The Buffalo Hunters

The Buffalo Hunters








By Nicholas Williamson







An allegoric prose poetic cyber story, regarding murder, brutal lust and equally brutal retribution: from Zone One in the
emerging Azanian Konfederacy in Afrika
Publisher’s warning: this text contains material that is sexually explicit and violently graphic. Thus the text is not suitable for those who are not yet adult.



NOte: The full text of Williamson's cult novel: The Buffalo Hunters, will be found under that heading [Buffalo Hunters] in the "categories" section of the blog. What follows here in this section is a brief introduction to the novel.


Synopsis


The Buffalo Hunters are a murderous gang of motorcar hijackers: modern hunters who hunt
the urban savannahs of Zone One for BMW’s, Merc’s and Audi’s…Afrika’s new “Buffaloes”

They are on the run, after offending a local warlord in their area, and need to hide out across town. They cross to the east side of South Central Zone One aka Jozi and stop off at a bar in the neighbourhood in search of a hostage: a tribute for whoever gives them sanctuary.

It is Saturday night at the Battered Connection, a bar in a post-gentrified neighbourhood where men plot murder inside, drug gangs menace the streets beyond; where modern day trackers stalk the stalkers, and ‘nice’ girls walk at their peril of being jackrolled, i.e. hijacked into a passing vehicle, gang raped and murdered.

The reader will encounter five separate casts of characters in five unrelated stories, which together generate a “Rashomon” style plot, where each cast plays out its own drama oblivious of the loops and intersections with the other parallel players.

During an intense twelve hours the lives of these many unrelated players intersect in a masterly collection of interwoven stories that collide collectively to a bloody and violent confrontation.

Publisher’s note
The Buffalo Hunters is a brutal piece of poetic metaphor and is not recommended for children or those of a squeamish disposition.
Some readers have found it funny and ironic while others read it the first time with distrust and then once they realised what they had read went back and read it again. Some wrote to say they found the violent imagery poetically beautiful.

The Buffalo Hunters is a landmark piece of
South African writing.

October 1996




Note for the offshore Reader

This prose poem disguised as crime fiction is set in post-revolutionary Azania in the heart of the great gold yielding province Zone One in Afrika. Every attempt has been made to modify the use of Azanian specific English language but this may have been a failure because we live in Zone One and so may not know that you don’t know our words. Therefore provision will be made to deal with your questions and a glossary is attached [see main file]for those words that we are sure you may not find in your local dictionary. If we miss any let us know on yonkamemo@gmail.com and we’ll update the glossary.

For those who are unfamiliar with Zone One.
Zone One is an urban state in the southern part of Afrika. It is often called the Place of Gold.

In 1885 when gold was first discovered there, Zone One did not exist. By 2001 it had more than seven million residents, all of whom came in search of fortune which most failed to find.

Thus Zone One is one of Earth’s most urbanized political zones. It is the wealthiest, most industrialized, most politically aware; suburbanized yet radicalized and revolutionary place in sub-Saharan Afrika.

Above all things, Zone One is a place of opportunity. This is a rare thing for Afrika (and also, presumably, in much of the offshore world); where progress in life is more commonly determined by relationships to, or with, the great and/or important persons of society. Notwithstanding that, these relationships do of course count too in Zone One, as they would count for instance in New York even though New York is, according to legend, a place of opportunity.

Zone One is a unique Megalopolis for two reasons: It is situated two thousand metres above sea level on a plain [called the Highveld] dotted with low level rolling hills. Its centre is watered by a multitude of small, now choked, streams that turn into raging torrents after a lightning thrashed Highveld storm, and pour from their highest points along a two hundred-kilometre crescent shaped ridge, the Ridge of Gold, which bisects Zone One. Because of the altitude little other than sparsely treed thorn bush punctuates its natural surface.

As a result of this, when the first, modern, successful, gold seekers plundered the hills of their new domain, following the great gold rush of 1886, they did what successful people always do: they displayed their newly acquired wealth. Those who built mansions on the north facing ridges found themselves facing a barren treeless landscape. So a group of disgruntled (rich) women in South Central Zone One, aka Jozi, decided to give themselves a better view from the ridge tops and hired a gang of woodcutters who planted three million trees. Those who came later, and built homes on the northern plains of South Central Zone One have planted more than three million more. In a deforesting world Jozi is a rare place.

Modern Zone One is a Mall infested, mining/ industrial complex: experienced, wealthy and sophisticated. It has also, huge pockets of urbanised poor: many homeless, destitute and desperate, many simply working poor, who supplement their lifestyles doing crime. Whole regions of Zone One are little more than shopping malls for stolen goods. Speaking of shopping there are those who say that Zone One is simply one big Shopping Mall: that Zone One is a place where people work, gamble and shop.

The region has also always been violent. In 1896, at the height of the great gold rush, which brought it into existence, the ‘Star’ (a still extant newspaper of the region) described Jozi as “a place without law”. More people are murdered daily in Zone One than anywhere else on earth (except perhaps Bogotá). Rape is a way of life. Freedom and democracy, so hard won in 1994 now include the right to kill, maim and pillage and to restrict these things means curbing liberty and a return to the hated police state that residents had before: and to do such a thing would require great subtlety.

So it will be a while before we can do that. In the meantime, in an attempt to curb violent lawlessness, whole suburban regions of Zone One are sealed off from their neighbours and passing traffic in a mass, voluntary act of totalitarian restriction. These trends are hinted at in the Buffalo Hunters which is set in the period immediately after the revolution.

Until the last decade of the twentieth century Zone One was also the heart of the world’s last, sanctioned “Slave State”. Power may now be in the hands of the people, names have been changed; the place has the most humane Constitution on Earth and a flood of laws have been passed outlawing a range of things from the use of racial epithets, to tobacco smoking in public, or using mobile phones (Zonies call them cell'phones) while driving in your “buffalo”; but much else remains unchanged and Zone One is still a place without much law, although it now has many more lawyers. It is not a place for the squeamish.

Of course those who love “Jozi” or the “Big J” as South Central Zone One is also often called, figure it to be the coolest place on earth with year round sunshine, (well most of the time), blue skies (mostly), the worlds greatest cultivated forest, awesome casino’s and a shopaholic’s paradise. They do not, however, forget about the shadows that lurk, as they always have, in the deepest recesses of revolutionary night.


Note about the writer

Nicholas Williamson is an Anglo-Afrikan poet, who lives in the African Union with his wife and daughter and a pack of dogs. Two adult children live elsewhere.

In the year of the Revolution, 1994 in the most southern part of Afrika; he survived a full-on close quarter gunfight with a gang of radicals-turned-criminals: a gunfight in which his assailants fired seventeen bullets at him at point blank range and hit him four times, and he fired thirteen back at them, also at point blank range, and hit them nine times: so he won: a Pyrric victory. The Buffalo Hunters was written as an exorcism of that event.

His injuries though, meant a change of lifestyle in a most absolute sense and while recovering in the Intensive care ward of a local hospital he conceived of The Azanian Quartet© a body of work which would span the reach of the Revolution in Azania [or if you are uncomfortable with this: South Africa]using the ways of poetry to write a fictional prose set, starting with the Buffalo Hunters.

Nicholas is an ‘Anglo’ because he was born in Britain in October 1946; his parents migrated to Southern Africa in the Winter of 1947 so it was 1948 before he knew that a year had a summer in it; and that particular summer a fascist government, which had as its purpose the formal enslavement of a large part of its citizenry, took control of the territory. As a result they took the place where he lived unwillingly, on a forty-six year journey into wintery futility: violent and nugatory.

