HOCUS-POCUS

The tooth fairy and the Easter bunny

Sat drinking one night in a bar

When Santa Claus walked in with a swagger

Already drunk and disorderly and itching for a fight

After Snow White had given him shit again

Because she felt guilty that she had been with Mowgli

And Casper the barman had to raise his voice

To calm things down as Jesus walked in with Goldilocks on his arm.

Outside the dwarves were on their knees

And the giants with their swords held high

Were mowing them down left and right

While the sun and the moon were having high tea

And the king was fucking the queen’s daughter

Behind the farmer’s barn while the cows looked on disapprovingly

Asking each other what had become of the world

When even the raindrops were falling skyward.

When I grow up in a million years

I’d want to be an ophthalmologist at night

And during the day I am going to be a conjuror

I’ll charge all the near-sighted followers exorbitant sums

To open their eyes so that they can see

That all the hocus-pocus that they claim to believe

Is what keeps us blind and dumb like the animals on a farm
Each in its own pen in seeming harmony.

City Bowl Blues

The sharp edges are brushed by polluted shades

As the day expires flirting graciously with the dusk

The angry hard drive buzz is reduced to a calmer hum

The island, the ships, the further shore.

A neighbour lingering at his door

Chatting to some girls with his boy in his arms

But mommy’s not happy and comes out to get her son

Sometimes sitting here on the balcony can be such fun.

Evening descends with a touch more fuss

A teenager gets scolded for missing the bus

The professional makes way for tired and casual

The smog and sun’s afterglow creates something special.

Birdsong drifts fragile as the cacophony subsides

To be shattered by a roar as a traffic light changes

Moving in unison despite their strangeness

And the general mindlessness besides.

Hues of grey and crimson mingle with a far truer blue

As the moon and sun share the blossoming sky

Carrying the smell of a thousand suppers

At home and with friends or simply alone.

Night heralds its arrival with a base beat thumping deep below

The city is transformed beneath its neon halo

The island, the ships, the far shore, the twinkle and flash

Indistinct shapes roam dark shadows in search of cash.

The ocean spills up into the infinitely black firmament

Yet more pointless loss and destruction are imminent

When the passion lies denied, festering, waiting to die

And the look in your eyes fails to hide your lies while the city cries.

Agterbaai patat...

Another magical sunrise at the 'Back-Bay'

The Khoi Gxam Poet

ORDER NOW!

...Because poets also need to eat! And drink...
Order direct or purchase your copy at Bolo'bolo Anarchist info shop & vegan cafe in Observatory!

R100 per copy or R80 per copy for orders of 5 or more... (Incl. postage!)

NON-POOR ONLY

Download and spray this stencil in places where residents are being evicted, victimized, discriminated against or being denied access to services and amenities based on their socio-economic status.

I DO STILL FEEL

I do not feel like indulging foolishness

In any guise or disguise

The masks of mindless metaphor

Without any rhythm

Cut and bleeding, pasted rhymes – just lines.

I often don't feel like indulging fools

Who continue to subscribe

To the debilitating proscription of culture

And the dogma that thrives unchecked or challenged

While we insulate ourselves from the other!

I no longer feel like indulging the folly

Of unconscious rhetoric, making excuses

And justifying our indifference

As our impotent submission

Allows atrocity to become normality.

And yet I do still feel that we can make the difference

I do still feel that there is hope

I do still feel that we have a chance

I do still feel the soul pervading beauty

I do still feel such overwhelming love.

Mal-Adjusted - with sound-scaping by Glen Arendse...

Image by Joy Owen

Mal-Adjusted

Poetry by Mikey DW with Glen Arendse...

MAL-ADJUSTED

APOLOGIES & LEGACIES

How would you react

If I arrived at your door

Unannounced and insistent

To fry the bacon

And sit in your favourite chair

The remote control in my hand?

How would you feel

If when you opened your mouth

I beat you

To within an inch of your life

Then raped your wife

And told you to be grateful?

What would you say

If I then declared it my right

The privilege of my superior might

And my brutally civil intellect

To have a child with your daughter

So that someone could dig your grave.

What would you think

As you lingered at death’s door

If I told that child not to worry

That your suffering will end

Pray and you will be forgiven

When you get to heaven.

Would you accept my apology

Even though I think I did nothing wrong;

Would you believe my sincerity

Even though your home remained my own;

Would you be able to forget

When constantly confronted with this legacy?

KNOCK-KNOCK

Knock-knock:

Who’s there?

