Menagerie by Lee Richard Kirsten©

‘95
r ie sten
e ir
n ag ard K
e ch
M e Ri
Le
Menagerie
Letchard Inc® *Revised Edition
2-
Lee Richard Kirst e n

Menagerie
3-
Limited First Edition Published in Cape Town, 1995 by

Mallard Publishers
Copyright © 1995 Mallard Publishers. All rights reserved.
Edited by Lee Richard Kirsten, P.J. and
C.A.L. Harpur.
ISBN 0-9583854-8-3
*Revised Edition Published in London, 2008 by

Letchard Inc creative rebellion since 1991®
Copyright © 2008 Lee Richard Kirsten. All rights reserved.
Edited by Lee Richard Kirsten.
Protected by UK Copyright Registration Service.
ISBN 0-9548420-8-1
Menagerie *Revised Edition

Front cover painting:
‘Menagerie’ by Lee Richard Kirsten.
Inside and back cover illustrations:

by Lee Richard Kirsten.

Menagerie
4-
CONTENTS
Introduction 5
Part One 6
Part Two 20
Part Three 27
A Short Story: Every Day Particular 30
Part Four: Old Man Chameleon 35

Menagerie
5-
INTRODUCTION (from First Edition)
I thought of giving an introduction as that of

the boring, autobiographical proud arrival of
memories, those memories that do trace the
growth of the poet as a person and as an artist,
but that wholly is not up to an introduction.
Introductions always to me, seem to reveal the

rational side of man, so I believe that hectically,
it is up to the poems, for them in solitude to
open the way to the poet’s journey, in disregard
of how they may be interpreted.
Lee Richard Kirsten (Old Man Chameleon)

Menagerie

6
Menagerie 6-
PART
g
ONE

k
Menagerie
7
-
.
We walked
and talked
and got lost in
our words,
at the end of our
conversation we found
ourselves in some
other vicinity.
Words have got us where
we are today -
let’s just hope they can get us
- back.

Menagerie
8-
THE DEEP AFRICAN NIGHT
The deep African night,

set off by scariness
in the unknown of the known.
d
It comes
primitive
&
raw
out from
the moving darkness.
Soft velvet
creatures turn
wild in the night,
their eyes
swallowing the moon.
We all emerge,
at the first act
of darkness,
each more
lewd
&
testing
than the next
What we stay blind to

is,
who will devour first.

Menagerie 9-
a
SWAN
Break through the water that

Holds your struggle,
Paddle with spider woven
Webs and scratch open a
Sky beneath your
Sunken pillow bow.
For me, please don’t give up

Great furnished satin,
I want the sky with you -
This is no dance, our anthems

Desperate not to lose this one chance.

Menagerie
10
-
THE CAUSE THAT FORGES YOUTH
The cause that forges youth

Driving my flesh; into rank
Is my extreme.
And her thigh shall be full
And inside the monster will earth.
The cause that drove no end in my youth

Wearily growing; into age
Is my autumn.
k
And her thigh shall be green
And the monster my slowing.
The cause that steals my body

Deadly; into realm
Is my extremity.
And others shall wear her thigh
And the monster my skin.
And the larks & sky shall pass

And hunger shall cease in the belly of the dust,
And the cause that forged youth, shall

Be clinched, in the flesh of her.

z
Menagerie
11
-
It is the life of a poet,
f
Solemn and cold in the warmth
Of mystery.
No regrets to meet the eye of fate
the mouth of
beginning.
And in the birds that fly above,
Are the deaths we have passed,
Full of flight and direction.

Menagerie
12
-
Ghosts stalking within this settled soul

Make the heartbeat in my ears, sound footsteps
That keeps my breath slow and agonized
Like an anticipated nasty surprise.
My feet are cold,

And my heart plots mutiny ...
Far away my feet feel, the ground is a sponge of

Pins and needles.
I shrink dead.
I look for courage in nothingness,
God is a fantasy island ...
Now I worry I have gone mad, knowing I am

Finally
Wild.
t

[
Menagerie
13-
,
We wrote our chapter of the world
In the dust that failed to settle.
We were old & young, dead & alive
We hated & loved;
But most of all we flew,
Constructing a headstone - eternity.

