Stone Poem - May 2025

We drive past dead animals on the road from Beaufort West to Joburg. Mostly birds. Sometimes a dog. Occasionally a monkey. Another bouquet of dried flowers tied to a fence, plastic wrapping flapping crazily in the wind like don’t forget me don’t forget me don’t forget me.

Phil and I walk around the Hyde Park parking lot on a Wednesday evening, trying to find somewhere to smoke. We watch the Sandton sky line shimmer in the distance and pass the joint back and forth. He tells me about his week at the hospital, about the shortages, the frustrations, and the ridiculous hours. He tells me about the bad movie we are about to watch. We float back through the mall, pointing at eccentric and overpriced things. A glass dolphin that costs ten thousand rand. The ugliest jacket you could imagine. A very large candle. The trailers have already started when we take our seats in the theatre. God, there are some crap movies coming out.

“God, there are so many Germans in Cape Town these days.” 

Mike flips the menu over, trying to find the cocktail list.  

“They’re all over the place.”  

On the mountains, at the restaurants, in the express checkout lines at PicknPay. They’re clogging up the traffic and driving up the rent and stealing all the good spots on the beach. Where did they all come from? Well, Germany, obviously. But like, how dare they though, seems to be the general sentiment.

Spots of mould on the goats cheese in the fridge. I don’t toss it because I’ve got something very important to do: eat an apple while lying on my bed watching a youtube video about climate change and then a youtube video explaining everything wrong with a movie I will never watch and then a youtube video about a soccer player I remember from when I was in primary school. There is an illicit thrill to holding in your pee and chewing your nails while watching one more video, and then just one more after that.

I formatted the memory card before I saved the photos. And now those lost photos are the only ones I want. I’m forever trying to recreate them with words. The early morning light hitting the curve of a parking lot ramp. A partially deflated gold balloon, stuck in a tree above Westcliff drive. The overzealous yellow bloom of a flower whose name I don’t know next to the empty lot below Louis Botha.

If I had a big enough piece of paper I could get it all down in one go. The problems start when you have to stop. The pause when the pen leaves the paper as you turn to a clean page. The gaps between forming one letter and the next. That’s where the doubt finds purchase. Niggling toothpicks of despair desperate to pry open the project and reveal the wriggling little legs of your mind. You click your pen once and you click your pen again and you try make that sentence about unloading the dishwasher into a better sentence about unloading the dishwasher.

New ways of working. New ways of not. New ways of avoiding eye contact. New apps to help you catalog your anxieties. Colour-coding catastrophes and making pesto sauce at home on a Tuesday night while someone knocks on the gate with a stone because the last time they did that you went outside to see what was going on and ended up giving them some money and some clothes and some food. You could do the same this evening. You have the money, you have the clothes, you have the food. While the stone on the gate sets the dogs to barking, add rocket to your pesto for extra bite. Ignore the dogs until you’ve tasted the pesto and adjusted the seasoning. Wash your hands then head outside to call the dogs in. Don’t pause to look at the sky. Don’t consider the hand holding the stone. This time. Come back inside. Add the last pine nuts in the packet to your pesto. Add pine nuts to your shopping list. Check your phone to see if she’s on her way home. Put the kettle on to boil.

It’s slippery on the bridge so be careful, my darling. My angel. My sweetie. My love. It’s not safe to cross here. That milkshake contains mercury. Don’t run too fast when you’re holding heavy thoughts. Don’t speak too loud if the stars are visible. Don’t try act cooler than you are. That’s how accidents happen.

Russell’s mom drove us all to Gold Reef City in her minivan. We got two big buckets of KFC on the drive home. She had frizzy red hair, an accent from overseas, and a temper that her kids were not afraid of. Her husband worked in IT. Russell and his siblings didn’t have to brush their baby teeth, because, like, what’s the use if they’re just gonna fall out eventually anyway. Their freckles and their cavities and their awesome computer room were all part of the same soup.

My youtube algorithm is trying to radicalise me. I’m resisting its attempts. But still, I worry. Even if I’m not clicking on any of the suggested videos that sound gross, bit by bit the horizons of my digital world shrink. The once wide open vistas of the internet become a sticky surface I don’t want to touch without gloves on.

We’re dancing in the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher, singing into still hot clean mugs, waiting for the  oven to heat up. Through the window, the neighbour’s electric fence is snapping along at not quite the right tempo,  clicking against a fallen branch from last night’s storm like an unhurried hi hat. The dogs watch us dance with worry on their faces.

On a fuzzily warm March afternoon, I sat on a bench in the school parking lot, waiting for a disciplinary hearing to begin. Shirt untucked, tie loose, socks sweaty from soccer.  A lawnmower’s hum punctuated by the muffled pock-pock of someone practising in the cricket nets. I took my blazer off, scrunched it into a pillow, and lay my head down. My arm flopped down off the bench, fingernails scraping over crease between two bricks. The friction tingled pleasantly up my arm all the way to my teeth. Would being slightly smelly prejudice the disciplinary committee against me? I closed my eyes and let the sun warm patches of my face, slowly losing feeling in my feet as the edge of the bench pressed into the back of my knee. Last week at second break, Pond said that if you sit on your wrist for ten minutes you’ll lose all the feeling in your hand and then you can jerk off with the sensation that it is someone else’s hand doing it to you. As usual, he got laughed at, punched, called a fucking weirdo. That afternoon, though, alone in my room, I tried it out. Maybe I didn’t sit on my wrist for long enough, or at the correct angle, but it didn’t work. It still felt like me.

