Vacation

Our sheets are wet with sweat

As we wake in the furnaced light

If only, a sea-sand holiday it was

Where balloon balls bounce around gayly

And pastel shouts, ice cream melting,

Trickling down the spines of fingers

Tongues ready to lick the sticky slick –

If only, indeed

 

But powdery Portugal will have to wait

Just last week

You lay on me

Twisting yourself,

Merging with my limbs like a salty pretzel

You fell into a rhythm:

Quiet waves of slumber caressing

 

You, I held

As the rain spluttered on glass

Spring softness, shiny jewels

Glittering grey against the backlit green

Made ever-so vibrant, intense

The promise of sun

Through verdant plumage

 

Made beautiful by wafting Nina Simone

And Ella Fitzgerald

And Moon River

Made beautiful by the sweet songs of bygone days

Of other people’s affections

 

But, I’m having a crimson romance with our love.

 

And with our bedspread, our glinting forks and our mason jars

(Poised to be domestic and used)

 

I’m having

A dancing tryst with your calves

Plump plums, juicy to sink white enamel into

Gnashing your goodness, savouring your kindness

Pressing your gooey insides to my breast

And stroking your Lynch-like hair

 

You’re my vacation by the sea and I drink in your

Seashore eyes every day.

My husband calls

My husband calls me during his lunch break to find out how I am. I am well, I say with a modicum of truth, and begin the conversational dance of pretending that I am not on the brink of letting it all go and allowing obesity and a disregard for hygiene to run rampant, to fester like puss in a neglected sore. He is goodness though, and the best part of this life.

Every morning I wake before him. His body is creamy and I fold my limbs into his batter like egg whites in a cake. I look at his back, mapping made-up star constellations and whatever patterns come to me in those hidden hours.

He smells like him. There is no comparison to this scent because it is so uniquely his musk and sweat and sweetly yumminess. He twitches occasionally and I hold on tightly as his slumber attempts to take him away. He could float up into the sky, on a hot air balloon of cloudy dreams, if I don’t press him to me. I curl my feet to hook into his and we move our appendages together in an unsung rhythm. These quiet communications are my favourite moments in the day. They rub me the right way.

Embroidered Floral Kingdom

My sugar-buttered childhood taught me how to

Speak in soothing sherbet tones,

Crystal-encrusted,

And embroider thick summer blossoms

Onto the slippery pink satin of my tongue

 

Years of coiled yarn spin themselves

Into an entangled mess of femalehood

Red dress plastered onto my limbs

Stretching over the mounds of fleshy plump

Impasto swathes of kitchen breeding

Seeping through my pores like granny lavender

 

Floral sunshine, spinning teeth

My mouth that actually bites and snaps

And spits out mistakes and curse words

Lips full of vitriolic acid and insecurities

 

Febrile is my temperament, rouged and ferocious

My feet clap with lightning rod high heels

Burning itch beneath finger nails

My tunic of rage ribbed with horror

The furnace in my belly, swelling and rolling

The tips of my tongue flicking flames

Off into the sunset-rich horizon that holds no future

Or promise.

 

I blow on my conch

The howling despair that bends to the moon

Pale orb cut by Father Time’s sickle

This complicated bracken maze

Of what it means to breathe

With the weight of swollen breasts

Fondled roughly by dark-glassed men

Clawing, crawling eyeball gazes

Wolf calls that scathe

Canine want, growling desire

Barking, roaring for a piece

 

Beaded, heaving clouds

Trousers dragged forth from jiggling belly

Near the erect centre

The monolith of manhood

Spiked, slick

Coated in sweaty entitlement

 

The cream-soft thighs forced

Into a wide, shrieking V –

For vagina, for virginal, for virtue –

 

Taking all you want

Spoonfuls flowing over

Tureens of dimpled pudding

Devoured with unseeing gluttony.

On Leaving London Love, Returning to Cape Town

I was nervous to drive yesterday evening, but when I turned the key in the ignition, I felt fine. As I drove over De Waal Drive, dipping and turning, I was overcome by a sense of vitality. The sun was beaming through gaps in the mountain and the city to my right looked bleached by it. I was listening to music and suddenly remembered how sexy and fun summer in Cape Town can be. I felt empowered as I eased into the driving, revelling in the feel of the motor, and thought of how I’d conquered cycling in central London – if I can do that, I can definitely manage riding around my hometown.

