Bullets for Johannesburg

it’s closing time again and the “Road to Riches” machine is coughing up its last cheap mercy, some neon one-armed slot-machine in a Transvaal dive that smells of stale Castle Lager and broken dreams.

You feed it coins like you feed a whore lies, and it shits back a plastic cup of rand coins, clatter-clatter-clatter, like hard hail on a tin roof in the middle of a Highveld storm, or ice tumbling in a triple Brandy-and-Coke when your hands won’t stop shaking.

And the sound keeps coming while somewhere out in the dark, the cops, the special police, the death squads, Eugene de Kock’s boys are doing their real gambling. Tubing, they call it—taking an old truck inner tube, slicing it, looping it tight around some activist’s face until the eyes bulge like slot-machine lemons that never line up.

Wet-work ballet.

The secret police moving quiet as nuns, calm as a man sliding into a woman he’s paid for, no questions, no morning after, just the soft pop of cartilage and the long exhale when the body forgets how to want tomorrow.

They called it “sleeping with a woman,” those bastards, like murder was just another kind of fucking, quick and guiltless. And all the while Hugh Masekela’s horn is out there on the wind, crying bullets for Johannesburg, bullets for the townships, bullets for every cup of coins that never made anybody rich, just kept them alive long enough to lose again. The machine clatters its last, and the barman kills the lights.

Somewhere a man stops breathing under rubber and nightstick.

And the coins, Christ, the coins keep sounding like hail, like ice, like the small change of empire falling into a cheap plastic grave.

He scoops the cup, warm from the machine’s belly, and walks out into the sour street where the Jacarandas are dying purple and the cops cruise slow with their windows up, air-con and conscience both turned off.

Another night, another nothing.

The road to riches, it always ends in a parking lot behind a bar no one admits going to, holding a cup of somebody else’s bad luck.

shadows cloak the land,
death squads crush the rising voice—
apartheid’s blood debt.