He
(a writer's biography in nine parts)
Kobus Moolman
1.
He waits, in the middle of a raucous crowd,
where the beggars and the street children
and the hawkers of rotten fruit can hear his rattling hands,
for the wind to expose his mouth.
2.
He moves his arms
up and down, backward
and forward
like a suicide testing the air.
3.
This is the way he walks:
with two arms stretched
out beside him,
two hands holding
tight onto air.
4.
The darkness casts its long shadow over the page.
Sometimes all he can see is the pitch-black silence of his own hand.
Sometimes he cannot find his way out.
5.
Words come suddenly
the moment he turns his back on the page.
6.
He keeps writing:
walking across a high, swaying
suspension bridge,
he cannot afford to look down.
He looks always ahead. At where
he wants to be.
7.
How many others before him
have crossed over from this side of the bridge
to the other, and called it inspiration?
8.
There is something very like gambling
that keeps him hoping
this time, this time he’ll crack
truth wide open.
9.
The air has turned.
Suddenly it is no longer winter.
Opening a door to the night
he smells all of a sudden everything
his past had kept hidden.
Previously published in Other Voices Poetry, UK
LitNet: 20 December 2005
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