The Geranium Hotel Poems

It is the first day of summer I still wear trousers and woollen socks There is a bus ticket in my pocket for Capital city and a pamphlet on travel in Turkiye and Greece Out side the people get ready for Christmas Talking of the year and the wicked speed of its rotation Inside my family speak of Christmas decorations are they worth putting up? Is tinsel too tacky? 'I don't mind' I say 'Actually why not?' So the decorations are put up and I have a beer Merry Christmas

Ginsberg, I’m in Africa And I have not one of your words to sleep with I saw Kerouac’s Dharma bums in Dar es Salaam And I could have bought it But I want poetry So I am writing some For the two of us Ginsberg I’m in Africa Sexless with broken back And nearly 27 I know bits of your poetry off by heart But I want to read it loud from city lights Ginsberg, I’m in Africa And I’m alive and you are dead But I think of you a lot Like when I write these words Or when I saw that mad man Speaking Afrikaans to himself He looked a bit like you Maybe it was you On your way back from Rimbaud’s house perhaps.

Yeah, I will massage your time line Wear it to the ground Build a house around it And let starlings roost within its fading roof Life lines and decks of cards Spurs in flanks and passwords Do we live in such times As these? Where lovers depart one another Without leaving nothing chipped? No statue of memory? No bronzed heart broken smouldering and cooling? No marble bust, dusty and worn? Left for generations of the future to find And to think ‘Ah life lines! And decks of cards! Spurs in flanks! And pass words! Love was lost and love was taken But the lovers left something memorable and something warm!’

Slowly he fell amongst the sheets Three hundred metres and a park From the public library Where the howling pigeons walk To forget their feathered wings He was named for duty And a poets life He wore the boots of childhood With leather laces That broke with a pattern unnoticed At the beginning of every May He enjoyed the warmth of the city During his extended adolescence As he grew fond of following aesthetic form And wearing white singlets with chinos (the uniform of the swimming summer thinker) In library cubicles he grew mad with firecrackers Exploding behind his fly buttons So had no choice but to leave Nothing to no man’s imagination Not even God’s guilt Then paper and pen Became the road to paradise’s port This man with the blue eyes who lived on candy and beer Knew the answer to the secret ’?’ But would he catch the thoughts of the city’s gulls? And learn to write it’s illustrations? Would he study the bridges phallic architecture? Make love to its poetic purpose? This man could

Africa's slow embrace a great opus for the philosophers the streets take you silently and you are covered with an urge to slip away... forever The dust thickens the thoughts and thins tolerance for men the music is a cheap rendition of ancient love grand though- like the buildings of old Nairobi Africa's sweet menthol cigarette smoke sticks in my throat like Swahilli some days its too hot to smoke and some days its too hot to drink Birra Baridi but somehow you manage in Africa's Slow embrace