The journey culminated in the capitulation of that regime and in the People’s Revolution of 1994 a Revolution that marked one of the great liberating revolutions of the modern age: it is also a revolution that is incomplete… and like all revolutions it has unleashed a frenzy of violence that may well take a century to abate…if it ever does.

In that year (1994), in the spring, the author was born again, in Afrika, after he was cut down by a fusillade of bullets in a gunfight with a gang of disturbed humans. No rational reason for the assault was ever determined. The event took place on the 11th of September: the anniversary of the assassination, by the former fascist police, of one of the liberation struggle’s greatest heroes and a date which has subsequently become a general date of infamy on the planet.

So the writer is suspended between two personae: the one which grew up and survived as an Outsider in a Police State, through the second half of the twentieth century, a condition which eviscerates the soul; and the one that survived attempted murder, at the hands of those who were liberated.

Nicholas Williamson is an economics graduate and former businessperson who no longer practices those arcane arts, preferring instead the greater truth in fiction.


The Buffalo Hunters© is Part One of the Azanian Quartet. Part Two: The Ashanti Raider© will be available shortly and Part three: the futuristic Jonker Memorandum© will be available later this year in serialised form.

What is the Azanian Quartet?


The Azanian Quartet is generally inspired by Nietzsche’s idea of “Eternal Recurrence” and was specifically inspired by what happened during a neighbourhood gunfight one Sunday morning at seven thirty: and by a series of dreams that followed.

Azania is the name given to Southern Africa on ancient Ptolemaic maps.

Random notes of a marginalised man

This collection has had various homes over the years and is now moving to my blogspot here on amagama. Enjoy.



The
Random
Notes
of
a
Marginalised
Man


By .NiK©…






aka Nicholas Williamson

Published by Leofric House Publications.
PO Box 891224
Lyndhurst 2106
South Central Gauteng
The Afrikan Union

All rights reserved.

The author, Nicholas Williamson also known variously as .NiK or Nicholas or even as Nicholas Jakari asserts his moral right to all the work contained in this collection. It may not be reproduced without acknowledging the poet, and it may not be reproduced for gainful purposes.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system for purposes of duplication, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and/ or the the publisher of this cyberstory.

Leofric House Publishing. PO Box 891224, Lyndhurst 2106 South Africa/Azania.
ISBN 0-620-23292-7 The Random Notes of a Marginalised Man by Nicholas Williamson also known as .NiK .


The pieces in this anthology include both previously published and unpublished works
and span the period 1973 to 2000. With thanks to Gazebo Press, Two Tone Magazine, Upstream, Bedford.

There is no theme, no conscious drift to holistic order; the pieces contained in this small collection are selected from the Random notes of a poet who lived through those years and wrote down some thoughts and continues to live.


For all the poets.

With thanks to Di, to Dagmar and to Gordon, Leigh, Craig and the guys at PC Inn

Contents
.NiK 4
Satori 5
Performance Poetry 7
Election Manifesto. 8
the Man who never shot Mugabe 9
To Wilfred Owen, 10
Gingindluvu....A vision at Easter 12
Some Moments from a Sheltered Courtyard 15
AM LIVE on Malperformance* 17
Captured from an Instant in Johannesburg Road. 18
Ex Jo'burg: South Central Gauteng 20
The Pity Fuck Theory of Marketing. 22
K's Reminiscence on an Absence of 23
On the Morning after Diane’s Birthday Feast. 25
On The Hill 26
Conversation with Diana: 27
Intimations of Alex’ * 29
If you see Buddha on the road, then kill him. 30
Deconstructions 33
February 1990: 33
The Extended Now: Playing Nietzsche. 36
The Last White Night: 38
Thoughts of Dylan Thomas 41
Not the Valentine’s Day Massacre 42
A Vision of Agincourt: 43
Notes of a Dreamcatcher 45
Khaboloading: Rwandan salads. 47
Chalkdown in Alex* 2000 48
All Tax is Theft 51
The twelve bar globalisation break down Stalinist blues song. 51
For one of our girls: murdered for her handbag. 55
Four Haikus 58
Meyersdal* 59
August 31, 1997. 60
From the Stonehaven collection. 61
Trappe.* 61
Stonehaven #3 62
A locked gate at Stonehaven. 63
Cobwebs 64
Scotch Carts* 65
Thoughts of a long dead Greek philosopher on 66
crossing a stream. 66
Flutterings 67
1991...The First Hours...Port St Johns 68
Transactions 70
The Fat Tailed Curve* 71
Some doggerel nonsense which may or may not 73
be on the subject of sex 73
Gravity 74
Roadkill 75
About the Poet 77

.NiK
is an Anglo Afrikan poet. He was born in the United Kingdom of Anglo-Welsh parentage in 1946, and migrated to South Africa with his parents in 1947. There he grew up in a gold mining town as a member of a despised, newly side-lined, Anglo-Celtic minority community, in a society controlled by fanatical, god-consumed zealots who sought out every opportunity possible to beat the hell out of everyone who wasn’t in their club, at any and every opportunity.

To give his life some kind of balance .NiK began giving poetry readings when he was four, continuing from then on. He grew up to the sound of TS Eliot, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, Euripides, Shakespeare, Owen Glendower and almost every other poet of significance. By seven he was roaring out Gilgamesh and Beowulf and at the age of fifty four, in 2000, he performed the work of Freidrich Nietzsche for that poets centenary, and as his own fiftieth anniversary performance as a performing and secular poet. He started to write down his own poetry in 1973.

He read political science and economics at the University of the Witwatersrand during the turbulent end of the sixties and later trained as a schoolteacher: then ‘dropped out’. He travelled in Europe, at first alone, then later with his wife, Diane, with whom he has also worked in various parts of Afrika, in a variety of occupations. Amongst these they spent some years working in the former Rhodesia where he was part owner of the Sundown Theatre Company, and where two of his three children were born. He returned to South Africa in the early eighties to generate family sustaining revenue via a variety of opportunities in the field of direct marketing, writing, selling, debt collecting, writing and, doing whatever else went with urban survival…

In the ‘Year of the Revolution’ in 1994, on a fateful 11th of September .NiK was ‘reborn’ in Afrika, when he survived an assault by armed murderers, killing at least one of his attackers, and wounding two others in a wild and frenzied close quarter gunfight. No reason for the attack was ever given.

The injuries he sustained though, changed his life; returned him to the classroom, as a substitute teacher in a variety of State high schools, teaching many subjects and experimenting with methods of accelerating awareness and insight amongst young humans.

Eventually, in about 1998, he was declared permanently redundant in the State sector, as part of a process that favours the appointment, to State teaching posts, of citizens who were, in pre-revolution days, disadvantaged by discriminatory hiring policies. He now teaches part time in the private sector; and writes full time, when he is not busy doing something else entirely: living in the only time we know…now. Editor.

Satori
‘Truth knocks upon the door
and you say
go away I am looking for
the truth.’
zen koan

I was an
old fragile man
it seemed to them then.
They were young
fragile men when
the business began
and I felt a gathering
of angels
swirling through the dust
of our berserk
denouement:
to fetch us
to our destiny,
amongst the anthills
of urban renewal?

There were we
and
those three, who
threw
their lead
at me; striving
through such
imprecation
to burn
their way to
the centre
of my station;
convinced I
should fall
to their
sanctified
call.

Unannounced.
They came;
unheralded they left,
the way stoned men
cry
for mitigation.

The circle closed
the loop was done:
sanitised
in blood:
bonded
to links of lead.