It’s me; the person you do not see

Through your peephole

The unfamiliar stranger

Standing on the outside

No longer sure what I’m supposed to be.

Knock-knock:

What do you want?

I’m so busy

So many things to do

Things that do not include you

Why are you still out there?

Get away from my door.

Knock-knock:

Please let me in?

I was born here,

It was once my home

Long ago before you moved in

Now I have nowhere to go

And no pillow

Upon which to lay my head.

Knock-knock:

My knuckles are bleeding

Raw from all of the knocking

Trying to get back in

To return to the fatherland,

The place where I was conceived

Where I now stand knocking

Dying to get back in.

Waiting - Bolo'bolo 2nd edition launch

Reserved - Bolo'bolo, 2nd edition launch. Observatory Cape Town

Die Varke - Bolo'bolo Observatory, Cape Town

Namibia - Book Den, Windhoek

Mal-Adjusted!

with Mikey DW & Glen Arendse... 

sound & verse

@ The Anarchist Bookfair

cnr Wesley & Milton Rds. Observatory

Sat 7 Dec - 11.30

a spontaneous collaborative expression

Bang Bang - Spoken Word Namibia, October 2013...

This Ain't It! Spoken Word Namibia - October, 2013.

Bolo'bolo reading - October 2013

A Germ... # 2

I’ve been searching all my life

Actively seeking and silently observing -

Reading, feeling, breathing in -

The sounds and sights and rhythms;

I’ve been trying to tie down

This thing that we’re sold -

Google it, and you’ll see what I mean -

Endless pages of game lodges

With a couple of NGO’s in between:

I couldn’t find it on the street

And most of the books I tried to read

Were published by institutions

That exist to perpetuate

The paradigm

That laid the foundation

For our shame.

A Germ... # 1

First things first

Everything that you believe

Is not fact

Most of what you’ve been told

Is just wack

The things we think of as truth

Are in fact

Just a series of ill-constructed lies

Time to wipe the sleep from our eyes

And realize

That knowledge is not one side of a story

Be wary of the praise-singers

Who paint the oppressors

In benevolent shades of glory

As history is rewritten

With inference and theory.

KAROO

Yellow is just another kind of orange...

Avian Icarus...

The beauty of sunrise...

die Vuur, die Wind & die Water - 2013 fillum projek...

Spoken Word Namibia - Punchlines...

Pic by Helvi Elago

THIS AIN'T IT!

This is not what liberation entails

After the centuries’ travails –

After all the revolutionary rhetoric –

The privilege of paying with plastic,

For these neo-colonial

Baubles and beads

That we believe sets us apart

From the heart of suffering

As we strut our stuff in this high-yield fashion

Ignoring the insidious oppression.

A welcomed enslavement

To the boardroom plantation master

And the billboard aspirations

That we have been sold and

For which we’ve made

The down-payment;

Happy to believe whatever

We’re told because

The advertisement said so

And the ads never lie.

Humanity has been decocted

Every one of us bar-coded

Noble ideals discarded

Notions of substance confused

By the mainstream jargon

That not too long ago

Still labelled my ancestors

Terrorists and dissidents

And rabble-rousing miscreants

Who had to be detained.

This cannot be the African dream

Nothing is what it appears to be

There will be no African dawn

While we still mourn the murder

Of parents and siblings and lofty ideals;

Freedom’s refrain usurped

By a chorus of muted appeals

As the blood congeals

On the sidewalks and highways

And the gutters of the ghettos.

This is not what our forefathers died for,

This is why they were killed.

@ Bolo'bolo, Observatory, Cape Town...

Khoi Gxam & Noplot...

with Cecil Moller (Windhoek, Namibia)

Book Den reading - with Namibian poet laureate Mvula ya Nangolo

I LOVE YOU Workshop - Windhoek Namibia...

Simon (Sand) & khoi gxam

A LOVE LETTER FOR THE EPOCH

Cape Town writer Michael Wentworth launches the second edition of his poetry collection

When: Saturday 12 October

Where: Bolo’bolo – 76 Lower main Road Observatory

Time: 14h00

Cape Town-born writer, director Michael Wentworth, who currently resides in the Great Karoo where he is working on a new novel, returns to the city in October after a sold tour of Namibia, for a reading of selected poems from the second edition of his collection of poetry titled A Love Letter for the Epoch.

Born in Lansdowne, Cape Town to a diversely talented family, Mikey, as he is affectionately known to friends and colleagues, patiently and determinedly nurtured his dream to be a writer since his primary school days.