Menagerie
14
-
j
In my pleasure of nature’s art
Pressing the idle mouth; do I seem
An anti-star of the gritty art house film reel.
Her vine strong in keeping, lays voluntary

Arrested, where restless words
Moan and ripple my reflection in her fresh face.
u
Black betroth, in the velvet of winter,
Sends my maiden calvary into a dizzy little
death.
My girl is insane in her beauty,

turned over in her silence.

q
Menagerie
15
-
Please woman, don’t turn on

The light before my slumber is set.
Rest easy, my hand in yours.
My head atop your shoulder.
Pull up the covers and let them
Settle, our feet to dream and
Minds to warm.
0
Turn off the light, let darkness take
Over - I am ready
Don’t let go.

l
Menagerie
16
-
An endless roll of applause augment

The season of the storm.
The persons we sleep with, within our minds

Are the special secrets we keep
For when we feel alone.
And the mid-night-man, with eyes like dilated
1
Mouthfuls of wonder, he sees death, real in
Blood.
From the Forever Hill the

Sun rises, rising cooly to its warm soap box,
Where birds in V-shaped flocks, arrow the stars.
What could be said of night and

What is concealed,
That light has not already broken.

]
Menagerie
17
-
Sing to the fire not

When in the eye of maddening
Its heat laps the heel of
Your ground,
And mightily your good favour.
Let it not force your

Steely shape, before with
Ice you’ve murdered it’s
=
Heart into a shade,
Smouldering symbolic.
Kindle the oven, when your

Voice is in love and soul in
Outlay. All she can with weakness
Do, is turn to herself and herd
The fire of your broken seams
Into the heart of her gallery.
She is a prowel - a grasping finger
In my windpipe, a sonorous
Purr in my ear.

Menagerie 18
-
d
Power of promise.
Make one, and then
Give flight to it,
To rise with buttefly
w
Wings frail into the sun,
So it may bum like a
Japanese kite from a
Dragon’s tongue, beholding
Conscience as the power and
Promise as the enemy.

2
Menagerie
19
-
When that time chooses me to die

In valley, meadow, field - may
i
There, only there this old corpse rely,
On the parading dandelion in the wind,
The bursting flower in the minute
&
The crisp clover studied beneath the dew
To guide my birth shiver through this earth.

U
Menagerie
Letchard Inc®
20
*Revised Edition
-
F
PART
TWO

Menagerie
21
-
D
KILL ME ... to the side of the maggots -
(snakes in my hair, worms out of my eyes,

bugs from my
ears, dust & stone in my mouth ) -
and
LIFE - (seeds in my chest,

pushing the rust
in my veins)
I wonder if the little brook still sounds

like a poem,
its water droplets on succulents likening
the lips of a poet:
O
(dripping in hunger for words;
bitten from time unsprinkled;
dry from repeated sounds;
smooth from kisses to the lip of a bottle;
sealed like a door to a house of secrets)
behind a single lock.

Q
Menagerie
22
-
LOVE
I am alive to be dead with you,

So preserved in that photograph.
Eyes of deathless stone, a woman, I love,
Into a period passed off into inscription.
N
A face black & white, more aloof
Than colour, more outstanding than
Beauty, so young and kept by suicide
A woman, a lover, my self-abuse.
And as the mere action of romance

Lets flood my open wish, the blood
That runs is amused at the head
It once dwelled in,
As it covers now around its cheek.
We can walk in the circus of your

Burial; when I arrive, and stroll into
The cemetery of love, my body steel against
Your corpse, fitting inside you like a shoe,
lowering my spiritual height.
Now let us both behave like dandelions

And hide from the gusts in our oak caskets, for
I am alive to be dead with you.