In the dark soul of that instant,
the moment of
karma,
at the place
of convergence,
where
I slipped into
no
ness
I slew one of them
then.

And he was not even my enemy,
was never
the one in the swirling mass
of our
ancestors
who have howled for
the bullets
of our darkest desires:

I have made life
and I
have taken it
away.
And yet do
I know
I am not
some deity
awaiting frantic offerings
upon the essence
of our darker rhetoric.

It is simply this:
I have killed
a man
and now
know the
passage of life;
breathed first
upon my arm,
and last as well.
.NiK(1995)

Performance Poetry
Sitting in the park
one blustery day
I noticed the distant
figure
of a man
jumping
from the roof
of a building.

At first I thought it
was a
leaf
tossed
by the wind,
then heard his
voice crying out;
a primal song of joy:
rapturous
to seek eternity.
.NiK(1993)

Election Manifesto.

It is a one step two step
slanging match again
I run you down
You do the same
One step, two step,
Throw a bad word
Never think of telling
Where the whole thing will go.
Never think, or never dare
mention how to do it.

No it's
One step, two step,
Ignore the pointed question
Hover on the edges, until
They've all forgotten
Then promise something
No one thought to mention.
One step, two step,
Shifting from
The centre................

.NiK(1980)
Publ...Sting Mag, Former Rhodesia 1980. (Now Zimbabwe)
Banned by the British Interim Administration...1980:
A faceless flunky fellow told me it was “bad form”.
Refers to the election that brought Robert ( Bob the Roz)
Mugabe to power in Zimbabwe.
Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s “ Lobster Quadrille.”
Some lines spoken by a long distance
shooter about:
the Man who never shot Mugabe

Doping the wind
Depends on the
Angles.
Like Pool you know
Or Billiards even.

When you play
Pool you have to think at once
Of angles;
Subjectively nominating
Places on the cushions:
Angles to strike
A glancing blow to fetch up at a given point
Over there at the right edge of some other target
Which heads off to the pocket.

Feel the wind.
Feel the wind inside your head.
Stand in the weather:
Stand in the weather.
Standintheweatherletthebullets
Flowaccordingtothewindripplinginsideyourhead.
Rippling through your last remaining years;
Swirling around the backstretch of your ears,
Rippling tangentially, across the back stretch of your ears.

Lining up the barrel
On a heap of reckless sandbags.
Lining up your energy,
Between your finger and the wind.

.NiK(00)
To Wilfred Owen,
On the death of
Fourteen civilians,
May,1976.
We saw your pity of war
Wilfred Owen
distilled in the mine
blasted corpse.

Where laughter had been
there was now only death;
the horror of love
on a quiet afternoon
torn apart for
no reason at all.

No dignity here;
no graceful repose:
an arm
or a leg
are all that return
a vague
personal form,
stamped by the arbitrary bomb.

This charred human meat;
remnants of life,
converted to something obscene.
A shadow of hate
links us with you,
and that implacable darkness,
born in the vile
savage
slaughtering
time.

Freedom, enriched
with a harvest of blood;
and maniac
slanderous metal,
tears the smile from the eyes
of a child who survives:
and grows
old
in a gurgle of tears....

.NiK(1976)
Publ. Maze...1978.
Gingindluvu....A vision at Easter
While rehearsing Marc AnthonyAcross the veld
the horsemen rode,
they rode behind the light.
they rode from far
to rendezvous,
and end a ceaseless fight.

Never trust the horsemen
howled the man
with the bones,
never trust their solemn
hymns of praise.

The horsemen come from far
he called
and lust to take the land.
Never trust the words
they call,
or scribble
with the hand.

All hours long
the vultures hovered;
swooping as the sunlight softened,
settling
as the daylight died.

Never meet the savage
warned the man
with the book,
Never trust the savage
warned the one
with the word.

But the feasting group
of horsemen sat bemused
beyond the fire;
they never heard the
intonation
heeded not
the warning:
never saw the shadow
in the flames..

And as they sat
and gorged themselves
the old temptations flew
the assegais were sharpened
and the battlelines formed true.

Then when the pounding
reached the top and
the whirling dancers flared:
lightning flashed
across the gap
the waiting vultures reared.

Never trust the savage
warned the one with the book
Never trust the horsemen
warned the ones with the bones,
never trust their solemn hymns
of praise.

Then the Man screamed out instructions
‘Bulala abathakathi!’
And then they looked,
and heard the warning:
called upon the word...

All hours long
the vultures hovered;
swooping as the sunlight softened,
settling as the daylight died..............

.NiK...(1978)
• Bulala abathakathi…kill the wizards. (zulu)
• Gingingdlovu. HQ of Dingaan, Zulu king who succeeded Shaka. Vision: refers to the murder of a Settler party in 1838, an event which has bedevilled race relations in South Africa right into the present day.
Some Moments from a Sheltered CourtyardInside a sheltered courtyard
We built a little house
With a window in the rafters
And very little else.

We must have been out somewhere then
Down near the ocean side;
And all the furniture walked down
Along a great steel slide.

Then all of us walked into town
Attending us, a dapper clown
Who sported, with some dashing glee
Two overcoats down to his knee.

And I was there with Deedle Don
My grey coat, and her bald crown.

While we walked across the square
Nibbling on some cold jugged Hare
We heard a happy singer's voice
Come wafting past an old Rolls Royce.

We noted same as Clem of old
And rushed across, ever bold
To an ageing red brick station house
Guarded well by a gnarled old Scouse.

But he refused to let us through
Unless we had a song to do
And though I pleaded, none I knew!
He was quite adamant, it's true.

So we sang the old `Nying Tong'*
A happy sound for all that throng
We played it on some borrowed hack
With three strings on, and one was slack.

By plucking loosely at that thing
We eventually all contrived to sing
A song of praise for dinner time,
And Auld Lang Syne.
.NiK(1983)* Nying Tong: song from the 1950’s BBC series ‘The Goon Show’.
Anal
y
sis
Left hand right hand
who’s concealing what
as we plan or is it dream about
a meeting we must hold to discuss
the new agenda for the subsequent and
intermediary meeting where all the topics
under discussion by all the multiplicity of stake
holders, celeryholders, relevant associates and all
our absent friends will also be contributing their contribu
tions to the next stage of the evolution of a modified agenda
about the final major workshop where we will address not too
much
at
all.
.NiK(00)
27/7/00
AM LIVE on Malperformance*
If you construct your
Worldview from a place
Within the confines of a
Conjecture then
Getting things done means
Sublimating a self, of which
You are in any event unaware
In an attempt to deal with the world
As it isn’t.

This work done by all the
Armies of “help uplift the helpless”
Specialists: whether Aid, AIDS or other
Community outreach activities which now
Proliferate become ultimately self serving by
Default of eternal recurrence. How to change this
Is the dilemma faced by the individual in society. The
Individual in a free society is free to live as it was or change
Only we ourselves
Can decide whether
We should change.
And then, change to what?
From where? And how do we keep moving.

To call for instant change
To habits which took generations to construct
Is as irrational as tossing grains
Of sand one by one into a leaky forty gallon drum
And then demanding to know ten
minutes later why the job is incomplete.

The job’s the thing. The pay is always
Incomplete; There is no such thing as
Enough
Money
And all these people who are
Organizing these myriad fruitlessly
Ineffective batteries of commissions,
Committees, stakeholders, revolver holders,
Card holders and general handholders have
Involved themselves precisely in order to solve
Their own personal employment problems
By inventing the ‘issue solving’ mechanism in the
First place. No rational person would seriously attempt
To truly ‘solve’ the problem being addressed so intimately.

