This piece reflects on retrieving creative powers you think are gone.

Poets preach and artists advertise:

In the half-cut passigchï , Shadow Bassist

Bat-tossing in nomolo speak coded in disguise

All by surpassing the rise of Junking Food and

Yanking woods out of the punch vines

that only brew grape-dancing-blood

For the truncated selection section

Riddled in the deflective questions

Posed by speech free of charge;

. Nothing shocking

. Or worth busting

. Or unknotting

. Tangled lines

. Tangy with time

. Licking verse by verse the worst sense of chiminging Chima-Aché-

. Fanon-Ché-Mopape

. Mnyele-Katché

. Zim-Kuti

. Zim Masekela

. “Bobby Bobby Bobby”

Njateng has been barking in

Coded Languages gut knotting his lung

god fearing at the Gun!

Run from the barrel of sonnets

Stuttering with pun tongues

At the panga church chirping with people chewing nunchucks

Kwafella! Sekgoa Fela!

“Having your lines taken from you.”

“For me as craftsman, the act of creating art should complement the act of creating shelter for my family or liberating the country for me people. This is culture.” — Thami Mnyele (unpublished autobiography, 1984)