We Are The Mad Men Poem by Thabani Khumalo

We char ourselves dry with cheap cigarettes from a merchant store,
we cover long journeys in the dust against the cruel temper of the summer sun.
We are the mad men who stretch out to you for charity in the busy streets,
we are the broken men who yearn for your sympathetic care,
because that care is the only heart that is true.

We are the wizards of the deep valley between the high mountains,
to the west of the dark tunnel of all fearful doubts.
I was dripping sour from the waters of the abyss
drying on my body under all black apparel,
where I summoned the ghost of my father to come alive,
to walk me through the uncertain tunnel of death so I could be like him.

We are the mad men who live a truly purposeful life,
therefore we will persevere until that care has come unto all of human flesh upon the land.
The sound of the black birds is the only thing that remains alive there.
I went down a violent gorge where the whistle of the trees has never blown,
nor did any scaly fish ever wait to bear a little fry.

I felt the mighty legions rise from the rapid depths
and roar between the rage of the running waters there.
They opened the nexus for they had forever known my visit was devine.

It comes to life in a vivid picture,
life down there is a Holy life.
In a gorge so very very deep,
it is deeper than any challenging depth.
It reminded me of a long buried emotional charge,
the loving care of my great great grandmother
having come in the glowing essence of her flesh of youth.
She was glowing in every trending capacity of beauty,
dressed in garments of pure crystal white.
Her open sandals were white and their straps were made of snake's skin,
taken from big pet snakes like the one she rode,
as we took a long cross of a very wide river.

I climbed the slippery rockford under the guidance of the singuinary water monitor
and took the less traveled path to the left side of the river's flow.
It is a small path only taken by a few who are worst deranged.
Directly in front of a very tense cave,
only distracted by the tabernacle of the final death.
Where the river is calm, upon the flat surface of the holy rock of ages,
I rested prostrately and stretched out my feet.
There I knelt down before the lean of the holy rock,

I lit up my prepared incense at the dying minutes of the dellumimating dusk.
I was wrecked into a net of sagging ropes by the measure of physical fear,
yet I had to down all the bitter tasting gulps of the burning cup.

The instincts of a boy long forgotten
had risen to the same sense of a ritual snake lurking in the comfort of the cave.
The young monster snake having come to acquire the highest ritual of God the Devil,
I had come to pray for the sanitary state of God alone.

I was hiding on the tabernacle at the holy rock
and she was coiled up in the cave of the fouling horrors.
We both were waiting for the Angel of God to arrive
and land upon the holy rock on his shiny feet.

When the Angel did so arrive,
I was still kneeling on the floor of the tabernacle
with my head bowed right between my folding knees,
I recited the lord's prayer in a backward incantation,
the words rising pure in the smoke of the sacramental incense
and of a pact that was signed by the strong stain of my blood because in all,
I had me no parchment upon which to write that pact.

The Angel of God opened the way of the light as a flue to the worlds above.
I summoned the same names that made Pharoar a formidable rival of God the king -
that the king of Heaven descended from and landed upon the sands
to get into a supernatural warfare with the Magus of millenniums past -
I called them to return again and live upon this same land.

I invoked the names I never thought I'd ever quote in prayer -
I summoned the spirits of our firstborn brothers of yore,
those boys who received a mystery that had them die too young.
The holy bible tells me so.
They could have fathered a lot of cousins we now don't see,
but then the entire nation was brought to mourn,
and the Dark Egypt of the time was as big as the continent of Africa.
The lord knows I was simply there to ask for this illuminating power.

I drank from chalice and the buzzard birds
began to sing ancient songs in their aerial choir of rough voices,
so I knew the Angel of God was ready to deliver mine to the golden city above
and I knew that her turn had also come to conjure.

She slithered a little closer the holy rock as I skirted a little farther.
As we went back in the way I had come,
me a hub of active nerves and the water monitor at my guide,
that's when I saw a black skin human like animal standing on the other bank.
Bound of tight muscles like the beasts of the wild,
he had long horns, a long tail, a big beard of furs
and he seemed to be standing on hooves.
His worshiper prayed to him from outside the abyss deep
on the other opening of the tunnel.
He shouted reverence from a very faint distance,
and he is the mad man I had been afraid of before,
yet I stood face to face with the Devil incarnate - face to face with his God under the gown of the growing night.

The Devil in the flesh was there to visit all of his own
and his own were following me into this liberated civilization.
With these demons I will shout loud the gospel of the heavens,
the life of a savior only seen by the eyes of evil men.
I am out here to announce to you the arrival of the second Christ.
I am he the wizard of the dark side,
the man who yearns and stretches out for your sympathetic care.
I am the mad man you've come to meet in the streets, always.