Political Spider

I can see them Clouds of voracity Covering my stars Shadowing my reality These civilized consciences Have raped my protest Have spun my web I can no longer pacify The tenacious circle of hate That daily haunts me- The deprived race What is it I longed to be Where come this aggressive reticence Why this intellectual lock-jaw I longed to be an alcoholic I longed to join in the ecstatic dance I longed to leap into the unknown To preserve my ancestral pride Neither did I know I had no ancestry I belonged Not to the human race. I could no longer trade That rotting corpse of ancestry For a dream Nor could my voice Accentuated by gesture Give sacramental significance To the ailing corpse I bled from my wounds I choked in your bonds I baked in your avarice How infinite this unity Of free slaves! How therapeutic This hibernation! They preached brotherhood Their god issued Commandments of charity Which they conveniently Reserved for the virgins The silent majority These invertebrate disturbers of peace Must always answer with a nod To those honeyed phrases Which phased out moral indignation Only to usher spiritual aberration The saints had to turn the other cheek I resigned from imagining, designing Protesting and even dreaming Into the routine of living Without emotional wavelength- A kind of unconsciousness What do you say, brother Should we take flight to freedom Flee this intellectual tyranny And accumulated weariness Should we indulge our consciences Can one dream thus Dream of the miracles They craned their necks Dream of the great darkness The ends of the universe Dream of the wonderment Of transcendent realms Is there anything beyond This shadowy future Is there another universe For the spider? I queried thus and thus In my ice-age mind Whereupon emanated Vast ramifications Spinning a web for me- A universe Beyond which loomed Irrational extraneous universes Was that a miracle Was that nature Were those her snares Perpetually gnawing my reality Could those questions be answered With a nod- however studied? Come individuality Remove these tenterhooks Let me leap into a new rhythm Let me split the capsule And witness how long The trip of human triumph. (Apartheid era stuff)