.NiK(2000)
* The morning host for a popular radio news programme is
prone to tetchiness when self serving systemic flunkeys rationalise their
failure to deliver on political promises. Some days the failures pile up: he
forgets that his role is largely symbolic
Captured from an Instant in Johannesburg Road.People are in a hurry
to get home.
The sun breaks low,
smiling malevolently
through
scalloped banks
of clustered
clouds.

A flustery, flurry of busy
busy Mamas, flouncy
with enormous
puff sleeves
puff
slowly; stentorious,
up the hill
to Lyndhurst
and Alexandra View
bellowing beer
and happy day’s
cheer.

They pull
their overcoats
and baby battered
blanket shawls
closer
to
their skin and jeer
at a poor man
waltzing by.

Idiot man:
Eyes agape;
arms rolling
from emaciated nape to
ankle bone:
rolling gait
rolling tongue
happy man?
Happy mamas?
People in a hurry to get home.

.NiK(1997)
Ex Jo'burg: South Central Gauteng
Could I have ever loved you
gold mining town,
with your faceless grey concrete
piled up to the sky,
and that vile yellow dust
coating my eyes?

A frantic pin cushion
of sparkling hope,
marketing dreams
to children who grope
in the garbage
that never quite
seems to go
from your gold
shrouded pavements
and cold
narrow roads.

They're all poor
and forgotten
who wander the valleys
through mountains of brick
and the gutters are filled
with the mouldering
tricks
of the maddening, eternal
mr big.

You measure with gold
the value of man
and specify virtues he holds;
and when you have sapped
the juice from the brains
of the people
you're pretending
to serve,
you dispose of them all
down insanitary lanes;
then ram straws
in the marrows of youth.

An
alien place
in an island of hate
where lovers
love only today,
and strangers stand staring
about in despair
at your drab
filtered
neon lit
lair.

Sometimes,
for a moment
you lift
up your blinds,
to show envy
and greed in the dark;
where the man from the bush
from the conical hut
is as lost
as the sons of the park.

.NiK(1978)
Original Publ....Maze...1978. Now reworked
The Pity Fuck Theory of Marketing.
We recently used this approach
In an attempt to pitch ourselves
As a world class venue
For a grand fuck of a party:
The Soccer World Cup.

It is our turn, we said, we are
Entitled to have a fuck from the
Nutritious bone of international capital,
Which we otherwise
Despise but which on this occasion
Appears tolerable and is
In the form of a big soccer match.
We know about soccer and play it
And have soccer teams and
They would benefit
From the game with all the big guys
And it would be cool and inject jobs into our
Otherwise idealess employment
Strategy. Things would happen
And because we were treated so badly
For so long we
Would like you to
Let us have a fuck, for luck.

You know you have been exploiting us
For a long time; mining our resources: nourished
By our pain
We also need to have a turn;
A chance, to get
Us up and moving in the morning.

And in return for letting us
Hold this synthetically eroticaerobicexperience,
We will let you all
Come here and fuckforrealaswell;
With wall-to-wall-non-virtual-pussy-fucks-for-bucks-fucks-for-real-
Best fucks you’ll ever feel; of course a Deutsche Mark will buy you
Less fucks than a pound although
For the price of a sandwich
You can fuck to the ground
Dripping with juices and Henry the Fourth:
So slimming, you’ll never find better in hell.
So slimming you’d never be able to tell, when you’ve
Gone back, gone back, gone back North.

.NiK(2000)
* Refers to the original bid to host the World Cdup tournament that was held in Germany in 2006. The failed bid due to some strange machinations by a New Zealander member of th fifa voting committee aroused immense resentment. Notwithstanding the sentiments expressed in this poem the Cup has subsequently been awarded the 2010 games which we anticipate will be successful in promoting things we prefer to deny.
K's Reminiscence on an Absence of
Salutation upon Leave-taking.

It was a most amazing ride
Through fields of grass
In some old park;
over pitted marshland
cleared by a mower into
neat cut bales
and uncut clumps.

The sun was bursting down
in the sky
while I cycled on
haphazardly
in the solitary
quiet.

And while I wove
in that rutted track
I saw behind me
on the path
that I had rode
a lonely little figure
stark
against the gold
of fading day
small
against the world.

Then,
before
I reached the other side,
where the earth
was torn
and overturned:
I rode through miles
the mower missed!
Submerged
in towering banks
of yellow tinted stalks.
Blindly
following by instinct
where,
before,
I'd never walked.

Meeting
at last, where a path
crossed mine,
an old black man
who guided me
on a route
he thought would
go
my way.
And while we
spun
the silence
fell
as deep as all of time.
As though infinity
had held
her breath to watch
the colours, mime
their slow
inevitable change
to starlit
darkness
.NiK(1977)
From the play "K" written and performed by .NiK (1987)
Grahamstown National Festival of the Arts 1987


On the morning after Diane's birthday feast
Going over forty
going on and out
met some guy the other day
transmogrified beyond a doubt.

Wotcher mate I asked him
‘ow’d you get to ‘ere,
via some bank out somewhere else
cashiered for guzzling beer.

He stayed with some Sri Lankans
where Blondie sniffed blue death
and told about the bank card
with eyeballs dripping meth’.

Reached up to the counter
here I am again
furtive little gestures
go away in pain.

We really do not want you
crushing ice with glee
go back and cast your shadow
queue up to go free.

.NiK(1988)publ. Upstream 1989
On The Hill

Dry hot dust covered world,
fat, Baobab, littered world:
little, tattered scraps of earth,
where tufted roofs
point, picturesque.

Bricks surround an open fire
where black men sit
and eat charred meat,
where hands shade eyes
to watch our passing.
Heads nod reflectively;
shake,
at the strangeness of us:
murmuring voices comment,
judge?

And we sigh; not quite at home
in this strange place
where we are
the record
of events.

Three searchers come, proud
resentful;
one to suffer,
one to punish
one to hate.
A cycle of despair once started
never ending
perhaps to flash in bitterness
and greedily consume.

While down below the watchers wait, patient;
laughing.
Drums throb,
voices join with feet,
beer runs, roosters ruffle;
a quiet time is ending.

.NiK..(1973)
Pub. Two Tone. Dec 1975, Maze...1978.


Conversation with Diana:
from a classroom exercise in deconstructive poetry with forty seven grade eight girls on the morning that we all heard the news of the tragic death of ‘Lady Di’. Were you making love
then
happy again;
indiscreet in
the arms of a man you would meet
in the fast flowing flood
of eternity’s beat:
were you rocking to the rhythm
of Freddie’s
“Friends will be friends”
or was it Frankie’s “Strangers in the night”.

Your people now say
you were maligned; that
they didn’t treat you right.
They say
they’ll make amends,
call you, ‘…a
beacon of light’.

Better to be
alive in the sea,
said the Indian guide
to the ingenue,
than a bloated dead dolphin
adrift
on the shore.

We were always strangers
playing at the table,
then i was sent away,
vaporised
upon a cradle.
Given far too many kisses
and no hugs,
anymore.

Don’t ask me what the ‘sounds’ were
when i went to stay.
It could never have been Queen,
i did it ‘My way’.

.NiK(1997)

Intimations of Alex’ *
on a Warm Saturday Night.
We are standing in a
Video shop
Deciding on some
Or other
Diet of celluloid
Escapist violence.

While eight hundred metres
Down the road
Free, Gratis and verniet**
A war ekes out its pain
Real people
Killed
With real bombs
In real battles.