Later, seeing my friends offered a boost of positivity and confidence. I feel as if I’m settling into myself again, away from you. I talked and danced and laughed with them under a soft touch of alcoholic influence. Fran and I lazed in bed chatting about life and I became aware of how much my special people had grown and changed and what current predicaments they found themselves in. It comforted me to know that they were all just winging it like me, like us. I felt sad and I missed you but in a way that didn’t feel crippling. In fact, it strengthened me to know that what we have is beautiful though unattainable in certain ways for the present moment. But it’s still there.

I woke up and went for a brief walk on the promenade. The smell of the sea and nature tickled my memory. The light was growing, steeping the landscape in the early spreading gold of tea that will soon deepen into rich amber. In this waking metropolis however, it’s more likely to sink into the white steaming heat of the day. Bright, stark shadows. My window was open on the way home as I watched the morning yawning and felt acceptance at our lot and the need to make the most of this period. A fire is in my belly raging to exorcise itself; energy is bubbling. I feel ready for the day in every way. Come at me with your best shot life, I can take whatever you throw my way.

Busy Bees

Busy bees buzzing around my head

Tiny feet, diaphanous wings

Stamping and flapping

On my marshmallow-boned brain

Your din is a maddening, humming haze

Nebulous swirling clouds to mock my logic

 

The bruises are in full bloom

Blossoms of vibrant puce and violet

Purple eggplant shiner

Ripe and rounded

Watercolour splotches

Bleeding into an abstract impression

Not yet the autumn fall –

 

Old, curling at the edges

Meagre jaundice spiderwebs

threatening to stay for the rot –

 

That is still to come.

 

Shall we remember

The curtained boudoir

A cocoon of nutmeg-y toastiness

Orange glow, blue twinkling fairies

Furnaced fragrance wafting, tickling our noses

A friendly ‘hello’

Mutual tea-hugging, herbal enticements gripped to sleepy hands

Me spread over the sheets like butter

 

Those times you brushed my hair:

After steamed lovemaking in hot December

After going out with plaits in North London, your fingers fumbling with the braids and knots

After yet another fight in Canonbury

 

Those times you brushed your hair:

In front of the looking glass

Gooey faces of giggles

Flashing sapphire, eyes alight

Toothy grins to complete the picture

 

Shall we remember

The heaviness of the room

The musty, stuffiness like mouldy velvet

Suffocating us both

The many watered tears contouring my face

Your temple-rubbing, my blistering words

Our ‘cunt’s and middle fingers and threats of violence

The saltiness of blame

The punches of anger

The kicks of guilt

 

Or rather remember

The reality of it all

Feeling alone together

Existential but together

Showing the worst together

Seeing the best together

Pushing and pulling together

Fighting and loving together

 

Shhh, buzzing bees

You’re giving me a migraine

Your morphing memories of night

Tossed pillows, flailing limbs

Like childhood nightmares sticking to my psyche

Are too much for now

Go to sleep

Calm for the moment

 

No one can control the future.

Review: ‘American Honey’

The BFI’s 2016 London Film Festival officially screened its final items on Sunday the 16th, however I still have film impressions to deliver. I watched Andrea Arnold’s three hour epic, American Honey (2016), recipient of the Cannes Jury Prize, as part of the festivities one frosty Saturday evening at Hackney Picturehouse.

The film begins in a manner that completely negates traditional Hollywood expectations of a theatrical experience that stretches as long as it does. But then again, Arnold can never be accused of creating ‘mainstream’ work. Her Oscar award-winning short, Wasp (2003), is a portrait of the overwhelming grimness of single-motherhood in effluent areas of the UK. Her first feature film, Red Road (2006), also honoured with the Cannes Prix du Jury, is an edgy investigation into concepts of voyeurism, haunted histories, grief and revenge. Naturalism of camera and performance, Dogma 95-esque inflections, saturate her oeuvre and distills into a painful humanism that one simultaneously wants to avert their eyes from but finds themselves unable to.

American Honey is no different in its approach to affective honesty. Star (played by the formidable Sasha Lane – an amateur actress Arnold discovered on the beach) is rummaging around a dumpster. The entirety of her body, clad in barely-there attire, is involved in the process. She is searching for sustenance, or rather just something to eat, to give the two children accompanying her. As is a trend throughout, the finite details of whose kids these are and why Star has been charged with the responsibility of caring for them remains amorphous. Hints are provided but specific truths of character and past will continue, for the most part, to be swathed in mystery. The viewer must collect pieces of information dropped into peripheral dialogue to formulate an impression of who they are watching; the reasoning that has informed these personas’ actions and demeanours. This vagueness implies that the audience is merely dropping in for a brief ride along their journey. The nebulous nature of their tales makes them at once specific while also evoking a sense that these people populate the world all over.

