Track 04: Love in a time of visas

Album: TAFL - Teaching Afrikaans as a Foreign Language

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Lyrics

you’re seeing the bosphorus in the distance, from here I can see the cable cars
(two things on the same line, but never at the same station)
we can both see mosques, or at least, if I was standing on the roof I could
you’re cooking something in the kitchen, I’m spinning around on an office chair
there’s a tiny delay, when we laugh it becomes irrelevant

I’m trying to let a twenty minute phone call tell me something new about you
trying to let that hug you send me crunch my bones, pretending the plastic of the phone
is the warm curve of your face that fits like a favourite hat
the kind of hat you’ll climb back up a mountain for,
knowing that it’s kept you warm before
and there’s no reason to let it go just like that

that email you sent me about full moon
was like a brainscan spelled out in english
I wish I was a psychopath, I mean a homeopath, I mean,
I wish I had telepathic powers, so I can make you do things with your hands
or control about an inch of your skin, make it glow in the dark, just a bit
like an indiglo watch, a blinking cellphone charger, uv strips on a jogger

I wish it was the end of july already,
so I can rub a rough thumb over your eyebrows
and take you to a room somewhere
where we can talk and unpack and shower
and put our steaming limbs together,
melting the sheets as if it was snow
in the thin quiet air of nepal

then I can put my ear to yours
and download enough mp3s for years of listening pleasure

and tonight, what i remember is nothing
but the blue in your eyes turning green
like a fish
jumping in and out of water
as the sheets in my bed flap
from darkness to heaven

tonight’s the night
that i feel the warmth of your face
like a gust from the warm wind mulling
around now for hours and hours
like the weather is one of your powers

and even if all i have to show for it is
backpain
and a sense of something incomplete
when i go through my daily prayer
of car eat work shit sleep

and even if all i need to know
is that when i play a song i like
you’re somewhere in it
laughing
like rubbish removal is a service
for clowns
doing black humour

and you’re directing aeroplanes again
to take off and to land
when you dance like a madman
and sing in a band

and my heart is a leather handle,
pulling with the tides
of yours hitching rides
with the freedom in the sand

my teeth are aching for peppermint chocolate
and lion’s breath in the morning
by that river,
you remember

because tonight,
i watched a movie alone
together with other people
and the moon
was just hanging there
like a church
without a steeple