Sandile Dikeni's books are Telegraph to the Sky (University of Natal) and Guava Juice (Mayibuye Books). He lives in Cape Town, where he works as a journalist.





**

Chicken livers
I return
To the sounds of broken bones
Whom I try to mend
With broken words
In a web
Of verbs
Without rhyme,
Crime,
Or slime
I
Slip into
Sleep and dream
Where I kill
Deadlines
To awaken
Life lines
Hold on
I scream down
The narrow corridor
Of corrugated consciousness
Hold on
I am poem
Reincarnated
I dance with my unborn children
Twins from Hiroshima & Chernobyl
HIV negative and still dead
Without epitaphs
I send epistles and letters
In epigrams to life
When I know that this epidemic
Screams
for an epic to death.
It is yet another return
to the other madness.
I do not need LSD
To hallucinate
My madness is innate,
Immediate
I don't need ecstasy
To get ecstatic
The real scream from womb to womb to neon
Is already colourful red
And black
And purple like me
Like the bitter lines
On a dead sweet pussy
Flashing the grey ceiling of a morgue
Without disco lights
Or plight
I return to cold night
Return to the children
Of the night years
Light,
Syphilitic
And clutched-glued
In the paedophilic grasp
Another fatal embrace
By the market's extended entrepreneurship
Return
To the market of little naked bodies
Shot with art of the state's audiovisual components
For the IT revolution's pornographic
Graphic
Orgasm
Masturbated
And denied by the white hall's
Of the white house
While we know
That Richard Nixon
Wasn't the first dick
And the dollar bill is only as perverted
As William Clinton
Innocence
I return to innocence
To shred it
And fart on its incense
I am incensed
At the continued dominance
By the guilty
This absence of beauty
This false poetry
Rhythmically sodomising
The art form in a fantasy
To ejaculate
On the glorious walls
Of the Wall Street journals
Or to exchange vd
At the Johannesburg Stock Exchange
I return to change
Small change does not change me.
I exchange big blows
With the biggest masters of change
I will not call genocide a homicide
How can I?
I hold strong impressions
On repression, oppression and suppression
And other nasty missions on emissions and omissions
And care little if my expressions
Lend themselves to monetary depression
- that's momentary,
the economics of our soul
are falling deeper into permanent depression
the latest available balance
on our humanness
is in perpetual overdraft
and the majority shareholders
in our anguish and pain
are laughing all the way to the bank
with my poetic stethoscope
against the chest of your words
I hear gibberish
And I know the black vulture
has a heart of a buzzard
we need a transplant urgently
that's why i too must return
to the shores of laughter
where my own bones clatter
and I laugh mostly at myself
and my benevolence
in a return to a bowl of chicken livers
as organ donation
to cardiology