And we stand
In the video
Shop
And idly watch
The video news
Reel clips of the
Real violence
While we pay
For the
Simulation.

.NiK(1992)

*Alex’ (Alexandra): a residential area in south central Gauteng which was the scene of considerable violence during “the Struggle of the Dispossession” (1948-1994) when rival groups fought pitched battles in the so called ‘Beirut’ section.
** verniet…for nothing. (Afr)

If you see Buddha on the road, then kill him.
He was there
with a Lincoln Continental
waiting at the door
for the driver
to show up.

And He
said
that
the meek shall inherit the earth.
But that when the time
came
the meek
obstinately declined
and reached back into
the pain
of freedom's cage,
to pluck forth
the overwhelming
Daddy.

And so diminuendo,
to the Fathers of Nintendo
and the
Constitution's rolling on the
floor......

You cannot defect
He came and said to them
from an insight
you have taken to the show.
Nor can you with ease
un-see
what you have seen.

Searching 'round
inside yourself
for the innocence and
joy
remembering
some chances
strutting the toi, toi*

He said,
i dreamt i
met my father
hiding underneath
a leaf
asking
would i be
a sailor,
a tinker or a thief.

And i knew,
i would set out to
be
all of them,
all of them,
all of them.
i set out in thrall to them
before i came to grief.

We are impotent
he told me
in the face of this
collision
and i would rather
be in Teksas
than
Soweto.

Death he was
asserting
is a dirty
rotten trick
played by bureaucratic
mystics,
in Rayban
holographics
who say the meek can't
cherish freedom, nor a
Rastafarian chin;
they fear seeming somewhat
different,
vaccinated from their kin

So Armageddon’s coming
and we'll burn and burn
and burn; vanquished through
ineptitude
selling off our turn
for the
Lincoln Continental
and Buddha's walking with the driver
chanting;

So what diminuendo
to the Father's of Nintendo
and the Constitution's
rolling
on the floor.
NiK(1992)




Deconstructions
I am beginning to grasp
At the secular nature of
Consciousness .

Is this what I mean?
Or did the message alter from
The hand
Up
To the brain or
Even vice
Versa.
Did the paper change it
Or did the pen
Or did I
And
Why?
.NiK(00)

February 1990:

A report on breaking through the ceiling:
A praise prose poem for Nelson Mandela.

The world came
to watch a
spectacle;
a man who had
been locked away
for twenty-seven years
was to be released.
And the spokespeople
for the media
and the great,
came from afar to hear
the wisdom
which it was
believed
this old man
had gained
during his incarceration.

After waiting
uncertainly
for hours
in the hot February
glare;
He finally emerged
blinking
into the sunlight.
Was led to a podium
around which
a Hundred Thousand people
had gathered and
onwhichtheeyesofFiveHundredMillion
faces
werefocussedviatelevisionsetsina
hundred and eighty
countriesbeamedbyinstantsatellite.

With a great sense of Majesty
All awaited
his unique insights, which,
his publicists claimed,
andwhichallwhocamewould
have
themselves
believe he had gained
through years of
incarcerated
introspection

The great buzz
was that this man
had
through his
suffering
acquired unsullied
wisdom and would
unitethecountryandleadhisto
rmentorsandhispeople
toapromisedland:
freed
of all the pain borne
by the suffering
for millennia.

Slowly
he ascended the steps
and trod
with unaccustomed grace
toward
the podium.

A hush
fell
uponhalfaBillionhouseholds.
Fathers
shushed their children
andbeatthosewhospokewhilethegreat
Man
began to speak.

And the sound of wonder
amongst
the gathered dignitaries
and the watching multitudes
turned
to
consternation.

For he spoke yet
anancientanditwasbelievedarecently
discreditedlanguage
and none had thought
to expect
it.


And so they sat
in bewildered
and bemused
consideration
ofwhattheywerehearing
while
a
howlingmobofjubilantsupporters
soon turned their joy
to rapturous
violence
smashingallthewindowsonthesquare.

.NiK(1990) Publ. 1995. Bedford Yearbook

The Extended Now: Playing Nietzsche.

an admonition to my children

Nietzsche’s conjectures are
Like the objects of his
Conjectures
No more than
Conjectures albeit even a two
Percent
Conjecture.
This position is absolute; even a point
Nought to the power of n
Does not turn the conjecture into a
Relative conjecture.

His position is that the probability
That “God” is not a conjecture
Is so remote
That the total focus
Of the individual
Must be on the Now (perhaps)
In preparation for the
Extended Now
Which is to come (and perhaps not).

There is no such place
As ‘the future’ when we shall
Do something:
Only
The conjecture of
Eternal recurrence
With changing images and backdrops.

The purpose must be
To get more
“Bang for the bounce” out of each passing second
Anticipating only in the sense of
Expectation.
At the same time knowing
Only that we live now:
That we/you/i have created a personal
Destiny and yours is one
Only you
Can fulfil.
You cannot live in anyone else.

And so it’s one step two step three step
Four, five step six step another step more.
.NiK(00)

The Last White Night:27 April 1994*
an eerie calm
came over
the country
when
thenationlinedup
at
the
check out
counter
the day
we
all
went to vote

and a few bombs
went
off
here and there

a few people
died
here
and there

and old men
and
women
who had
waited
all
their
livesforthismoment
stood
for hours
inthesun
until their crosses
werecharredandblistered

then as the
dawn
broke
on the last white night
those who
were
liberated
felttheirchains
fallaway

while those
who
werefreed
smelttheairforthefirsttime

and cried! Peace on Earth...!

for
a
time
the guns
fell silent

in counterpoint
the blasting
thumping
thunder
of
the bombs
flaredthen
rolled
elliptically
across some new
horizon.

andthosewhocould
watchedit
ontelevision
until their eyeballs
glazed over
while those who
listened
went deaf
with the news
that the day
which everyone
hadanticipatedforcenturies
hadfinallyarrived.

and we awoke to the
smell
of freedom
andanotherworkingday
.NiK (1994)

*Refers to South Africa’s first fully democratic elections which
brought to an end three centuries of rule by ‘elitist’ racially based
oligarchies.

2/6/00
Thoughts of Dylan Thomas
On rolling west through the Gauteng Lake District
On the R22 highway

Fire roaring on dry
winterveld illuminates
smoke
stacks
of cloud rolling dark across a backdrop
formed by the setting sun
a distant horizon
flames roared angrily
as we travellers all passed them by
flaring suddenly at us they erupted
from the sunlight’s shadow
lit the darkness in the empty
rear view mirror etched out on distant pylons
which windroared as flames beat against the metal
uprights whipping the wires heating up the messages which knew
little of the world
through which they passed.

i am disturbed by the images i see in those flames
bursting at the edges of the highway
seeking greedy satisfaction from my perhaps immanent collision with a
thirsty thirty six wheeler bearing rapidly on me: hurtling then past
rampaging past: sucked into the smoke and the dying of the light.
.NiK(00)

Not the Valentine’s Day Massacre

I bought a Valentine
from ‘Bambi”
at the Bambi Café
and I told him
I’d seen a rainbow
slashing to the east.

He said he’d always loved rainbows
since the time he’d been a kid
and he hoped he’d never be
the pot, nor the fatted beast.

We laughed; he handed me
the Weekly Mail which
he would always
keep for me
just like the guy before
had always done.

Then later when the rain
began again
and while the shop
was filled
with people
some hunters came and shot him:
took away
the paltry contents
of his till.
.NiK(Feb’96)

A Vision of Agincourt:
while standing in a clearing
at the edge of a desperate rain forest."Ouderhoud!" *
An ancient, fragmented bow:
Mildewed,
Lies in a glorious grassy
Glade;
The centre stage
To a symphony
Of serried ranks;
Soft in the evening light.

