Joburg
Joburg I’m trying so hard to love you. Your tuscan vistas backdropped by powerlines and jacaranda branched forests bare and empty-handed during dry winters. Your signposted billboard-littered hillsides shouting skin moisturisers, Outsurance green and cell-phone deals by the starterpack. Your messages of capitalism guiding me to plastic-same malls filled with plastic-same products on plastic-same shelves in plastic air-conditioned hallways with the Nu Metro on the one side and the Megastore on the other. Filled with echoing sounds of credit cards swiping. Clicks of economy. Ants working the hive. The way you overdub your morning drive with Gareth Cliff as you fall into weekly work trances. Your love for Facebrick and construction sites. They way you leave blue PVC pipes next to the road like pieces of your history. Important but cumbersome. Your highways carrying crime statistics and end of month loan repayment worries driving you late into the night and keeping me awake in my hotel room. Your flyovers, intersections and intestines connecting a stomachache of anxious knots and traffic-jam near misses. An empty network of possibilities leading everywhere and nowhere filled with swarms of GP ZYSOMETHING number plates. A web suspended in the Highveld spun by ambitions and hijack statistics and seaside dreams and imported handbags and opinions forming a confused interlocking economy of spiritual petty crime. Your fast happy chewing gum peroxided people buzzing in cars squeezed over hot tar pushing adrenalin levels and bending fenders. Your complete disregard for changing lanes and changing history. Your AUDI and BWM dealerships, those gleaming silver steel churches of the motorway. The way you say it how it is. Your Grant and Aneles chattering cosmo gossiping. Your JMPD orange. Your radio stations broadcastings swedish house over frequencies from Benoni to Fourways to H20. To crocodile arenas. To backstage parties. To picnics on rooftops in downtown hipster Arts on Main type spots. Always the alarm bells of electronic synthetic beating. Your massive expanses of car parks. Huge deserts of 6 x 4 white lined spaces. Harbors filled and emptied with the tide of cars and commerce. The cactuses and wimpy dusty quick stops 95 fill it up check the oil and water. Your office parks. The humdrum mines of mouseclicks and desktop computers operated by sweaty Markhams white collars ordering and inboxing and booking Kulula flights to Plett. Your blue light brigades delivering politics and irate newspaper headlines. You wardrobes of khaki and dragon inspired kitsch. The way you like to water the lawn on Saturday mornings. Your love for supplements. Your need for speed and ripped abs and big backs and MTN advertising campaigns and almost fake handbags. Your warm windless weather and golden afternoons promoting post-curricular activities like cricket highlights on Supersport DSTV, affairs and going to GAME to find gas braais. Your smiling jaw boom gates, a frightening welcome at every entrance. The way you laugh so loudly in Woolworths queues. Your Parkhursts, Parkmores, Parktowns, MTB Prawns. Your pothole politics fixing up culture up as we drive along. Your energetic acidic addictive taste for success. The way you disguise your most beautiful girls in Ed Hardy and baseball caps and pink lipgloss. Shrouded like abayas delivering a small town message in big town envelopes of clashing textiles. The way you lock yourself up at night. Your over-burnt coffee that singes my tongue in the mornings. Your thunderstorms clouding up afternoons, an exploding steam of pressure that leads into the evening. You landed here like a golden promise. Like a page that slipped from the Bible. A promised land. Like God’s land. And you claimed up stakes of the Witwatersrand. Mapped up your spaces with RealtyOne and Seeff FOR SALE. Scratching the face of the earth and with axes and picks digging for gold and leopard print. You’re capitalization, globalization, cynicisization, manifestation, mesmerization. Joburg I’m trying so hard to love you but I guess I just don’t understand you.