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 — Thami Mnyele (unpublished autobiography, 1984)