Last day sun
Glazes
The gentle, mist
Layered amphitheatre
Where Thuja Plicata's
Feathered
Snow-flaked arms
Play "Gods" to the troops
In the gullet
Valley.

Pinus Roxburgh, ex Himalayas
Pinus Pseudostrobus
Pinus Radiata
Thrusting interjacent
For the fulcrum
Bulkhead.

To the left ridge
Flanking cavalry:
Pinus "Variegatus"
Comprising
Pinus Oocarpa, Sentraal Amerika,
Stark, aquiline;
Consummate, hard scaled with
Jagged spikes
For thrust and joust.

While next to him
His cousin Patular,
Leering
Mocking
Bowing from the waist upon
An outstretched strengthened stirrup.

Behind?
Gathered throngs
Of Archers;
Acacia Melanoxilon,
Orchestrating occupation of
The last remaining ridge

Then bank on bank
On further banks
Behind
Till that far reaching
Point.

While here in lonely opposition
from the last
beleaguered crest
a vagrant
mercenary
from up Messina way:
some bold Machado.

At its back
huddled down below
amidst the moss
and bracken-fern,
a shrouded hospice:
an ancient sanctuary......
.NiK(1989)

1/6/00
Notes off a Dreamcatcher
We were on a journey
It seemed to me
With someone who may have
been a friend to me.

Our journey was over open
Country interspersed with low hills
Dotted like anthills
Over a flat expense of ground.

My companion told me the place
was called Canader and he told
me a tale
about how, the original discoverer of the place:
himself,
had sent off the necessary documentation
to a registry office somewhere and a bureaucrat
in that place had assumed bad spelling and
changed the name to the more familiar form
and that this accounted
for the fact
that the place remained unknown.
It was, he said, one of the great issues
In the public affairs of the country.

As we passed through Canader seemed a place of rolling
Hillsides as the anthills grew more numerous
And there were many clean rivers
And bright clear skies: all generally inaccessible
Through glacier-like passes.

We came at last again to level country
Where we were attacked by a pack
Of wolf-sized lions who at first
It seemed wanted to play with and then later
To eat us.

I winded one when it sprang at me and
I rolled back onto the ground
And threw the creature via a
Perfectly executed
Backward overhead kick which
Ripped my shins
Apart
When I caught it on the chest
To fling off over my head.

They then ran away but afterwards
Continued to hang about
Believing we would ultimately
Weaken: while we were concerned
That they would be revealed to hunters
And be killed….

.NiK(00)

Khaboloading: Rwandan salads.

A grudge is not held,
it was said,
against
a dead person.
Nor can the dead,
forgive
the living.
It was further said,
that success
could distort pleasure.
This was said,
from the darkest time,
that, the goal betrays the purpose
That both weave
holograph
illusions
weft to smoke
and mirror-back pretensions
of what is
there, and
what
never was.
So follow the stars and follow the cash
find out who’s eating who.
Find out;
who is dressed
with feet.
.NiK(1998)from: The Ashanti Raider: aka The Girl in the Golden Kushĕshĕ.
from the notebook of Kermit Sing
a story by NiK.(1997..2000.)

Chalkdown in Alex* 2000
Any learning that emanates from
space perception
derives from operations we have performed in
the past:
Thus began a curious incident.

I drove into Wynberg, light industrial city
in pursuit
of mouldings, ultraboard
and gas
against the freezing
aftermath of
all that earlier
rain.

It was already late afternoon
not a moment too
soon before closing up time
for the day.

Space circumscribed, best response? Take a gap
at the mouth of a short piece of roadway joining
the Old Pretoria Road
to Carey Str next to Sandton Auto
and opposite one of the main
entrances to Alex’: the so called ‘Soul City’.

At this incongruous juncture
a wandering group of excited senior
schoolchildren
walked in the centre of the
road, uncaringly away from me:
bags on uniformed backs.

They blocked my passage
and it was late
and I had much to do
before returning to my gate.
Haste dictated that I hoot at them,
move them from the roadway
before they were run down.

Then I felt
A coruscating prickle
of electrons, shifting gears
defensive
down the centre of my neck:
sensing wipe-out
on the surf board of my universe.

So I changed gear, threaded
myself
inn
ocu
ously
into their momentum
felt them
gradually
in
sin
uate
themselves apart from me.
Moving with such subtlety
that they seemed unaware of me.
I sensed some issue;
saw from the corner of my eye
as I went by:
gesticulation, faces torn
by distorting, frantic emotions,
which seemed so general
amongst the nine or so of them,
that it seemed beyond some
particular romantic disinclination.

I was aware of their exuberance;
an adrenaline high, that familiar catharsis,
in excitation: engrossed
they never noticed
me.

When I reached home again later
I heard on the radio
how the schoolchildren of Alex’
rioted during the day…again…against
in
justice then…against injustice now.

It seems they argued with those who once
called on them to riot in the name of freedom that
the Revolution was being ripped off;
and murder was unrequited:
so they burned houses, and cars, and the police
shot one schoolchild dead
and wounded
seventeen more.
.NiK(00)
30/5/00• Alex: suburb on the former northeastern edges of the old city: noted for its assertive activism.

All Tax is Theft
A response to a strident call from a stakhanovite style apparatchik for ‘poems about the economy ‘ made in the context of confiscatory “take it all back” tax proposals:
Alternatively :

The twelve bar globalisation break down Stalinist blues song. 29500

Tax, history, computers, investors
and the concept of delete consciousness:
the issues of today.

The world of today is the world of
Delete consciousness,
Nay!
I never heard of that.

Those who live today
Are not the same as those
People who lived here yesterday!
The people of today have deleted
The people
Of yesterday
From their consciousness, in order to cope
With today

To demand of the world of today that it should pay for the
Deeds of yesterday
Is an idea which can only
Begin to work if people decide to love
A Demander today.
It is no longer enough to be loved
Then
It has to be now.

On the Dow. The product must have
Credibility,
And unspeakably sharp and acute
Marketing methods to get good attention
That attracts velvet paws
And a favourable mention.
Ok.

The idea of taxing anyone
Especially
As a form of reparation
Is a demand,
Which must be analysed
In the context of what happened to
Other similar taxes in the growing of the nation:
The general state of the tax inflation
Process,
The treatment of corrupt tax thieving officials
Caught, as it were, during recess:
Generally what the
Taxpayer gets after the promises have been
Deducted from the bill;
Instead of “fuck you, stand back,
I haven’t emptied the till”.

Securing invested money: that is
Securing other people’s money, honey
Extends through risk evaluation
To the limits of gradation, mixed
To bland computerised credulity
Impacts upon the premium
We have to pay
For nice clean offshore money:
Instead of dirty honey, hey, where
The anti collective collectors
Karry Kalashnikovs and K….

All Tax is Theft. Especially those bereft and
Confiscatory deductions
Like capital gains disruptions
Which are scary to all those marys
Who seriously dispose with
“Other people’s” woes, by handling their cash
To demo’ overwhelming dash:
At the same time, with great care ,
Beneath an open stare.

Investors are owners of money.
They are not politicians or something
Else funny.
It may be in doubt they are human at all;
Concepts wired up
With a screen for a wall to show memory:
Spewing out models of risk
And uncertainty.
Measuring the loot of the world’s
Aging billions:
Cash that adds up to hundreds of trillions.
What you did last month doesn’t matter a jot
It’s what happening now that counts for the lot.