Wentworth became independent from a very young age, traveling continuously between Cape Town and Windhoek to visit his Namibian family. These trips soon morphed into traversing across the length and breadth of Southern Africa, profoundly nourishing and honing his skills through many encounters and projects with a broad spectrum of creative South Africans. These experiences are reflected in the diversity of his offerings as a journalist, playwright, director and poet.

Wentworth started out writing children’s theatre in Taung in the North West in 1996 and two years later his play Inside the Rainbow was shortlisted for the British Council International New Playwright’s Competition. He has since written and directed numerous dramas and musicals. He has collaborated with household names such as Itumeleng Motsikoe, Peter Mashigo, Mbali Ntuli and Manaka Ranaka but most of his work over the last decade has been produced outside Cape Town, so, atypically, he is somewhat of an enigma to his home audiences.

Career highlights include the musical Torong – A Place to Dream which he wrote, composed and directed as well as his one-man play Waiting which opened at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival in 2008 and featured live musical accompaniment by multi-instrumentalist Hilton Schilder. The following year Wentworth returned to Cape Town to direct and co-produce with brother Gary Wentworth the multi-disciplinary performance Live rAge, which was an 80^th birthday tribute to the poet and writer James Matthews, who has been a source of inspiration and encouragement over the years. (One of South Africa’s famous self-publishers whose debut collection Cry Rage was the first book of poetry to be banned by the Nationalist government.)

In 2010, the fifteenth commemoration of the murder by hanging of Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, Wentworth wrote and co-directed the play Progres’ that drew attention to the ecological devastation of the Niger Delta and the struggle for self-determination of the Ogoni people. He is known for such activism as well as his writing workshops with juveniles and youth at risk, encouraging them to develop alternate ways of self-expression.

While Self-Publishing now internationally accounts for most new work available in traditional and social media, this is still a very brave exercise, especially in South Africa.

Moreover the act of publishing one’s own verses is even more daunting at these rather complex and menacing times. A Love Letter for the Epoch however consists of poems that have been written over the last two decades and should be read as a creative take on the “birth” era of South Africa’s democracy. The Foreword to A Love Letter for the Epoch is written by fellow writer and poet Keith Adams who was first introduced by mutual friend and music director Abdel Naroth in 1995.  

Copies of A Love Letter for the Epoch will be available at R100. Further orders can be made directly from Michael Wentworth.

For more info email mikeywentworth@hotmail.com or call 0765157700

The Windhoek reading - at Book Den

The surrogate family farewell...

The Viewing Party

die Vuur, die Wind & die Water - Part 1

die Vuur, die Wind & die Water - part 2

Launch details to follow...

Cover art by Donovan Ward

From A Tale of Extra Ordinary Madness

(By Mana Neyestani)

Then the singing starts; wordless, sweet harmonies as if in the presence of an impromptu, choral ensemble drowning out all other sounds and thoughts with its beatific song of ethereal delight; but with a barely discernable undertone of culpable discord.

I am swept away on the turbulent night breeze, away from my misery; away from the misery of others, the misery of the city veiled by bright neon signs flashing its deceptive welcome to those who can afford its vituperative charms. The decaying buildings which once housed the depraved and the masters, painted in fashionable, muted colours, with sand blasted glass and aged wood and shining chrome façades: home to the obliviously hip and happening.

The once impervious mountain mother, the majestic Hoerikwaggo, brought to its knees under the interrogator’s harsh, relentlessly brilliant white light despoiling the beautiful face of the city.

The electrified grid of streetlights stretches away across the flats to darker corners where a more blatant misery roams the alleys. Undisguised and often unacknowledged within the bustling, thumping conurbation where the blind reign supreme.

The driving bass beats are replaced by gunshots and screams and cries; the raging, manic silences that can no longer be penetrated or dispelled; the unvarying misery of the hopeless and the perpetually downtrodden.

 The sound of babies wailing and children sobbing, hungry mouths feeding on mucous and craving for a more substantial repast. 

The Conglomerate Logo

2nd Edition

To those who didn't get a copy the first time 'round, the 2nd print of A Love Letter for the Epoch will be available soon! Hope to see you at one of the future readings...

Simplicity - a thought inspired by Voltairine de Cleyre.

One day I will die.

Hopefully

as I have strived to live:

a free spirit.

An anarchist,

owing no allegiance

to rulers

in heaven

or on earth.

Day four - filming 'Boytjie'...

The more we explore, the more we discover...

Every day of filming sees another young mind light up as the pieces fall into place and the creative vision evolves and roles blur because everyone begins to assume all of the roles; as every one becomes the director, producer, DOP... As each one becomes everyone...

