the jazz experience

Hoping For Jazz

I am

Poet getting high on Jazz’s fumes

Bitter-sweet perfume of Blues and Indigo Moods

I am

The Will

I am

Just like Alice & John

Seamless and cyclic

Ecstatic

The end of us and them is we

As Jazz blends spirits colorlessly

But never quite colour-blindly

I am

Neo-Classical Jazz Experiences

Memories of Plantation Lullaby’s

Pushed and dragged so low yet still getting high

Not on coke and sprites

Black tie affairs or BBBEE invites

But on life and stolen moments of lokshin style and ghetto jive

Jazz

Jonas Gwangwa & McCoy Mrubata, Kuti Femi, Anikulapo, Seun, Fela

I walked the smoggy ghetto passage ways

Nodding to Moses Taiwa Molelekwa’s Genes and Spirits

Or Billy Holiday’s Strange Fruit

Wailing, Wailing and Wailing while swinging from these Southern Trees

For reasons beyond us

We are still singing those Weary Blues

Decades after Sobukwe, Dollar Brand & Langston Hughes

Meditated on Stillness, Freeness & Jazziness

The so long, how long Blues

This Jazz shit has made me forget to remember The Good News

Got me walking the tight-line between the life we know and the death we choose

I am

The Jazz-man’s tears appearing perpendicular to a broken note

Which is a seed in the soil

Where grows the fruit of hope …

The joy of Jazz is the most omnipotent dope.

For Kush

Un-entitled - Part two:

Now you are dancing

Oh how you move, move, move

Swirling and curling your serpentine spine

Your locks leap, sway and wave to Abdullah Ibrahim’s Mountain of The Night

And the Sun is shining outside

I am reclining watching your spectral whirl

Shining like the detailed wisdom of humour

In sheer-move-meant

With a semi-serious smile I watch

I record it

In un-translatable ink

Through the windows of my mind

Knowing this moment is just an elliptical blink

Of beauty unhindered by the shades of life’s storm

Your trance-dance is the instantaneous re-birth of a trillion life-forms

In your smile the sunlight is cradled, reflected

As if light has found its home

As Life forms

After coming down from the Mountain

Now we are both reclining

Spiraling into stillness

Listening to Mseleku

Home at Last

War and Peace

The Poet as A Fighter 


Perhaps words will expose
Hidden lines on Father Times contrived face
Seperate the true from the false
Maybe poems will disclose
Just why and what for we fight wars

Some speak of just and unjust cause
Others defend holy wars
Righteous indignation
Condemnation where the chosen condemn nations
For lack of civilization

SOme say Freedom is worth the blood-letting
The tears are grains of sand making the sacred mountain of the infinite
So will we shed no more blood when Freedom comes?

Zealots say we are undone
When we seek ungodly freedoms
And then I open all the holy books
All I see is Freedom sacrificed at the altar of the Unseen

Voices calling from the wilderness
For peace, for stillness, for Grace
For Mercy

"Oh Arjuna!" Lord Krishna cautions the Prince
Reluctant to wage a battle against reactionary forces
Which include family, friends and other loved ones

Perhaps words dressed in wisdoms shimmer
Will erase our bloody history
LIke Ausar (Osiris)
The Still Hearted
Make us one again ...
Perhaps