance
to wisdom.

Pleasing to connoisseurs:
these words,
this blood-wine
posing as poetry—
a trite word for something so grave.

v.
I digest books finish to start,
the need to believe in happy
endings a result of being last—
born.

Teddy-bear remnants
of a girl who abandoned
the need to conform
have become art.

I fidget with the alphabet
like worry-beads
and arrange words
to split the ground like a cross.

vi.
When stars rise,
that long, familiar silence
settles thinly like oil across my ocean

and what is lost
permeates everything
that may have been found.

Traces of laughter
remain suspended
between then and now—

where dark circles frame
the caterpillars of my mind
and the moon in my eyes never sets.