After exposing Star’s domestic situation as one filled with unfairly mature duties, coupled with a sexually abusive family tie, she decides to join a travelling troupe of magazine-punting teenagers in an effort to shatter her parental-like restraints and follow their dark and brooding manager, Jake (played by Shia LeBeouf). This ragtag team of misfits, each individual with versions of trauma and neglect that seem ubiquitous yet unique, drive around Oklahoma in a minivan selling publications. As Arnold addressed in her Cannes panel earlier this year though, in an age where hard copy is becoming outdated, these subscriptions are more of a guise for buyers investing in the people peddling them. Krystal, acted by Riley Keogh (known as the lead in The Girlfriend Experience or Elvis Presley’s granddaughter), is the owner of the company and is the capitalist reminder that they need to use the entirety of their arsenal of personal tools and physical assets to make a buck: lie, plead, expose yourself in the name of the dollar. “If you’re not making money, I’m not making money”, she warns Star as she stands strung-up in a patriotic-themed bikini while Jake rubs self-tan onto her thighs. The threat is obvious and without sympathy: lack of earning will land you back on the street.

Hopping from one grungy motel to the next, the story grapples with the literal and figurative fluidity of a young girl attempting to break free from her social and economic confines. Star’s peripatetic lifestyle is enhanced by the organic feeling camera work conducted by Arnold’s usual cinematographer, Robbie Ryan. Working in their standard 4:3 aspect ratio, Ryan is able to capture and contrast the mundane textures of life on the road, rolling through bleak industrial and suburban landscapes, with the sun-soaked wonder of the wilderness that borders them.

Star  is as flare-filled and vibrant as these nature scenes (scenes that offer a reprieve from the direness of city living). Her name, however, recalls the nation’s flag and jingoism – a symbolic reaching for the twinkling lights ahead (or the American Dream). But the film rather unceremoniously peels back the layers of American society to reveal a system that has ultimately failed its people. Arnold’s social realism is reminiscent of Ken Loach, her poetic lyricism of Lynne Ramsay, however her style is very much her own brand. She exposes the gritty poverty, and its brethren such as drug abuse and malnutrition, that belies the simulacrum of an ideal USA. At the start of the film, a bleeding raw chicken, left out in the heat and prodded with a fork as a plaything, is continually returned to as visceral symbol of a life of paucity and unhealthiness. Images such as these juxtapose Star and Jake entering a wealthy home where a pile of overflowing birthday presents (in amongst them is Kim Kardashian’s selfie book) intended for a spoiled preteen girl confronts them. The excess is so obscene that it acts as a metaphor for the greater discrepancy of wealth distribution at large where a handful of pockets are bulging, straining to burst, while the rest are starving and meagre.

American Honey is brimming with brio and creates a charged atmosphere of tension that seems to be on the constant precipice of explosion. Whether its the brazenness of a female protagonist who continually puts herself into risky or possibly dangerous situations, the backtrack of aggressive hardcore hip hop, the sexual attraction between Star and Jake, or the combination of these elements, the film achieves a high level of energy throughout despite its expansive length. Hormones are ablaze in these characters. Unsure of how to manage emotions and without adult supervision, the magazine-sellers are left to their own devices like Peter Pan‘s Lost Boys. Ritualistic fights akin to another literary link, The Lord of the Flies, ensue amongst the hodgepodge family. Drinking and drugs anaesthetise them from the harshness of their reality. The overt sexualisation of young female bodies plays out the social economy of their restrictive world – one of financial dearth and engendered oppression. Despite the negativity that surrounds Star and her ilk, the movie is redemptive and hopeful. It breathes life into sepia-toned cliches of experience tinged with deprivation. It instead provides fully-coloured portraits of personas with rich inner-lives. The film is unconventional in myriad ways, however there are a few scarce moments where its alternative nature folds in on itself and becomes overly trite or profound, such as a typical angry chair bashing by jaded loves, quaint unrealistic encounters with bears and maudlin singing sessions with group members. Overall though, the performances are gripping and solid, the run-time justified and the narrative unusual: a charming watch.

Impressions: ‘Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World’

The BFI’s annual London Film Festival has been raving in said metropolis since the 5th of October and I’ve been privileged to see a few cinematic works. Last night I watched Werner Herzog’s latest documentary release, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World (2016), at the Genesis Cinema in Whitechapel. A Q&A with the legendary filmmaker, conducted by the witty Richard Ayoade, was live-streamed after the film.