Menagerie
23
-
I’ve seen the traffic of a murderer’s heart

Dreaming of a kill, and all along could not stop
My hands from wringing in the arouse of it:
T
Lithe, pale instruments, each with nicety like
The tidy pedipalpi of an untidy-minded spider.
Suave accurate gesture I filled the evening with:
I had begun the killing, within my subdued

wooing.
His mind bore a lonely toneless stare, as

He touched on the length of her hair, into
R
The curve of her neck, then as into her eyes
He searched, his fingertips edged the lush
Rim of her mouth - her breath drew in difficult.
- he kisses her.
Tiny, soft woman’s hand, fitted like an innocent

Insect under the belly of my five-legged animal:
She was hooked.
His sweat seeped under her skin. As he spoke

His conscience slowly drew back, his words
Became daring and sultry,
His smile gradually slipped.
We strolled off into the web of the night & she

Wished upon a star.

X
Menagerie
24
-
The many delusions and chemical thoughts

All have tried to kill away memory.
Some days when the seconds are lived
And the hours seem like days,
Then I am the minute I was born:
A new name, a first world -
“Something must be out there.”
Slowly as I cure myself, to resurrect
My phoenix, I think of ways
Of blood & steel, but live and die
U
Each day out.
The things that I’ve known have misled me,
And the things that I have grown toward
Have guided me, into the maze of excess.

h
Menagerie
25
-
MY JOURNEY ALIVE
My journey alive to loose the gesture of toil,

Is at the incest of play, fused with nature
And the menagerie that roars within the dance
of joy
& struggle, which has bound me like a pulsing
snake.
In tragedy my latitude displayed, clothes me

like a
Dream blanket and when I swim and dissemble
with the white
Crests, it will be the last time for everything,
until
My earth quakes again, out from its dull
melancholy.
As the blanket wraps, I am in truth, not naked,

But primitive, as everything is apart of me, as
what
I see I create and what I don’t,
Is desolation, the world yet of my creation.
The eel and the land melancholic cannot be, so

death
By water to change this amphibiousness can I
see.
One death have I chosen already, but the other
Will not see me, to the ends of the river’s
mouth. (continued ...)

Menagerie
26
-
What venture can I face, when the man who

fears
The unseen eyes of the forest, fears only his
sight.
Who are they that make us fear, where are the

fears that give us power?
The sun & night over my travel both kissed

A sky of deceit, for it was not my sleep
That divided, but the anger of strangers,
To sell my garnets to their shallow comedy.
Homeward I board sleep before waking - In
walls
Of rose and window morning, blossoming full
in
Bottle colour. I see the Forever Hill and the
Old Stuck Tree, both with ageless hold over
D
me.
When I wake and dissolve the sleep, it will not

be
Home, for now I have assembled into a huge
awake.

A
Menagerie
Letchard Inc®
27
*Revised Edition
-
PART
T
THREE

Menagerie
Letchard Inc®
28
*Revised Edition
-
The red light has been turned out

And all that I see before
Is its remains - I am caught and
Living the red glow of lonely
Occupied beds.
Red thorns are all, red fever is
What stills a sky: The blue, blue
Side that I know I can & can’t reach.
Red lights are long dark corridors,
A head full of men crazy and deeds
They dream of doing.
Red lights stay long to comfort
Only the tormented, whose pains stay
The redness thru, thru redness they
Are in torment.
Black and happiness are one to create
The dead, whose visions have now
C
Released the red, into comfort
As we sink.

