keeping it real: a happy new year?

a happy new year?

so it’s that time of the year again, as we all drink to numb the pain, lost in a haze of intoxicated numbness, we try and hope that the year ahead will bring something different, something better, some peace of mind and peace on earth, while all the changes is passing of yet another year, leaving us bamboozled and at times quaking with fear – fear at all that may be in store for us, fear of being the last once again to board the bus, fear that tears are the soul, as we booze it up to just feel whole, thinking and believing that as the calender and the clock turn, the heartbreak and ache may cease to our beings burn, scalding us as we crawl around this world we each have carved out for ourselves, the callousness of us for us and they for themselves, while all along we clutch onto that sliver of hope that tomorrow will be a whole new day, without the angst and mortgage and bills, hoping that the year ahead will pour peace within until our lives it fills, oh but what can I say about myself, tattered and sweating it out on a sea swept island, alone as most of us do feel, even as we on our knees pray and exhort as we kneel, begging the powers up on high, to bless us with love and mercy and not being made to work to the bone, as our fellow humans walk stiffly around us, unfeeling as stone.

tonight as I stare at the clock of time, churning out more and more depressive and disjointed rhyme, I still hope though hope has abandoned me so many new years past, that the reverie of the countdown never seems to even after a minute after midnight last, while I sink deeper into the quicksand of fate, torn and battered and always knowing I’ll just be that little bit late, but why am I spewing these sad words to you, my friends? perhaps to find kindred spirits who feel as I do, perhaps to realise that I may not be so alone, hoping that not all of us are hardened as stone, praying that we can start afresh this coming year – hope and hoping and beseeching the gods above – to bless us with simple love. 

love, that elusive feeling that binds two souls together as one, love that renders us not singular creatures, love that we can feel and hold and touch and kiss, the love that we all crave and so very much miss,

but alas I have seen many a new year come and go, so I kind of maybe just a little bit know, that tomorrow will be just another day,

and tomorrow I will still be unable to keep this deep ache at bay 

staying real: freeversing new years blues

art by banksy

freeversing new years blues …

… and so it has come to pass, this year that rendered trumped up egos as brittle as glass, the hubris of the few who have so much that it is grotesque, it is obscene, while the many billion souls are seen as chattel to sweat and die as they are relegated to the bowels unseen, and who would have believed it, that it is the year of our lord 2018 – and now the world awaits the pomp and the razzmatazz to usher in 2019, inebriated and inured, as the few use us all as pieces on a chess board, where billions of sewage-odoured cash are made off the perspiration in those barbaric sweat shops, and as the world is glued to the telly screens harrumphing as this stock and that bond drops, on that vile ticker seem everywhere it seems, allowing the few to purchase their penthouse of dreams, while once more the many are expected to work work work and never complain – damn your unions and collective bargaining for better pay and humane work conditions, we’re now in the era of ftz’s and coupons as daily rations.

it sickens me, as I know it does you, to smell the reeking greed of the 1% who fling around a million or ten to the slaving few, ah such generosity from those whose collective wealth could put an end to poverty and misery and preventable diseases if they only cared, if they only by some miracle or knock on the head realised and chose to accept that there is more than enough to be equitably shared – so that hunger and deprivation and indignity stalks our streets no more, yes yes yes, but who could care less, as they imbibe their largesse behind countless an endangered mahogany door.

so 2018 is coming to a close, and we are expected to intoxicate ourselves like some ancient gladiatorial charade, we are expected to be sloshed and staggering, singing and dancing expecting 2019 to be so much different than the year that is showing us the door, lost in a daze and a haze of alcohol fuelled excess, drowning the fact that we were driven to be deadened consumers in 2018, and who are we fooling, expecting a change in 2019, as dismembered hope and savaged dignity is swept off the stage, as the machinery of war and occupation and profits over people and petropolitics and diamonds and golden greed to cease, all the while the greed within us continues to ravenously feed, and as the rancid tumour of capitalism without conscience continues to multiply and breed. 

now, who am i to spew such self-righteous claptrap, i feast and enjoy the frills shaved off the innards of the profit-mongering beast, so who am i to slam the ways of this callous cold and heartless world, while i too don the tuxedo and have my partner drink champagne as to the music we have always swirled, so who am i to have the gall to even attempt to be a mouthpiece of the 99%, while every morning i as i pass by the dregs, it is i too who fling a couple or just a cent – i am you, i think, as we both guzzle down another fancy rainbow coloured drink, while cauterising our consciences, if we even had one, as long the the fine print is sealed and the deal done, so the booty can again and again and again be lasciviously won.

well, perhaps not you and i, we tell ourselves, we certainly don’t fit that heartless mould, where its buy buy buy and sell sell sell – sold!

then who is culpable?

who is to blame?

who is guilty of the pernicious non-rules of this endless i want more and more game?

it’s the leaders and politicians we holler, it’s the capitalists and corporations we shout, it’s the old money made off the backs of slaves we say, as we absolve us all, already, for 2019 and a day.

so here comes the end of yet another year, but by now our eyes are dry, incapable of shedding a single tear, not that tears are what is needed, if we could only turn off the blaring music and fireworks and hear the billions of empty stomachs that rumble, all around us as we of our saville row tailors do grumble – is there any hope at all that twenty19 will usher in a more kind, less harsh year? as for me I don’t think so, I fear. 

for as long as the system is as it is, gaudily consumerist and selling unfulfillable dreams, the world will be still tearing at the seams, where hunger continues to stalk the avenues of excess, where the crisp notes of money will be all that determines our success, for it is the system itself that fosters greed (not to give us all a pass), it is this corrosive system that has sunk its talons all around our no-longer very green earth, so what do we do to bring a better world to birth.

this is not a question but an indictment on me, who traipses around thinking that i am free, it is a slap in the face of my cocooned being, choosing what to ignore while seeing all that i wish to continually be seeing, oh yes indeed, it is i who am culpable of feeding this sewer of a system, that fills plates with caviar, while sucking out the very food from the hungry mouths both near and far, yes it is i who salivates over the next big thing, never pausing to even consider that as a united world, we may just be able to usher in a new spring.

a spring of hope and of justice and equality and gender-rights and freedom and dignity for all, it is within you and i to lift our heads which are so deeply entrenched in our comfortable sand, so that we may understand that cliche – that alone we fall but united we stand.

and stand we can, equally and as one, if we only accept that this system is vulgar and putrid, that this system consigns our fellow human beings to the cauldron of profit and of capital, and that the time has long passed for us to take up the long long long delayed battle, the battle for a gentler way, a kinder path where we all may tread, where no one in shame needs to ever again bow their head, for all to stand tall and proud, and perhaps then we may actually sing that we have overcome – that we have overcome the worst aspects of our human nature, tapping into each heart and releasing a wellspring of compassion for the sick, the infirmed, the elderly and the alone, but until that time we shall all be just divided, trying to draw water from the exploitative stone.

so, how possible is this new way, where humanity will hold sway? 

not possible at all unless the system is torn to tatters and set ablaze, to awaken us all from our consumerist daze, where charity and philanthropy are the order of the day (though i cannot say much for i do not lend a helping hand), and within this noxious system it is charity and philanthropy that “assists” the many, while i walk alone but with countless other – goose-stepping in silent compliance that is harks back millennia and that is so similarly uncanny.

no, it is the system that must either consume itself or be razed to the ground, all so that we may all plant new seeds all around, and yes it may work or it may not, and yes it will be chaos for quite a while – but what is the alternative?

for us all to continue to be servile?

wishing all a very happy 2019 …

a Southern African philosophy of the interconnectedness of all living beings