New from a man who doesn’t use a cell phone and once proclaimed nature to be “in misery”  comes a movie that offers an insightful look at the intricacies of the Internet; how it shapes and impacts our past, present and future. Divided into ten chapters with respective themes, such as the inception of the web, its dark side, the culture of ‘me’ and how the human race would function should there be a vast and widespread blackout, the film meticulously analyses mankind’s diverse relationship with cyberspace.

Herzog sketches a nebulous impression of a time of yore: a breath in history when virtual technology was still in a state of whispered infancy. By interviewing its architects, talking heads of science and progress, he divulges the philosophies upon which this endless source of easily accessible information is founded. Attempting to recreate an imagined reality where the Internet’s ubiquitous nature is nonexistent (a surprisingly difficult task), he interviews people who have been forced to lead hermetic lives, isolated from most of modern technology, due to an unusual disease that makes one highly sensitive to radio waves.

Lo and Behold’s evaluation hinges on paradoxical intersections. Concepts regarding the literal and hypothetical removal of the web’s multitudinous sway over society, the possibility of advancement in the health sector, Elon Musk’s projections towards producing a colony on Mars, the threat of addiction and cyber bullying, coalesce to evoke a complex tapestry of tension and contradiction. Herzog makes no real moral judgement but serves a rounded case study of this mammoth technological tool. Instead, his cultish lilt poses questions to the documentary’s contributors as well as the audience by extension. The director’s characteristic theatrical treatments and tableaus provide additional textures to the words spoken. An arrangement of pastries on a breakfast table, centre-frame, hint at meanings that need to be teased out by the onlooker – as do monks swathed in saffron robes absorbed in their smart phones. 

A worthwhile and good watch, the movie’s pace tends to meander in parts. Scientific jargon occasionally veers into the realm of the esoteric. There are flashes of typical Herzogian humour (for example when he represses the urge to ask a recovering gaming addict about the “malevolent druid dwarf”) and poetry (who else would inquire from various sources whether or not they believe the Internet “dreams of itself”), but the reveries concerning the “connected world” lack some of his signature flare.

Ayoade’s streamed interaction at the movie’s conclusion was an interesting accompaniment and enriched the cinematic experience. It offered an intriguing view of the director who has achieved deity-like status in contemporary culture. Herzog’s passionate declarations about living without shame or doubt, the man himself as a creative genius, were in ways more gripping than the film. I would still heartily recommend it to any filmgoer.

In alignment with the documentary’s subject, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World can be watched online at home.

Daddy Baby

Round and polished, an unturning doorknob

Hairless shiny crown

(I never understood why they call them ‘Bald Eagles’)

The monarch of the household

Your dominion is domestic, parochial

Perched, a crested dictator

Oh father, thy will be done

Baby blue eyes in a baby pudding face

Bloated, despite the talons

 

Goo Goo Ga Ga

Goes the foetus in its swathing crib of entitlement

Ga Ga over biltong and rugby

Go bokke! Let’s braai our sorrows away

Rip into raw meat with the teeth of manhood

This is the Afrikaner way

 

Please, keep your feet up

High, high, high

Relax while your wife bends beneath your knees

In the crooks of your desire, the bent of your want

Genuflection in what some might call love

Hopelessly devoted, Sandy and Danny

Except Danny was a tosser.

 

Loop those stubby fingers –

Stretched to their furthest point –

Around my neck

Tighten the noose of this swan song

Hit and slam the hammer on the drum

The beat of self-righteousness

You’ve always done that well

Sketch sterile landscapes that hint at emotion

But never quite evoke it

Play The Who as loudly as you like –

Pete Townsend can’t hear you now

 

Tell me to get back into my box again

Please do. You know how I like it

I must be a caged, feral animal

You must be privy to how I crave strangulation

You must have instilled my taste for

The copper saltiness of pain and flagellation

Flog me for having ovaries

Punch me for having a mind that lacerates more than yours

Coddle me to your chest before you smother me in ashes

We aren’t Chinese but hide behind your Dutch religion

The church has always been resourceful

When digging for Biblical text

We protect our own, our lambs of slaughter

 

You’re a full-grown toddler struggling to stand

Stunted gait, tottering mind

An intoxicated infant?

How irresponsible

The headlines should be calling for justice!

Aren’t females the problem though?

Aren’t offspring the problem though?

