After a conversation with one of her colleagues on solo-kids/kids-with-much-older-siblings, my mum called to ask if I remembered the imaginary friends of my toddlerhood.
The memories of the androgynous twins Boonza and Goonza are nebulous. I can’t quite picture them except for swatches of denim, shirts and short hair.
Except for their odd names (a career in branding eluded me even then), and faded features, I know nothing else of the twins. The years are long and many, and I’ve always been terrible at keeping in touch.
Do you remember your imaginary friends? Have any of them stuck around?
A twitter rhyme/twyme
There is a sin tax
On my syntax.
The words extort.
Whirred exhort.
It’s so hard to conceive,
When the mind is a sieve,
I’m a con.
Who’s your dada?
For the down-low on Dadaism, get the wikipedia notes here.
This experimental ‘antiverse’ uses selected phrases from spam comments garnered from my foodblog.
Amison walked exactness
Kleenex sticking
tanned arm
his man
Belle began
her tongue
fed animals
Kill one knife sheath
very still
Harry who
chills down
tonight gone off
backup
very basement
your neck and bunnies
dark cord that eyes flicked
his smile noise grew and stared
told her you inside
but ignorance slid
Popeye imitation
slip house and were clay
crouched imps beware
neighbors breathing
slit eyes was hoping
religious experience
everything became water
ghoul began
cold waves
Damn quiet
The heavens will comply
Today is Slie’s last day at frayintermedia.
She joined us as an intern in 2007 and became a permanent staffer after serving her time. We fell into an easy friendship, jamming out spoken word in the smokeroom while she taught me bits of Xhosa and decided I was black enough.
She’s moving on up to a great position as a communications someone-or-other at an organisation in Pretoria. I have no doubt that she will step up and up and on and on. She has the determination and drive to succeed for herself, and for her child.
Her little boy’s second name is Xhosa for ‘rain’, and that’s what’s inspired my first rhyming poem in years.
I know a rainmaker;
a claimstaker,
a groundbreaker.
I know a deep thinker;
a float neversinker,
an eyeswideopen blinker.
I know a rainpath guider;
a light strider,
a feetforward glider.
I know a rainmaker.
And I don’t mind the drizzle.
Trip-hopoetry
After my er… theatric rendering of Kroes, a poem by Parasputin, I challenged him to interpret one of my writings.
This is his reading of Meanwhile Juxtaposition Adorns Dreams.
Download the mp3 (4.692mb) here.
I’m winded.
Are those my words?
I’m really struck Parasputin, excellent, excellent work.
A big bad block, but there’s always a poem
When I’m feeling particularly useless, I type random words into my Gmail search and read the regurgitated chat archives. It was April 10, 2006 and Sg33k had sent that very first email. I bounced this off of a friend and said, “He seems literate” (ya, Miss-fucking-pretentious was I). That throw-away line was a little piece of flint, and while it’s not going to burn down the house, at least it gave off a bit of smoke today.
—
He seems literate
Famous first words.
Before clever funny words
And what are we words
And I think this is going somewhere words
And when are you going to words
And then I Do words
Into pet words
And silly words
No words
Never angry words
Just grateful words
Just I am so fucking lucky words
Thank God words
And when I have no words
He brings words
To write this story.
Drawing Destinies
My very simplistic rendering of how I imagine the interaction between fate and free-will to be.
Some things you can’t avoid. The rest is up to you.
Now draw your own.
The Craft of the Beautiful Opposite
Effective/Affective Rhetoric Continue reading The Craft of the Beautiful Opposite
(the post everyone has done/will do) Some year eh?
For sure.
For so many of us.
Newly-married people. N00b-Earthling-rearing people. Single people. Mingling people. Committed relationship people. Constructs-beyond-definition people.
Your 2008 was all about travel, epiphanies, discoveries, major milestones, messing-up, doh!-forehead-smack s, loves, losses, newness, learning, changing, life-getting, brain-using, creating, destroying, beginnings, endings, more opposites and juxtapositions etcetera etcetera.
And then there was, in no particular chronological order; burning foreigners, madness in Mumbai, load-shedding, horrible crimes and angry tears, bloodless coups and we get a new president and health minister, bail-outs, Zimbabwe had a mindfuck of an election(wait, there was an election?), they switched on the LHC and then it broke or something, the US got their audacity to hope, Somali pirates don’t say ‘Arrr’ apparently, Trevor’s getting married, will you COPE?, The Rand gets a drubbing, Bush ducked the now legend Size 10’s, Satan holidays in Gaza and civilians are incinerated in their beds, etcetera etcetera.
Some year eh?
I went and got married, and yeah, life tends to change just a tad when you do that.
Somewhere between fate and free-will, it happened. Beyond the febrile caricatures of what we thought it meant to love to the real deal of not being able to imagine a life without the grocery lists, the saturday morning errands, the socks on the floor, the waking up to your completion made manifest beside you; snoring and kicking your shins.
And it’s just so much to feel sometimes, yet it’s only just a scratch off of what is to come.
It’s fucking beautiful and I am so so so grateful to the Almighty for where I’m at.
Happy fat included.
Muharram Mubarak, Love and Prayers to all, especially the bereaved, the abused, the oppressed. Amandla.