When a butterfly tumbles
And performs in Peru
The red card is flagged from computer to you. The
Risk model says the risk
Factors have altered:
That risk you took last week has now
Gone and faltered.
So follow instructions: delete from the programme
That order we called
And that hold put on Put.
The rate must go up
Or the cash go on out.

Perceived expectations: perceived quantum
Risk
Modified market uncertainties
Frisk
Down our hopes
Batters our fears
Causes the money to stop
And change gears.

Perennial problems perplex perceived risk.
Confusion of outcomes presents the most risk
To one who man’s mountains of money: to plan and to
Do and to follow things through to
The end:
Which should always be happy.

Should this Hollywood twitch
Suffer a glitch…should heaven transform into hell
When success equals misery,
Inconsolable outrage,
Mixed in with
Anger
As
Well.
Then confusion will reign
The markets feel pain
And the cash is away before
losseswillclaimallthegain.

In other words: In the world of money
Something is done; which is not at all funny:
A result is achieved, expected or not.
There are no relative gains
For corporate aims,
But returns, as predicted.
If results are in doubt,
Then someone with clout
Changes course,
Before loss is addictive.

When bosses complain, cash workers feel pain
And the outcome is bad for the homeowner’s loan and the girl
Who was Jill becomes Jane.

Alt.F1 delete part one: next transaction please.

.NiK(2000)

For one of our girls: murdered for her handbag.

It was a cold day
to put a child in the ground;
the sky wept and you
swept,
wet, wild, windswept,
raging, through
the icy, midsummer morning
so that the heavens,
mourned
with us:
remembering perhaps, that time,
when we all lay down
and studied Scorpio.

We counted out the stars
that
formed the tail
and talked about
the pictures in the sky.
We talked about the archer, Sagittarius,
checked out the flying star
it somewhere learned to shoot:
we wondered at the marvel,
of that Comet,
that Bopped out after Haley,
trailing out a
solar
vapour
route.

Then we talked about the
Universe
and all
our trifling
bankruptcies,
Talked about the
meanings
in the stars.
Awed, by the auld milky way;
untroubled, by remorse,
or whether there is an answer
to the shuffling and the snuffling and that time
when paradise is lost.

Now
we have passed
that vantage point
behind the etched
out
cross,
depicting the
reflection
of your
own
steadfast
intention.
To follow through the route you called, ‘your way’.

The ‘flower girl’
walks
all night
towards her mother’s grave,
reaffirmed,
as some one
we had lost, along the way.

Sing a song of paradise
within our bloody wounds
sing a song of paradise, with me.

Farewell to the winds,
which bring premeditation,
farewell, to the winds of all.

Sing a song of paradise
within your bloody triumph.
Sing a song of paradise with me.

We settled first, then stood,
and
waited
for the bell.
Settled first, then waited for the summons:
crucified
against a
deep,
sad silence,
we
repaired
our faith, and
sang a song of paradise, with you.

.NiK(1998) R.I.P. Shannon Leigh Whittall.
14-7-1981 - 28-11-1998.

Four Haikus


Anger is depression with
Out enthusiasm
Highly illogical: spring buds burst.



Father vacuums grey
Hair following spring cut
Years melt like blossoms.



Red flower burs
ts from naked bra
nch: fillagrees of coral.



Ripping out ingrown
Toenail on warm Saturday
Night: old blood runs cold.


.NiK(00)

Meyersdal*

Sanitised
Romanticised
Democratised
Suburbanised.

Your nightmares are real,
The bars made of steel.
The roads are not paved with gold.

You drive down some street,
Where the people you meet
Do not watch each other grow old.

Now you live in an age
Where you hide in your cage
Play the game of suburbanite life.

Flaunting and skulking and lurking in there
Dreaming out fantasies you’d love to dare
Paranoid, bored, class-ossified, wife.

You’re not rich, you’re not poor
Your debts line the floor
You’re so scared you are barely alive

Begetting tax avoiding perks,
To dull the pain which always lurks,
In the lawn and the ritual burning meat.

You take a course of rough brick,
And some occasional trick
Turned with glass and the hot plate on heat

To match the sound of your fate.
The latch on your gate.
The jungle outside your front door…

.NiK ( circa.1992)
* Meyersdal is an upmarket suburb.

August 31, 1997.
I am sitting in space myself
at the moment
thinking that you’re
not here
and it’s Friday afternoon.

I’ve worked all month
and have no beer,
no vodka, sherry, gin
or anything.

I do find coffee
and guzzling that,
thought this.

.NiK(1997)

From the Stonehaven collection.

Trappe.*

Up behind me,
in a splendid, secret gorge
tucked up between a krans or two,
frothing,
ice sparkling manna
rushes down
a time worn path
tumbling along at last
quite uproariously
across the final trappe
to find
its well grooved route.

Some to end in stagnant pools
much
to race with rippling joy
across the open
flood plain:
rushing off to see the world:
coruscating drops.

.NiK(1996) * Trappe: Afr: steps

Stonehaven #3
Remembering
how the silence hung,
tremulously,
between distant chirruping,
and cawing;
the flapping of a sudden
flurried
wing,
and the ripened innuendo
humming from a swarm of bees,
tending to their nectar.

Faraway,
that crashing roar
of gentle water, foaming
for a brief and frenzied
moment,
drowns out all sound.

I’ll brave the bees
and move on,
slowly, down an avenue
of motley trees
each one , I’m told,
to mark the passing of a promise:
each one a metaphor
for those who passed here
once.

.NiK(1996)

A locked gate at Stonehaven.

A bull blocks my way;
he is on the other side
of a farm gate
and he glares at me
ferociously;
lowers his head
folds an ear
to the largest gap
in the wired barrier.

When I come too
close,
he breaks away, snorts
gives a grunt
circles, tosses head
rubs his horns
against a stump.

Then he chews awhile
on juicy
clumps of lawn
while half-a-dozen calves
of variable vintages
approach
to see what I will do.

Soon I’ve gathered such
a crowd
as others came to watch
expectantly.

Then father, feels the turf,
scrapes a fetlock,
moves up
behind
a youngish calf,
and snorts an intemperate command
into its ear.
They all break away
leaving but two younger bulls
to bar my way:
and of course,
Big bad dad.
.NiK(1996)

Cobwebs
The back -end of the lawn
is dotted
here and there
with glistening cobwebs.

Fine, crennelated wisps
of spittle
sparkle
in the early sun.

Some murky creature
lurks inside an aperture
hollowed
at the centre.

It peers out at me,
looming
from its
gently ruffled canopy.

.NiK (1996)


Scotch Carts*

How many poems,
I wonder,
have been written about
Scotch carts
pulled
by spans of donkeys.

In this case
there is
no cart;
only a troop
of foolish asses
poised
to draw…nothing.

Ears pointed
perpendicular
to their heads in
alert proximity.

An attendee
sneezes
voraciously,
shakes his head,
and walks away.

Two further donkeys
stand to
disorder;
In a field, beyond a gate
and watch him:
are startled for a moment
as another attendee,
runs purposefully
by;
reaches the gate
and leaves them, again,
waiting:
patiently.

.NiK(1996)
*Scotch Cart: Two wheeled cart drawn by donkeys:
ubiquitous to Africa


Thoughts of a long dead Greek philosopher on
crossing a stream.I step into the water
and
the
stream
slips
through
me

Its unfragmented melody
ripples
as it runs around
a bend
between some
dark
dank
copse of Wattles.

I walked on through
and
left
no
footprint even
once
in that
crystal
place.