Didn’t we ruin your chances

At a glorious path scattered with many prized fossils

Remnants of the ancient land

 

Burnt sienna Kalahari sand

That sticks to the roof of the mouth like bloody tar

That colours your clothes with bigotry

That rubs into your wounds like love never received

Never given

 

Festoon yourself with your squandered talents

Wear them with the fluorescent venom of blame

Don’t reflect, the mirror will shatter and sting you

You will forever be acid-etched by your failings

 

Take it out on me, Baby

I will talk above you in swirling circles and cut out your lying tongue

Deceit is almost as harmful as denial

Squeeze lemon juice in your eye and watch the pus leak out

This miasma is what your actions have sought

 

I disown your traces in my saliva

Castrate the loins from whence I sprung

They are crusted and diseased anyway

I used to sing nursery rhymes

(Ode to Daddy’s Strength)

Now I spew hate speech

 

Pink, fleshy memories of first-time biking

Clasped hands journeying trafficked streets

Bubblegum tales catch in my throat

Scalding reflux

I spit out

I choke out

I vomit out your hypocrisy –

Regurgitation works better than a Rennies

 

Your disgraceful words

Won’t bludgeon me into submission

I shall not cow in mutt-obedience

Scratch me off your to-do list –

I reject you as master

 

Do not burden me with the yoke of your regrets

This ox is rather a crow

Heralding your dearth of time

Your imminent black descent

You’re pious, aren’t you?

 

Kneel before the forsaken daughter

Your mucus-filled sighs won’t bleach this murder scene

They’ll bring you back cooing from hospital swaddled in cloth

And I’ll slash your face

 

I went

Goo Goo Ga Ga too

Once.

You saw my face and turned away

 

I recall your hum of despair at the close of the door

Welcome home, Baby Daddy.

My Regal-Spined Lover

My regal-spined lover

Bone poured down with heavy cream

Elongated, stretched

Falling ridges and reaching crests

Lotion-rubbed by Ingres

Alabaster is the tradition but I find it unyielding

I’d rather dip my spoon in

And lick the tasty traces off my fingertips

One. At. A. Time.

Childhood Amelie wonder, morsels to savour

 

Recline for me, my sweet

Sit for the painter’s painterly touch

Silhouette like rolling hills

The South Downs of your south downs

Reveal to me your secret places

The hooks of your hipbones

The denseness of your shadow

Undulate your chiaroscuro

Unfurl the ferns of your appendages –

Tendrils of snaring fronds

Isn’t affection arresting?

 

Smooth waves of a Neoclassicist

Pretty peacock with plenty of plumage to stroke

Be exotic with your stoicism

And your Doric columns –

Those legs that run their way through this life

 

I just want to grip your body over mine

Winehouse was a revelation.

Although I prefer ‘rip’

Wasn’t Curtis correct when he said love would tear us apart?

Indeed, tear into me and slurp up the pudding that bleeds out

This thing we’re doing is messy, make no mistake

But there’s no use crying over spilt promises

 

Twist your words around mine

And hold them in your marble hand

A treasure entwined with thin gold thread

Sow your fingers into my flesh, pin me to your body

But take me tenderly and with pillowy softness

Stitch those gasps into a tapestry of gilded dreams

Feverish and hopeful

 

Enfold me in your folds

Gather my hair at the root; pull

Shake my skeleton until it writhes

Mattress me on a shoal of sweet nothings

You see, our Leggo limbs fit together

Let’s build a castle of clever quips and despair

May it reach the heavens of unattainability

Make my diaphanous laughs concrete

Those billowing whispers of approval

 

Drag me asunder and let’s sink to the bottom

I give myself willingly if you’ll always

Reply to my Whatsapps with poetic eloquence.

 

(Inspired by my real-life lover, Bradford)

A Short List of Hopes: A Letter to a Travelling Friend

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If you’re in Berlin, I hope the frenetic eclecticism and dynamism of the city is enveloping you. Its vivid colours are reverberating deep within you and ironing out the lacklustre kinks of the ennui of the last few months.

If you’re in Italy, I hope it’s singing its song for you. One full of operatic drama and swells of billowing emotion. I hope the sunlight is gilding you in a halo of warmth, a cocoon of comfort. I hope the history inspires and the art awes and the celestial quietude of churches instills an a-religious, pious calm.

I hope the poetry of living, of seeing the world and meeting people, infects you with an insatiable thirst. I hope you see the yet-silent, unwritten beauty of what lies before you. I hope that in amongst the often mundane, sometimes difficult and almost always tourist-riddled travel, you get to experience the romanticism of it all. I hope your friends are acting as a soothing balm, alleviating the malaise and weariness of Life. I hope your adventures distill into a revitalising elixir, replenishing the resources of your pool of creativity. I hope you feel alive.