The island scout

Nadine Botha

To Michel Houellbecq

You’ve got to be brave to look through the glass,
not the looking glass,
but to another, without seeing yourself.

Detached, absurd, beyond comprehension,
the meaning of existential is more apparent than anyone admits.

I’m here and the focus is nuptial:
the wedding of eyes lock
the gate to the cemetery below
crows and clouds sheathing the sun
make way for evaporation and more
rain down devastated graves with marble
precipices and grounded orifices
cave towards our significance
will be survived by meaninglessness.

Even if we find our way,
it is mortal.

I’ve never wanted to be immortal
living the drag of a cigarette without repercussions
in still frames,
thirty times over,
and living a loft life in spaces cleared
for new functions with an open bar.

The nonsense is eternal,
you don’t outgrow it.

Unless you admit your mortality,
don’t fear that your insignificance is larger
than your cunt after stillborn triplets,
you’ll be fucking a cave:
only feeling the drilling vibration of a rabbit’s head.

Multiplication is not assumed by fingers
shown at a baby.

There are mathematics that are intuitive,
but not that.

Mostly, it’s just sequential addition:
consciousness is crystallisation.

Quartz is more valuable.
It lasts, it can buy you things.

But when consciousness is not valuable,
but all you have,
you cling to it nonetheless hoping
the world is wrong:
temper it with conscience,
spice it with conceit,
kill it with con-plicity
and crawl into it with conviction.

A con.
The spy on the human condition.

The traitor to the secret –
there are less of those than you think,
less in those that you suspect,
contradiction and dissent among those confirmed.

It is only your own,
of which there is no significance that bares a relation:

an emotional exchange that leaves your heart
wrenched, monkey on a corner with pennies –
not even your own currency –
parallel to the next corner,
only pi away from it –
a block that is a circle: centre, radius, obsolete.

Dreams too must travel the perimeter
crawling at a pace of mesmerisation.

Insomnia is only dreams
too short to comatose:

we do that daily,
why sleep?

To prevent the accident of bust metal,
crushed glass and crunching blood,
pour the condition over yourself
and truly bask in It.

Then: “It” is the superficial –
why The Beats were beaten
by their trackless dissociation.
It is not the supernatural when one is mortal.

Affectations to the immortal got me,
and others that read more, into this.

That’s how artists steal dreams.
How writers live longer than their heartbeat,
lovers become heroes,
wars identical,
politics a way of life.
How the promise continues to remain only performative.

And with this drug I take to deal with it,
I have to remember that writing is procedural,
belief incidental and sex
still
a yearning for intimacy.

Love, only maybe.

LitNet: 06 June 2006

Click here to return to Nadine's index page.

Did you enjoy this poem? Have your say! Send your comments to webvoet@litnet.co.za, and become a part of our interactive opinion page. Or submit your own poetry to Michelle McGrane for consideration.

Click here to receive our newsletter - your weekly cultural fix! Check out what's sizzling on our newsletter this week

back    /     to the top

© Kopiereg in die ontwerp en inhoud van hierdie webruimte behoort aan LitNet, uitgesluit die kopiereg in bydraes wat berus by die outeurs wat sodanige bydraes verskaf. LitNet streef na die plasing van oorspronklike materiaal en na die oop en onbeperkte uitruil van idees en menings. Die menings van bydraers tot hierdie werftuiste is dus hul eie en weerspieël nie noodwendig die mening van die redaksie en bestuur van LitNet nie. LitNet kan ongelukkig ook nie waarborg dat hierdie diens ononderbroke of foutloos sal wees nie en gebruikers wat steun op inligting wat hier verskaf word, doen dit op hul eie risiko. Media24, M-Web, Ligitprops 3042 BK en die bestuur en redaksie van LitNet aanvaar derhalwe geen aanspreeklikheid vir enige regstreekse of onregstreekse verlies of skade wat uit sodanige bydraes of die verskaffing van hierdie diens spruit nie. LitNet is ’n onafhanklike joernaal op die Internet, en word as gesamentlike onderneming deur Ligitprops 3042 BK en Media24 bedryf.