You know how sometimes your phone will buzz even when there’s nothing for it to buzz about? How sometimes it acts out, demanding a software update when you just gave it one, like, literally, the other day? How sometimes your phone just wants to be held for its own sake? Well, go on. Go hold your phone. 

The new diet consists of cigarettes and black coffee. Delicious.Delicious. Delicious. 

Usually, usually, the guy at the robots by the zoo has a copy of the Mail & Guardian for me and usually, usually, I have money to buy it from him. But ever since I stopped seeing my therapist I don’t drive that way so much. I no longer see the woman at the coffee shop who knew my order. I no longer see the stray cats who lay under the cars in the parking lot. I no longer see the men pushing tyres and doing jumping jacks in the park that I would pass on my way to the clinic, as  I  tried to decide what I would speak about that day. 

Okay, but just because I go to a jazz club like, once, over the course of this whole story - maybe you’ve come across it already, maybe it’s still ahead of you, in which case, sorry for the spoiler - don’t let that fool you into thinking that I am some kind of cool jazz club goer. That story is not representative. If you’re interested in something representative, may I suggest one of the bits about being suddenly sweaty at the mall, or worrying about sex, or trying not to buy another disposable vape. Other readers have found those quite illustrative. Anyway, I apologise for the interruption, let me let you get back to your reading. This next one is on the house. 

A man bends himself over the barrier separating the road from the pavement and dips cupped hands into a puddle of rainwater. He pours water over the back of his neck. He splashes water onto his face and shakes his head from side to side. He pushes himself up off his knees and walks on. The traffic uncoils. I push off towards the park.

My mom returned from a medical conference in Durban with a laptop bag, a notebook, and a ball point pen. The pen was also a flash drive and on the flash drive was a powerpoint presentation pre-installed by a pharmaceutical company. Bored in the computer lab at school, I clicked through the slide show as fast as possible again and again, from start to finish and then from finish to start. A blur of text and bar graphs and smiling, happy, no-longer-sick people of various ages and hues. Each time I reached the end of the slide show the screen would go black and I could see myself sitting there. Also on the flash drive: an unfinished LO project on natural disasters, due the next day, that I was trying to avoid. Also trying to avoid: the conversation Thomas and Sticks were having about what happened at the KES social on Saturday night. Also: telling anyone that my sister had cancer. Not the image I wanted to project in my first few months at a new school. Rather be the quiet kid than the kid with the sick sister. Hadn’t realised I had the capacity to be both. The next weekend, running errands with my mom, there’s a shavathon taking place outside the entrance to Woolworths. I felt a hot sweet rage swirling within as I polished a list of mean things to say if one of those cheerful, red cheeked, cheese-kopped boobs tried to speak to me. But none of them did. And so I carried my anger up the escalator and into the Seattle Coffee where I ordered a latte for my mom, and a mocha freeze for myself.

Why am I seeing this ad? Why am I watching this video? Why does my arm hurt when I hold it like this? Why did she do it? Why didn’t I do more? Why do I think about her on some days and not on others? Why do I think of her, in general, less and less until wham I’m reminded all over again for no reason and it’s fresh and hard to believe? Why do I wish I had seen her body? Why do I feel like that would have made things easier? Why did I not give her a proper hug on what turned out to be the last time I saw her alive? Why do I still feel so angry at her? Why do I still write as if one day she will read any of this?  Why does it feel like she killed herself and so now I’m not allowed to do the same? Why does it feel wrong to write down these questions? Why does it feel like I’m using what happened to garnish my writing and give it some weight or depth that it wouldn’t otherwise have? Why does it feel like having that last thought pop into my head automatically makes it true, and writing it down doesn’t do anything to make it any less true? Why is starting every sentence with ‘why’ beginning to feel like a crutch I am using to avoid other painful thoughts? Why is it wrong to use a crutch? Why is it wrong to avoid pain? Why am I seeing this Ad again?

Sobbing in a cupboard somewhere in our house is a whole family tree of redundant iphones, with cracked screens, out of date charging ports, and exhausted batteries.

Oh gosh. Remember buttons?

Remember boredom?

Remember being alone with your thoughts?

If you break down tasks into smaller and smaller chunks the tasks will soon shrink to a manageable size. That’s what the internet tells me. Shrink life down to the size of a single breath and you can find peace in every inhale. And doesn’t that sound nice? But now what to do about all these crumb sized tasks that were blown off my desk while i was in the other room? They’re scattered all over the floor and my fingernails are too short to pick them up.

In the parking lot under the mall someone is giving head in a VW Polo. In the line to buy popcorn two old friends are running out of things to talk about. In the cellar next to the library I grab what I hope is an inexpensive bottle of wine that my parents won’t miss and head back to the party.