Menagerie
P
29
-
DITHYRAMB
Dear earnest beguile of unconscious peril,

Rhythmic sentence deep; glitter on your
Modest murder, we learn from what we seek:
Standing do cliffs the flocks of suicide, to

Below the reborn hill of those, broken
With clear fissure and drinks of young wrought
blood.
Power over earth in blood & rule over poor, poor

Classical self in wine, are not the red flights
Of fancy, but mother and her nipples in bed:
Unforceful you let us find the pause between
F
The end and the return, beginning
In greater sacrifice, as when we started out be-
fore.
Mortal stranger, immortally ensued,

Teacher of a few outstanding individuals
You are the lost parent
My primitive counterpart
Reviving space with rage & fire,
The people uplift, dancing; singing; clapping;

dying; recurring.
These are the steps to the palace. Wisdom is at

our feet.

Menagerie
Letchard Inc®
30
*Revised Edition
-
A
SHORT
STORY

Menagerie
31-
EVERY DAY PARTICULAR
Upon a forever hill, as it seemed to him, the

morning stood on its toes, pulling itself upon on
branches and roof-tops.
The ground and trees broke free from the early

orange and spoke in greens and browns and
corrugated reflections. As the cuddle of the sun
grew, so did the cool, sluggish shadows, which
crawled from damp corners to the warming
ground.
In the window pane of his room, brimful into the

coloured bottles on the sill and onto his belly, the
sun rested unlike any hot water bottle he had ever
kept, under sheet.
Breaking the eye of sleep, the late cock crew,

with a lazed exerted “Dooo.”
His sheets were wet again and he still had not

kissed her, but this time there was a difference,
for it was her, it really was her; not his friend’s
mother’s face, or the next-door neighbour’s body,
it was her: the perfect cupped breasts - the skin
smooth, fur fluent limbs - the tiny feet - the naive
movements - the feline features - the content eyes
and the far away lips. She had arrived unto his
dream, as he had be-cum.
Soggy as a snotty nozzled kid, he, out of bed, into

Menagerie
32
-
his denims, stepped in front of his window, which

was but all was a longing urge of his minds eye.
Below at the friendly sea, he saw waves and gulls
racing each other to the cobbled shore. He saw
his friend’s father Mr Bird, post a huge envelope
with many stamps attached into a yellow and
black post box. A school yard with kid’s skipping
rope, swapping stickers he saw, some like shrews
hid behind the big Bougainvillea, with tales of
their mischieviousness and lizards with broken
tails and he saw a kid that he thought he knew,
lost and lonely in a forever world - even more
daring than the hill.
He could see everything from his window,

including the lies he made into monsters and
contradictions he lived.
Under the scurrying day he left from home, to
the daunting out-world that shook the safe slow
beginning, which from the bottles spilled, sipped
into the dull carnivorous land, gnawing at his
heels, as into the bright blue bother he slunk.
Along the dusty road to the tar street he waded,

glancing to his left, to make certain no one was at
adventure, in his bottled ash-dump aftermath.
“Where are the summons of mist.” He wondered

to himself, “Where can I get me some mist?”
Down the street that led into a tiny town of a

town, he carried an aloof swagger: chest out,

Menagerie
33
-
shoulders back, head high, his walk delicate

with a stiff awareness, but lazing concern, while
slowly his head turned to the right, eyes grabbing
past the last tastes, ponderings, memories from
his “Chemist”, where she was, a secret lover of
his mind, a fine mellowed woman, aged in prime
oak, to come out strong, lingering and smooth -
she blew his mind.
Down, down, down through the minature town

he went, over the new, safe, Wood-Bridge
(concrete bridge), where below he watched the
lagoon creatures: cormorants; gulls; learning fish;
canoes; splashing children; baited hooks and men
with their mussel pumps, who gazed up with
expressions mewing, “Look, look, our mussel
bags are full, though poor our arms.” Playing a
guessing game with himself, he would triflingly
gauge the size of the swell and shape, by the
wind and climate and telling noises the shores
back broke.
The wind slight in the leaves of Palms, passed

him by, off into the waters, eaten by throwing
mouths that crashed and swallowed. Up in the
arrogant sky burnt the light he feared, it glared
and bursted and reflected, pointing tiny fingers
and eyes at him.
Again he whispered, “Where are the mists, the

ranking cloaks, the mice of sound?”

