Wayward Philosophies
Regurgitated philosophies hang
From sagging chests
Recycled conundrums, hand-me-down
Wisdom, caught in see-through eyes
A queue full of depthless faces
Waiting on borrowed feet to go places
On expired pace,
they see
The wrong doctors and return home
Unsure on whose terms they base
Their urgency
Desperate before strange gods
Carrying other people’s backdoors
On their unpatriotic backs
A pall in their own stride
Through all conditions they
Merely go with the flow
Never mind what they lack,
they dream their way out
In the heads of strangers
Stalking pillows and bedposts
Like foreigners, they take asylum
In the sighs of others’ relief
from politician’s mouths
They weave a system of belief
waiting for passers by
To come to a stop
Before they decide to call it a day
My Gift to You
This is a poem in a language
I am hoping the world will speak
In a second or a week from this moment
Of its birth
The umbilical cord still attached
To every word, hanging onto it
Like a ghost learning to play dead
This is a poem
In English only so far as
The un-blind eye can see
Its words don’t agree
Without apostrophe or preposition
Independent of me
I might not even be its father
It’s an orphaned cacophony
Of words
Just waiting to be adopted
Privy to amusement
Or veneration
Suitable for upbringing
In your, and your arms
Only.
Home-Grown Fire
Seismic hunger pervades
the African belly,
Streets named after Gold
Hold no patched up address
With hand in pocket
They straddle the throat
Of watse democracy
Only it never runs
Out of air, minding its own business
Blind singers lullaby empty
Trains to sleep where they rest
In corrugated bliss, with no song
Left for the emptiness that claims
Them
For the journey ahead
Still they return, as the sweepers,
Commuters and Uber robbers do
Huddled ‘round one m’Bowla
Coughing Covid from one chest
Into one fire
The Colour Sunday
Lazy Sundays, white elephants
Trample the lining of our pockets
Still in yesterday’s clothes
With yesterday’s people talking over
The music we nearly blast
On old Panasonic hi-fis parked behind
Glass doors in a mahogany cabinet
Teeth are counted to the sound of Chi Lites
Hitting home and saucers are hurled across
Abandoned lunch tables at children
Whose eyes were likely bigger than their guts
By Maghreb it’s all a circus act
And the sunset is delayed
In west’s limbo, rays hanging in peripheral
vision, with heat clinging to our skin
Thick like condensed milk and worse
Than an old flame that won’t get the picture
Pretending to have dropped his eyes
In your blind spot
Her Undying Death
for my late mother, Maymoona
My mother is in the rhythm
In the silence, in forms of logic
The way shapes form
She is Pythagoras,
my mother
In the clouds, on the wind
Like a genie, all about the air
A firefly between dandelions
She is a singer, a song
About every face
No place for her is too far
To be
She is omnipresent
past wrapped in the present
Sometimes a pylon or a windmill
Throwing caution to the wind
A tree throwing shade to my father
I can still lean very much on her
Though she has no form
Or substance
Evanescent, she reaches
From Barzakh to hold me
In her immortal arms
Raeez Jacobs
Raeez Jacobs is an aspiring author and performing artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. Some of his works include the poems, An Education, The Anthropologist and Perfection have featured n Botsotso Literary Journal and The International War Veteran's Poetry Archive. He is currently working on his first novel, which he says has been years in the making. In 2017 he co-wrote and directed, Time Travel for The Eldos Arts and Jazz Festival, and is penning another production at the moment, which he hopes will enthrall live or television audiences.