The Opening of WASTED...

(By Blu)

(MUMBLING TO HIMSELF AS HE ENTERS, SHUFFLING WITHOUT ACKNOWLEDGING THE AUDIENCE. HE IS DRESSED IN COPIOUS LAYERS OF CLOTHING. HE TAKES HIS TIME UNTYING THE TRAILER) Consciousness, context, content, contempt … conscience! What a waste? Just words without form, but with a definite function! Consciousness, context, content, contempt, conscience… All conveying nothing of substance to the unconscious! Such fools; such idiots! But I must talk last because I am the biggest fool of all; I am the original idiot! Sweet words and passion and noble ideals – enough to enlist my bleeding heart in this hair-brained scheme! (HE POSITIONS THE TRAILER SPECIFICALLY) Such irony; raising consciousness about waste and at the end of the day, all of the effort will more than likely be wasted! Why would anyone care? Its just waste after all: rubbish, dirt, refuse! I should have refused. (HE CHUCKLES TO HIMSELF) Fucking fartists! Trying to make a statement: turning all this kak into art! If this is art then art is kak! (HE HANGS THE BIKE IN POSITION AND A LIGHT GOES ON AND A FAN BEGINS TO OSCILLATE. AS HE TURNS, TO THE AUDIENCE) Good evening and welcome to this wasted journey…

Mana Neyestani

HERE...

I think about the million moments, some forever burned into my memory, others – so many others – forgotten, lost forever in the general anarchy. The endless journey, the infinite paths down which I wandered in search of the next picture; the people who shared their joy and misery and the last morsel of food with me; the many lovers who shared their beds and mine; the endless nights and interminable days that led me here...
(From A Tale of Extra Ordinary Madness)

FEAR

Sometimes being in this cell is a comfort. I am afforded the space to be fearlessly lucid; to see things with a clarity that details what the dominant reality truly is: as opposed to the intriguing, deceptively beguiling veneer and the fear that stops us from seeing things as they really are.

Inside these four walls I do not have to compromise my perception because I am compromised by my actions.

I do nothing therefore I can think everything through with a clarity and honesty that penetrates the often self imposed haze of preconception and dogma; the recitations detailing right and wrong and morals and values and views and opinions. And if you ever wake up you realize that your identity was handed to you as a puzzle in a box and you put it together incorrectly: squashing pieces into spaces where different parts were supposed to go.

Out there the frenetic pace of living becomes a distraction and when people can become anything they want, they choose to be one of those gaudy, clay garden gnomes.

For all of the supposed sophistication and nouveau-cultured civilization there are very few trees left in the forest of humanity: mostly it’s just shrubs and weeds and creepers trying to cling onto the exposed roots of the few giants who once stood tall, or those who remain towering for now; mostly untainted by the malignant rot.

We become too afraid to be!

Too afraid to observe or even contemplate the irony and contradiction and the unthinking, unquestioning mindlessness that we’ve been convinced is the only way for us to be within the fragmented collective of our species-defined humanity.

Inside these four walls I am forced to befriend my demons even after they have been gauging deep scars in my flesh; I have to rip the scabs of fear from all of the wounds that have never healed.

My dignity pillaged; humiliated; denied my physical freedom; prodded and probed and dissected; stripped of my humanity I am finally able to observe through an untainted, pristine lens: finally I am the observer I have always aspired to be, and I have no camera.
(From A TALE OF EXTRA ORDINARY MADNESS)

GRAND EVENTS & LITTLE ACHIEVEMENTS

(By Blu)

I sometimes think about the things I took for granted: little things that in the moment are insignificant: until they are denied.
And then the inconsequential little nothings of days gone by take on a magnified import that makes me realise that I actually wasn't present in the act of my own living.

So many years are wasted going through the motions: years that are marked by grand events and little achievements that account for mere days or sometimes even hours and no matter how hard I try, I cannot piece together what I did with the rest of the time. 

I remember how sometimes after I was paid for a big job I would withdraw a budget from the bank with which I would go out and party. The next morning after I awoke, I would check my wallet and work out where I had spent the money and for the most part I would be able to figure out almost exactly how much I had spent on what; but now I’ve discovered that I cannot do the same with time.

Huge chunks of the budget have disappeared. And not through a loss of memory, but simply because I didn’t think that what I was doing at the time was memorable enough to remember.

And another second fades away and is gone, without a backward glance and no goodbye; forever.

(From 'A Tale Of Extra Ordinary Madness')