Читать книгу This Carting Life - Rustum Kozain - Страница 6

Family portrait

Family portrait

Aunt Gwen sways, rocks herself to and fro

like a baby, chafes her heart on worn linoleum

in the corner of my ma’s small kitchen

where one-hinged doors hang limp to the floor.

She lives there now. Her husband

imports the latest lover,

keeps her as his

arrears for buildings and new cars pile up.

Brother and cousin Joe have guns

and make babies with one eye open on the door.

Old enough to afford them, they now wait

for a twenty-year-old black onslaught.

Buckie and Mo are doped again on Mandrax.

Buckie robbed a bottle store, implicated

in his friend’s suicide note. He still drives

the neighbourhood, waving at passers-by.

Two children strong, Gail and her husband

still want to finish their studies;

they mention this all while I

wipe braaivleis juice from my mouth.

Sonny’s a school principal carrying joints

flattened in his file. He spins out to a house

empty but for fish tanks, dog turds, double mattress

and a friend’s pregnant wife now his lover.

Ma says, God, she’s switched off,

can’t take the strain of everyone’s problems

as the family close their eyes and stroke

their lashes according the latest fashion.

I’ve switched off too, light candles

and drive whisky and loud music

into me, dancing with my shadow bent

against the ceiling of my room.

Blood thicker than water runs thin

now, hardly holding us together, all of us

flung from poverty, slowly making it.