Hi, my name is Mark and I used to be a non-poetry addict.
As to my bio… I grew up poor as one of five kids. It was a rough and tumble dysfunctional household with lots of freedom, playing and fighting. I was a total bookworm as a kid with the unusual habit of reading upside-down for hours.
I went through the school system in apartheid South Africa. We knew that our society was abnormal and hazardous. But I had a good time as a teenager, scraping through high school. lots of house parties, girls, shenanigans, motor-bikes, the beach, cigarettes, booze, weed and cool music. It was alright, we were a punk teenage surf crew.
All the guys were then conscripted. Many went to the Angolan border war. I was there for 15 months. We became combat veterans. Later, as civil unrest escalated in South Africa we went as citizen soldiers on annual call-up into the townships to help the police and that was worse.
In the meantime, I’d knocked up a co-worker and we got married and had two kids. I had a mortgage in the suburbs, an office job and a pension plan, but it didn’t last too long. I quit everything and drifted on a motorcycle. I did many different jobs - when I met Lee, my life partner, I was a nightclub bouncer and she was running a sports bar. All our friends were party animals. Lee and I had a very good time together for 20 years before she died in 2013.
After a year, I moved from the mountains back to the coast, here in Paternoster with Keri now. Life is alright. It’s a touristy village and I do contractor type work on the houses.
I guess that’s it. I had some health issues the last year or so but I’m okay now. I wrote a poem last night for the first time in ages and went to the TTB site and hey presto discovered the new one. So here I am. The new site looks really promising. Thank you, Marc and everyone else involved.