Menagerie
34
-
Ruffian and rabid the disordered sea spilled,

greeting him on the shore, as he descended to its
reach.
The mountain in the distance, the crazy island,

the bobbing seals, his sturdy feet; made by and
borne for the sea, shall rest as one.
Sunken into his boots, the salt encased round

his feet, the cold water wept up, wavering at his
waist, pleased in nervousness to be the urn, of
such vehement weight. Pulling at his hands the
water beckoned, blasting spray into his chest
and face; on his toes he walked, until no more,
allowing the currents to draw him into the bent
sky, blue in his flesh.
Dark. The water kept him. Dark. His chest

released gurgles. Dark. To the numb sky mercury
bubbles rolled. Dark. Ahoy. Dark. Alas, where is
the mist he longed. Dark. The west aflare. Dark.
He returned. Dark. To the shore. Darkness, unto
his mist.
THE END

c
Menagerie
Letchard Inc®
35
*Revised Edition
-
PART
FOUR
s
Menagerie
-
36
-
OLD MAN CHAMELEON:
“Outside these walls are the Lessons of a

Quickening Wake for those who do not die, out
there are kaleidoscopes & visions.”
Tearing open his shirt, off onto the floor, Old

Man Chameleon reveals his chest saying,
“This beat has blended with the coordinates. I

have flown with feathers in my arm and have
swooped beside to lap with the river calm. In my
fists have I held seasons and have put them to my
eyes to observe the fascination through a lens of
\
detail. In there are talking trees, not only have I
smelt the flowers ...”
Old Man bringing to his nose cupped hands, then

throwing out his arms in embrace,
“But have spoken to them, all lesson &

providence needed is in nature, we and her are
the only reality; the residue bubbles a sober
evaluation, are a power committed in destroying
our only intoxication: beauty.”

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‘95

Lee Richard Kirst e n

Limited First Edition Published in Cape Town, 1995 by

*Revised Edition Published in London, 2008 by

Menagerie *Revised Edition

Inside and back cover illustrations:

Lee Richard Kirst e n

Lee Richard Kirst e n

INTRODUCTION (from First Edition)

I thought of giving an introduction as that of

Introductions always to me, seem to reveal the

Lee Richard Kirsten (Old Man Chameleon)

Lee Richard Kirst e n

Letchard Inc® *Revised Edition

Lee Richard Kirst e n

Lee Richard Kirst e n

THE DEEP AFRICAN NIGHT

The deep African night,

What we stay blind to

Lee Richard Kirst e n

Break through the water that

For me, please don’t give up

This is no dance, our anthems

Lee Richard Kirst e n

THE CAUSE THAT FORGES YOUTH

The cause that forges youth

The cause that drove no end in my youth

The cause that steals my body

And the larks & sky shall pass

And the cause that forged youth, shall

Lee Richard Kirst e n

It is the life of a poet,

Lee Richard Kirst e n

Ghosts stalking within this settled soul

My feet are cold,

Far away my feet feel, the ground is a sponge of

I look for courage in nothingness,

God is a fantasy island ...

Now I worry I have gone mad, knowing I am

Lee Richard Kirst e n

Lee Richard Kirst e n

Her vine strong in keeping, lays voluntary

My girl is insane in her beauty,

Lee Richard Kirst e n

Please woman, don’t turn on

Lee Richard Kirst e n

An endless roll of applause augment

The persons we sleep with, within our minds

And the mid-night-man, with eyes like dilated

From the Forever Hill the

What could be said of night and

Lee Richard Kirst e n

Sing to the fire not

Let it not force your

Kindle the oven, when your

Lee Richard Kirst e n

Lee Richard Kirst e n

When that time chooses me to die

Lee Richard Kirst e n

Lee Richard Kirst e n