LIT LITERATOR JOURNAL OF LITERARY CRITICISM, COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS AND LITERARY STUDIES 0258-2279 2219-8237 AOSIS OpenJournals LIT-36-1122 10.4102/lit.v36i1.1122 Litera Poems Ullyatt Tony 1 Research Unit: Languages and Literature in the South African Context, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, South Africa Email: chinkoa@vodamail.co.za Postal address: Private Bag X6001, Potchefstroom 2520, South Africa

How to cite this article: Ullyatt, T., 2015, ‘Poems’, Literator 36(1), Art. #1122, 2 pages. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v36i1.1122

 27 03 2015 2015 36 1 1 2 © 2015. The Authors 2015 AOSIS OpenJournals. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. “His lonely singularity”*: Michael Ayrton’s Minotaur in the Arkville maze<xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn0001"><sup>1</sup></xref> 1. It’s probably my pendulous scrotum you’ll notice first, then the aggressive stance, the right fist poised for the imminent piston thrust of the arm, the horns honed to pierce a body through, the breath’s vulgar heat, the terror of my bloody reputation. 2. But my bovine bulk is as deceptive as Daedalus’s pseudo-cow, a necessary subterfuge to help me cope with the unspeakable hurt of misrepresentation and my lonely singularity. My deformity attracts attention everywhere, the body’s abominations monstrous stigma that cannot be disguised in ways that mental aberrations and perversions can. 3. My birth made me a royal embarrassment; the public sniggered at this unsightly, hybrid child, Poseidon’s savage joke. None of this was my doing yet I am the island’s laughingstock. Eventually, Minos locked me into Daedalus’s Labyrinth: LABYRINTHUS: HIC HABITAT MINOTAURUS chiselled ineptly on the wall, near its forbidding entrance. I have come to know its every convolution. I have fathomed out the unfathomable. Yet I remain Minotaurus malformed and misconstrued still pining for a little sympathy or even love one day perhaps. Lunch poem I once wrote a poem on a paper serviette for a friend who told me no one had ever written a poem for her. I said I would and wrote something affectionate while we ate lunch. A year or two later, we bumped into each other; she had a new husband, she said, and still had the serviette. She re-read the poem every now and then; her husband sometimes said he wished he’d written that poem for her. I didn’t have the heart to tell her then that I wished I hadn’t.

The Arkville Minotaur.

 Some other time perhaps 1. At university, there was a girl I studied French with, she didn’t have a boyfriend. I didn’t have a girlfriend either, then. After several weeks of classes, I asked her if she’d like to have a cup of coffee. She smiled graciously, and said Some other time perhaps. Then she walked away. From time to time, I would ask her the same question: she always had classes, essays or tests, something to do that prevented us from spending half an hour together in the student cafeteria, its plastic furniture hardly the apotheosis of style or romance. Eventually, I got the message: I stopped asking. One day, I asked someone else the same question, and she said Yes. 2. Twenty years pass. I’m giving a talk to an audience of school kids. After I’ve finished, a copper-haired girl comes up and says her mother wants to meet me. My brain asks Why? but my mouth says Fine. A moment later, I face a stylish, affluent lady edging towards or perhaps a little past forty. I don’t recognise her. She has to tell me; she’s my former classmate two decades and three children later. It’s wonderful to see you again, she says. My brain says Why? My mouth says This is a surprise! I smile the inane smile of the bewildered. Over the years, I’ve often thought of you, she says. I smile another inane smile; I’m still bewildered. Strange as it may seem, she says, I’ve missed you. My brain says Bullshit! My mouth says Really? I should have had that cup of coffee the first time you asked me, she says She smiles a tentative smile. We could have a cup of coffee now, she says. I smile another kind of smile. My brain says Why not? My mouth says Some other time perhaps. And then I walk away. The short cycle

The short cycle my mother said.

Yes dear my father said then put the washing machine on the long cycle: sixty minutes of soaking tumbling rinsing spinning instead of the twenty-five my mother thought best. After thirty minutes my mother came to the kitchen. Don’t tell me you put it on the long cycle again she said. Sorry dear my father said. Desperate, he tried for years to get an unbroken hour or so but he knew the sheer breadth of my mother’s talent for splintering his day into quite unusable fragments. He rarely got his things started; he never got them finished. He died unfinished  two years  two months  and  two days before her. So she said you finally remembered the short cycle. Two I have no explanation for the way the number two kept cropping up in my parents’ lives it seems quite beyond coincidence My father was born in 1918 my mother in 1920 you can’t miss the two-year difference, of course And I have no understanding of what mystery what magic changed these two young people into a married couple: love was defined differently in those days when I was conceived - as part of the war effort - they had been married for just two months I relished the safety of being cocooned in utero; I emerged reluctantly into that evil belligerent world two weeks late ... after a life not always free of turmoil and some two months and two weeks past their forty-ninth wedding anniversary my father died; as usual my mother followed two years two months and two days later given the number two’s lifelong presence in my parents’ lives one question continues to vex me: why am I an only child?

This is Ayrton’s description of the Minotaur in his book, The Testament of Daedalus.