I don’t know her well
but clearly she is dangerous.
Dangerous like an ecstasy revolver.
If I stay alive
I’ll be standing in the street
in my underwear in the rain
some day probably.
Some day soon quite possibly.
I’ll have lost it all
in a silly town
whose name I won’t recall.
Scorn and pity will attend me.
A walking cautionary tale.
She has unclever feet, that’s the problem,
a broken skewly healed neck,
back scars where they took
what they needed to fix her neck,
neck scars too, of course.
You see how it is,
it’s irresistible, if you then
also consider her eyes, if you then also
factor in other parts of her,
and her needing to be talked down from trees
and drawn to them particularly
incessantly.
I have tricks and stamina sure
but you need an axe and accidents
to make this work
the way it could.
You need to breathe
in stone break out a flower, fearless.
You need to find who pays for the river
and pay for them.
I think you know what I mean.
This is a love poem.
She’ll just laugh, say
You can still change your mind buddy.
Her fingers already inside me,
her breath already in my language.
Nobody changes their mind.
Nobody doesn’t want all of it.
The gun to the head at the end of it.
I write this in a room in summer.
South Africa. 2011.
You can turn around now, she says.
Teken in op LitNet se gratis weeklikse nuusbrief. | Sign up for LitNet’s free weekly newsletter.