ode to the ABSA add

my bank is corrupt
my bank is greedy, is selfish, and an unforgiving self serving machine
my bank buys poets to cheapen their words for its cause
my bank takes these words of poetry and sells it to mass media corporations
with an aim to brain wash as many viewers as possible to buy into the image
of my bank
my bank sells businesism as a religion, my bank fills peoples hearts
with the empty hopes and dreams of money
my bank stands for nothingness, and its soul is empty
my bank in itself is no threat, but it’s lack of imagination, it’s dullness of spirit
its banality makes me want to vomit
my bank will hate me for these words
my bank will threaten me with lawsuits for speaking my truth, for
not falling in line
and if my bank can’t silince me by legal means they will pursue illegal ones
but my bank doesn’t realize that that they can do nothing to me that can’t be done
they are mere manipulators
my bank evokes a sick society upon a sick society
my bank is my hatred, my sorrow, my ignorance, and the bleakest past
to my bank I’m just a number, a no name, a figure, a graph, a statistic
my bank wriggles it’s wormy body into cyberspace, and manipulates every
dot com for its own gain
my bank is always flawed, cause it doesn’t understand the meaning of love
ABSA, never today, never tomorrow, never together

The theatre of my death – just one of those evenings

‘Welcome, to the theatre of my death!’
you purple laughing hihinas
blowing speech bubbles of hibiscus
in my face as I twinkle and torture over immortal words
then another sip of bloody red whine
as I crumple the page and set it alight
i pour a whisky as crowds in concentration camp styl jeans
loudly applaud… ‘O, come on laugh’, I command
while lighting a cigi between my teeth
with the page burning between my fingers
‘welcome to the theatre of my death!’, I holler again
and I drop the fireball page into the whiskey
after the hissing war of water and fire ceases
i take a sip collecting loads of black ash on my tongue
giggling to myself like a little girl
‘You fuckers, you came for the final show?’, i ask
drunken words squeezed out like drunken fucks
‘Come on, stand your man, raise your fists.’
i shadow box around the empty room
‘Come on motherfuckers!’
i swing at the dark with my fists and imagine
young teen age girls squealing with pleasure
then I feel tired, and sit down at the edge of my bed
i stare at all the emptiness, the loneliness
that this single candle lights up with so much ease.
i sink my warm head deep into my palms
‘The theatre of my own death.’, I giggle
then I roll back and invite another chapter of sleep in
with out taking my shoes off

©2007, Sjaka S. Septembir, unpublished poem

20 March 2007

To me there is an interesting thing in the word 'courteous' where it contains a large part of the word 'courting'. So i don't pronounce the word as [kur-tee-us] in this case, but rather as [kor-tee-us]...to bring the courting back into the being courteous...Well this poem is about being courteous in courting.

I know i said i want to concentrate on archiving older poems. But i've been itching to include something new - well the itch has come more form the Afrikaans blog and now has spread. So on both my poetry blogs I am including new unpublished poems. Well it also gives me an opportunity to include more up to date photo's.

Welcome!

I have two languages living their lives in me. Sometimes fighting, sometimes walking hand in hand. After I started my Afrikaans Blog there were friends who only know the more European planet of English and they felt left out. So this English Blog is specially for you! And for my English poems who’ve been sitting around with long faces since they found out there Afrikaans counterparts were drifting out in a space with a lot more opportunity of chance encounters-with-readers than the floor of my room.
I’m basically doing the same as I’m doing with the Afrikaans Blog. Publishing an Archive of my work which has appeared in many different small publications. And secondly keeping this space here, where I communicate with you, as intimate as possible. Poems to me are all about true intimacy.


courteous

i want to become emotionally dependent
on you
i want to be independent for you
us immaculately interdependent
we nurture
and are nurtured
co-nurturing angels
spinning in a headless chaos
with our own holy invisible order.
you, painting a Jackson Pollock
on a grain of rice
while i create a dot on the sheet
with my wet tongue
toddlers in a new Rich
with adult smiles
while, outside
amongst the birds
love makes love

©1999, Sjaka S. Septembir, first published in Cybervaseline #2