Murxen in G minor (a work in progress)

For some it is the music

Or the words, never both

For you who are everything

just enough bread in place of a carrot

to leave the chord hungered past caring

for any kind of sustenance

that does not begin and end

with the taunting call of drum and night

the keening  jaw of wounded beast

wanting at the mouth

I want to be the narrow tip tapping incessantly at sound’s surface

The rustling dip and stop of an empty stomach

filled with nothing but itself

The moment just before

the rest of your body realizes

how air rises around a falling plane

the ground reaching up fractured fingertips to touch

you, who are some lost and found song’s Icarus-sound

I watched your fisted knuckles drag and triple trap

the breath snared between wrist and rim

the quiet howling of heat caught between a missing beat

and ribs that still feel like a sudden cage

of broken rhythms

poetry is music

The Harare International Festival of the Arts ( HIFA ) is on again this May 1 - 6 in Zimbabwe. My band  sonic-slam-chorus  is on stage, Thursday 9th at the 7 Arts theatre, I'm looking forward to merging poetry with music for this year's set. Remember we don't get to see each other much because almost every member lives in a different country and we are literally spread country across 3 or 4 continents depending what time of the year it is. Thank you email and Skype.

Speaking of poetry and its music, there is a Sunday morning radio show in Botswana that's been on for a number of decades called 'dipina le maboko' quite literally 'music and poetry' and it features a number of the old poets/ folk artists who almost always merged music with their poetry. In a sense, for them, you couldn't really claim to separate the two, and instruments like the 'segaba' - a kind of home made violin, and 'setinkane' popularly known by its Zimbabwean name Mbira/thumb piano were a big part of the poetry performances. I say performance because traditionally the poet would have gone out of his way to wear some sort of special leather attire fashioned just this purpose and perhaps carry a horse-tail whisk and deliver his poetry in quite a vocally dramatic manner, accompanied by a woman whose duty was to 'cheer' him, or the poem, on through ululating each time he encouraged her through pauses or instruction to do so. In addition to this he (to begin with women would not have been allowed to recite poetry on public platforms, rather they were expected to tell folk stories to children around the evening fire - thank progress for the current inclusiveness of the craft now) at any rate, the poet would never write the poems down, simply composing them in his head until he had them just right or much like some modern day rappers compose the poem as he went along in front of his audience.There are still a number of poets who honour this tradition and it is quite a thing to behold.

Me, I like to sit with the words on a page first. And then find a stage. And if the story leaves room for the music to rise above the words, then we can talk. Hope to see you in Harare.

happiness in a pocket

No blog today just 10 things that make me smile

1. Julia Roberts laugh
2. Eating sun ripened mangoes
3. Listening to Olebogeng Morebodi’s evening radio show
4. Watching the Dark Knight
5. The X Files and Lie To Me theme songs
6. Counting the number of times the men in Sons of Anarchy hug per episode, and thinking how much the OST makes it seem like a musical – most/all the song lyrics are scene-literal
7. The memory of Lebo Mashile, Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani on tour at 7am in the morning and by extension the words ‘monkey’ and ‘mint’ in the same sentence
8. The HBO woosh sound before a show starts
9. Wole Soyinka’s telephone conversation, Sylvia Plath’s the arrival of the bee box, Taufiq Rafat’s circumcision, Owen Sheers’ not yet my mother. good poetry.
10. A toss between Bradley Cooper and Ryan Gosling’s smiles, Jim Cavieziel’s eyes and writing down this list every couple of months

Make your own smile list and keep it on you, its happiness in a pocket.