.NiK(1996)

Flutterings
A butterfly,
seeming black,
with red markings
flutters to a roadside
rock as I approach, then
as I walk closer it floats above
my path, across a stretch of grass
filled gully to a low lying krans, and a
bigger
rock.

.NiK(1996)


Thus endeth the Stonehaven poems which are dedicated to the American poet, Robert Frost.

1991...The First Hours...Port St Johns
A school of Porpoise
cruise off
Second beach.
We saw them
yesterday
from Sugarloaf.

Two dozen
more
swam offshore
elegant
in unison.

Then
standing high upon
a bank
we saw them
all
again
metaphors for
peace
and sanctity
heralds to
the point
beyond the bay.

While down below us
on the beach
secure in Lemming
fantasy,
stream multitudes of
revellers
to purge out
obsolescences.

Shouting words of joy
at the dawning
of the year; they cast
beyond
the breakers,
beyond
the white frothblasted
waves;
streaming out
until the scene
was black
with bobbing heads
'til
when,they fell,
exhausted,
cleansed,
onto the sand.

Then
(as in parenthesis)
a girl;
sandsplay running
herald
companions at her heels
disordered,
and dishevelled;
quite unlike stately Porpoises:
nonetheless
in unison
as in an ancient chorus
they cried out...

Haaaaappy...!
Haaappy…. !

.NiK (1991)

Transactions
He told me the cost
and how much back
on the empties
I worked it out
in my head
slotting the figures
neatly together
he calculates with care
on his hand.

One twenty eight
the tally read
and eighty back
on the bottles.
The very same answer
he called back
quite soft.

We're accurate hey!
in a bluff hearty way.
Yes, came the answer
then, added in softness,
unless of course
we're both wrong

.NiK (circa 1970.s)Publ: Two Tone (circa 1980)


The Fat Tailed Curve*
On reading the London ‘Economist’.

The thing had a memory
Of the past, he said,
Speaking of the Nile.
He called it the ‘Hurst Exponent’:
The probability that one event
Would be followed by another
Similar event; and then to
Explore this route, how often
And at what interval in time can
We learn to arbitrage
Our opportunities.

The ever present rules
Of the bureaucrat’s procedures,
Demonstrated how some
Favoured theories were overturned;
Trendy concepts
(Like capital asset ratios)
Were all invalidated, or at
Worst called into
Question since those insights were a perv’
Dependent on a standard deviation
From a norm
Now we simply cannot form
A valid construct
From a leptokurtotic curve*.

Then there was that notion
That the
River could remember and
If the river could
Then so could something else
Like a stock market curve or the idea
That order
And randomness
Can co-exist in a place
Of Zen-no-ness.

And the truth: that herds follow
Fashion was hence validated
And we all knew that,
Before it was proved, provided
We knew it all before we saw
The time horizon,
Lyapunov’s* point
Where we could forget entirely.

.NiK(2000)
*The Fat Tailed Curve & Hurst Exponent:
Statistical evaluation instruments for measuring
probabilities. H.E.Hurst.
**Leptokurtotic: “The more Leptokurtotic a curve is, the more
misleading the notion of a standard deviation….”
Economist Oct 9, 1993
.***Lyapunov Time Horizon (LTH). Like the ripples on a pool which
eventually merge with the surrounding water the LTH
measures the point where risidual memory evaporates.


Some doggerel nonsense which may or may not
be on the subject of sex
We had a most eventful day
In a Warwick* flown out for a play,
Which She did fly with great aplomb
And later landed, like a bomb
On a jetty spewed with clouds of dust
And thick red soil that smelled of rust.

Some lads came by to bawl us out,
From a yacht they’d hired to fish for trout
Which we’d disturbed by flying so low
That now they’d gone all gills aglow.

They asked us why we flew the thing
I shrugged and spoke of some old sting
When the Warwick flew with a different crew
Earlier on, before we knew
About some age old Venda Gold
Which the ancients ate to stop the mould
Of dust to dust: carefully rolled.

And then we heard of things banal
On that yacht they’d parked in some canal
(A deal they’d pulled in old J’town);
When one remembered with a frown
The Venda Gold, a plot too bold.

When we left we said we must
Arrest that mould of dust to dust.
We took off from a ragged cliff,
With paper bags to give us lift;
While the sailor’s moll and all her kin
Pushed us ‘till we came right in
To a void: clear bright open spin.

“Till then She soared aloft at last
Above a highway, flying past
A place we came to land at length;
A place we’d seen before the tenth
Remaining time torn obelisk
Where the treasure lay, all wreathed in mist.

.NiK(circa 1982)*Warwick: Air sea rescue aircraft, WW2








Gravity

If an Avalanche is
Crashing
Down a mountainside
Shall we believe
That the atomised snowflakes are engaged in
A tacit
Conspiracy to crash
Through
Their destination
Or would
It be rational to conclude
The destination to be
Inevitable: a result of
Critical mass.

.NiK(00)

30/5/00
Roadkill

Driving without brakes
On a highway
In heavy morning traffic
Is a sublime exercise in
Stress management, espec
Ially when the
Journey
Started
With “all systems go”.

The class awaits, kids don’t
Go on hold; they cannot
Be filed or even
Postponed.
Being ‘all systems go’
Means the glass in the class
May be honed,
Humans may be broken or
Roughly deboned.

I would have to fill out a form
Accounting for a lapse in fiduciary
Responsibility
And
There
Are
Few
Exercises on earththataremorestress
Fullthanfillingoutforms:
More stressfull even than
Driving a ’78 Volksie Beetle
In the fast lane
With no brakes
At
All
Downacrowdedhighway
Intherushhour.

I shifted left;
Shouted at the traffic
Which parted, unaccountably;
And found a comfort
Zone
In the emergency lane:
Slowed down, thought of home,
Whether I should phone.

I worked out how much
Actual
Play
There was between my foot
and my brain
and wondered if that most
bodacious gearbox
would still rise up
to take the
strain
of
crashing , double de-clutch
down
to
first…..whether I should
take some
alternate route
viasomedeviationlesslikelytobefullofcars

There was one.

And then
there was still time
for half a cup of
coffee
before
class.

.NiK(2000)
About the Poet
On rare occasions I leave town and go into the country, or around the country and the only reason that I go there is because someone asked me to, or else pays me to do it. I am an urban poet: I imbibe the spirit of Thoreau not his milieu.

My wife, Diane, describes me as a man who lives obsessively under a pile of words which scatter all about like autumn leaves. Beyond that she is non committal. My youngest daughter says I am kind, loving, huggable and mad. My eldest children have left home. They still email me now and again, which I take to be good news.

I can only agree with Nietzsche that the past is a dead hand upon the present.

I am what I am because that is what I have chosen to be, whether I realised it or not and whether the synchronicities that have teased me to this place are only obvious in hindsight and probably not obvious at all. I am here as the compounded consequence of all the millions of decisions (and indecisions…Thomas) taken by me and others across a lifetime, and for which I have no explanation. I am no longer even remotely certain whether cause predates effect or vice versa.

Basically as long as all my most important people are ok and there is food in the fridge when I want it, life is cool.

Nicholas.


Other work by .Nicholas Williamson.

The Buffalo Hunters …Cyberstories: Allegoric crime fiction prose poetry:
The Ashanti Raider…Cyberstory: Allegoric crime fiction prosepoetry:
Rehearsing Nietzsche…. Poetry based on a year of playing Nietzsche
7 Ways to get your money… Survival handbook for debt colleting… a novel under pseudonym Nicholas Jakari : now retitled: Tales of a tickey line trader